Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page I just knew that when these deaf people were together and communicating with each other, what they were communicating with was a language, not somebody else's language since it wasn't English, it must have been their own
language. There was nothing "broken" or "inadequate" about it they got on splendidly with it. 29
Stokoe had read Trager and Smith's Outline of English Structure during his final year at Wells "while trying to cope with various neglected problems in Old English, Middle English, and Middle Scots" Soon after arriving at Gallaudet he began to notice, as he watched his students sign, that "signs with different meanings seemed to be alike in more ways than they differed."30
Many years later, in a conversation with linguist Charlotte Baker-Shenk, one of his closest colleagues at Gallaudet, he recalled that the students "weren't doing the signs the way I was taught to do them. Like the linguistic principle called sandhi, where the word in use changes because of the other words around it, the students' signs changed, too. Second, as I learned the signs, it struck me that they had the same kind of minimal pair opposition that you find in the words of a language you are studyingthat they weren't simply iconic 'pictures in the air' as people saidbut that they were organized symbols composed of discrete parts."31
George Detmold knew of Bill Stokoe's reputation at Cornell and Wells as a promising young scholar. As the newly appointed dean, Detmold was eager to seethe Gallaudet faculty engage in research and scholarship. Furthermore, he wasn't particularly surprised by Stokoe's observations, which seemed to be a continuation of the language research that Stokoe had already done in graduate school and at Wells. But Stokoe's ideas stood indirect contrast to the beliefs about sign language that then prevailed at
Gallaudet and other schools for the deaf. George Detmold recalls what Stokoe was up against:
Sign language at that time was something to be ashamed of. Even educated deaf people were ashamed of itthough among themselves, and in secret, they signed. Deaf children in school used it on the playground, and in the dormitory, but

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