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

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versity) ten years later. Hawaii School for the Deaf and Blind was an oral school, but students signed outside of classes. I
was a day pupil and only picked up enough signs to get along with the other students. I learned to sign when I came to
Gallaudet by picking it up I never had any formal sign classes as they weren't offered to new students then. 27
Stokoe's choice of colleagues was brilliantand pragmatic. He knew from his linguistics studies in Buffalo that any study of sign language would need many informants of different ages and backgrounds. Croneberg had extraordinary facility with languageshe knew Swedish and German as well as English (ASL was his fourth language. Casterline had learned what ASL she knew outside the classroomas did most deaf peopleand she was familiar with various Hawaiian pidgins and creoles. Together,
Croneberg and Casterline could provide access to other signers of the varied ages and backgrounds so important to a valid study.
Equally important, at the time of the study Stokoe had been signing for only seven yearsunless his collaborators were deaf people with whom he could communicate effectively, it would be impossible to proceed. Croneberg and Casterline were proficient enough in ASL to communicate with their deaf informants, and they were proficient enough in spoken and signed
English to communicate their findings to Stokoe.
The dictionary took almost four years to complete. The grant money was limited, and Stokoe and Croneberg still had to teach their regular classes during the fall and spring semesters. As a result, most of the work on the dictionary was done during the summers.
Stokoe recalls that he decided to compile the dictionary partially in response to the criticism of his sign language research. The process also engaged his lifelong passion for tinkering with mechanical objectsincluding the motor of his childhood model trains and cameras borrowed from Eastman Kodak:
If I was going to keep on with the exploration that so many at Gallaudet considered quixotic at best, at least I could compile a dictionary and standardize (so they thought) a language that exasperated and frustrated them by its chaotic variation.

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