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

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Page work, the work of one small lone group of investigators working over a period of a few years to collect the materials fora dictionary, fora language which had never before been written. These investigators were laying out the basic groundwork fora linguistic analysis at the same time as they were presenting the first detailed listing of the basic lexicon of a visual- gestural language. Although other books "listed the signs that deaf people use" Robbin Battison is convinced that "the DASL was remarkable for another reason the signs were arranged according to a principle of the language. Just as spoken language dictionaries arrange their words alphabetically, Stokoe arranged his sign dictionary according to where the signs were made, what was active in them, and what it did. Thus, this idea that signs are complex objects with parts not only led to a writing system, but also led to a principle of organizing all the signs that could be related to each other, depending upon which parts they shared. This is like the way we think of different words as being related if they share the same sounds, particularly at the beginnings of words. This arrangement shows respect for the language."31
It was while compiling the dictionary that Stokoe, Croneberg, and Casterline began to refer to the language they were recording as "American sign language" Capitalization of the last two words, Stokoe explains, "came in with the times, as in the usage 'Black English' (Before that, he says, "we had been told that the formal name was 'the language of signs'informally, it was just 'sign language' "Many people outside the field of linguistics criticized the dictionary, however. Robbin Battison thinks the problem was "a strategic error on Bill's part. Bill gave new technical names to the things he was describing. Perhaps he didn't realize that he was creating resistance to learning when he gave complex names to simple and familiar things. He referred to dez, tab, and sig when he could have simply said handshape, location, and movement. Some people were probably put off by these strange words and had some difficulty learning what they meant and keeping them separate I certainly did, and I worked hard at it."33
Dorothy Casterline, too, sees the complexity of the dictio-

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