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

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Page it was not permitted in their classrooms. In some schools they were punished if they were caught signing.
None of us at the time had any notion that sign language was anything but a visual coding of English. This is what we were told, by the experts, by people who had worked with the deaf all their lives. If deaf people, among themselves, used these signs in obviously different ways, which translated into some horribly garbled English order, that proved how lacking they were in "language" 32
Detmold was supportive as always of his best friend, whom he considered "far and away the most brilliant and productive scholar ever claimed by Gallaudet." He encouraged Stokoe to pursue his observations, perhaps by finding a graduate student from the nearby Georgetown University School of Language and Linguistics who would be willing to use Gallaudet as a laboratory to study sign language Stokoe describes what happened when he went to Georgetown the very next day.
I was sent to the office of Professor William Austin. He welcomed me, listened intently for awhile, and became more and more excited as I tried to explain what sign language seemed to be. At the end he literally thrust me out of his office charged with orders, which fora mild-mannered man he almost shouted. I was to go around the corner at once to Earl
Brockman's office and say that I must have a summer grant-in-aid from the American Council of Learned Societies next
I was to phone Trager and Smith in Buffalo and arrange to join their summer institute a few months later in In February of 1957 the Middle States Association granted Gallaudet accreditation and praised Detmold for the improvements:
"Many personnel changes were made by adding new staff. The coming of the dean of the college aided greatly in its reorganization. Well educated, personable, deeply interested in the program of educating the deaf, he has been of special value in the recruitment of new staff members, and with the president has cooperated in the improvement of staff quality as well as quantity."

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