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

< previous page
page_67
next page >
Page truth" however. He had not risen through the ranks at Gallaudet; he was not a product of the "Normal" school network, which had produced the administrators and principals everyone was so chary of he did not belong to the Rotary Club where most
Gallaudet board members met for lunch and he most certainly wasn't buying into the widely held oralist belief among educators of the deaf that to abandon speech was somehow to diminish the nobility of English. In support of his position, Stokoe reproduced, in Sign Language Structure, an entire paper by Anders Lunde entitled "The Sociology of the Deaf" Stokoe has described this paper, which Lunde delivered at a meeting in 1956, as "the pioneer work in the field" In the following passage
Lunde remarks on the failure of oralist techniques:
The deaf as a group fall into a completely unique category in society because of their unusual relation to the communication process and their subsequent adjustment to asocial world in which most interpersonal communication is conducted through spoken language. No other group with a major physical handicap is so severely restricted in social intercourse. Other handicapped persons, even those with impaired vision, may normally learn to communicate through speech and engage in normal social relations. Congenitally deaf persons and those who have never learned speech through hearing (together representing the majority of the deaf population) never perceive or imitate sounds. Speech must be laboriously acquired and speechreading, insofar as individual skill permits, must be substituted for hearing if socially approved intercommunication is to take place. The rare mastery of these techniques never fully substitutes for language acquisition through hearing. 16
Stokoe had begun to look at the formation of signs. As a counterpart to phonology, he created the term chirology a word derived from the Greek word chirologia, the eighteenth-hand nineteenth-century term for fingerspelling or signing. Stokoe also began to draw analogies between signed and spoken languages, observing that just as distinctive features in oral languages are "simultaneously combined to produce consonantal and vocalic segments" distinct signing parameters are pro-

Download 2.48 Mb.

Share with your friends: