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

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tion to full circle. Once (and perhaps still in some minds) it was believed that speech and language combining made hominids human. Consequently, sign languages were treated as irrelevant teachers like EM. Gallaudet found them helpful speech specialists like Alexander Graham Bell called them pernicious. But when all the evidence is in, realization will dawn that language and humanity began with potent visible symbols. Gestures not only do the work of words they express sentences with visibly connected parts. Thus they show, as spoken words never can, how complete thoughts were first formed. Instead of pitying, tolerating, or trying to change people who sign because they are deaf, science and the public will look more carefully at what signers do in order to see how their communication may give us clues to the way we became human.
I suppose this sounds radical, but so did what I said about sign language almost forty years ago. I really believe that modern science will change the neglect and mistreatment once the lot of deaf people not just to tolerance but to real respect, when it becomes better known how important vision and the neuromotor mechanisms are in the evolution of the human brain and its language and consciousness. 42 Early in 1994, Stokoe sold the house that he and Ruth had lived in for almost fifty years and moved into an apartment built especially for him by his son and daughter-in-law in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In the midst of writing, reading, and editing he now can "travel just a few feet" to play with his grandchildren, Nathaniel and Madeline Each day, he visits his wife. "Ruth is holding her own" he says, "and I think she must enjoy the chair rides in the warmer weather,
though it was sprinkling this morning so I read to her from her travel bookand, as always, came on a passage so poignant that I
finished with wet eyes. 'Get a life' they say nowadays. Well, I've had two or three growing up in a loving family, a life of intellectual curiosity, and my life with Ruthall three so satisfying that I can only marvel and give thanks."44
Stokoe confesses, however, to thinking occasionally about the things he hasn't accomplished.

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