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

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Page Cathy did. Not only could he separate the two characters in that manner rather than using "he" and "she" as one would in
English discoursehe could sign interaction between them. Instead of calling attention to one side of his body or the other,
where his hand was forming the initial, he could move them in signs and show the relationship between the two charactersside to side.
It struck meat that time that here was an absolutely fascinating way of conducting a course in English literature, and it was something that I'd have to learn to do after some kind of fashion if I wanted to succeed in teaching my subject. Without realizing it, without being told to, Stokoe was doing what Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet had done more than 1 50 years ago Gallaudet had gone to deaf people to ask them to teach him their language before he would dare to try to teach them his.
"Right from the start" Stokoe recalls, "Id ask the deaf members of the department to help me. I'd ask them what the sign was for this word, how they handled this, that, and the other thing. They were most helpful to me."7
But Stokoe's signing was atrocious. It wasn't that he couldn't remember the signs his facility with languages (he had studied
Latin, Greek, French, and German at Cornell, his enthusiasm, and his excellent memory served him well in that regard. But signing, which requires a certain amount of manual dexterity and skill, is easier for some people than others, and Stokoe never attained the fluidity of motion he desired. Carl Croneberg, Stokoe's deaf colleague in the English department, explains "There area small number of hearing people who use the sign language fluently. Most of these are teachers of the deaf or children of deaf parents. But as a rule, hearing people having some knowledge of the language of signs cannot be classified as native signers. For any given persona certain frequency of inter-group contact is necessary for acquiring the language of this group;
the extent to which a person can be called a native speaker varies with the frequency of this contact."8
I. King Jordan, the first deaf president of Gallaudet University and a good friend of Stokoe's, notes that although "Bill has a tremendously large sign vocabulary" his signing is "laborious.

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