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

< previous page
page_92
next page >
Page nary as the reason that the deaf community "didn't cotton to" it right away. "Linguistics is not an easy science" she explains,
"and it wasn't and isn't easy to read the signsit requires a lot of practice before you get the hang of it. We've always had (and still have) pictures to illustrate how a sign is made, so we've been conditioned to think of ASL as a picture language. Seeing these strange symbols for the first time can be daunting" In the introduction to the dictionary, Stokoe assures his readers that "the foregoing explanation of the system with the table of symbols should adequately introduce written signs to a user of American Sign Language" However, the twelve tab symbols, the nineteen dez symbols, and the twenty-four sig symbols, along with "a few additional symbols and some conventions" do not "make the notation more explicit" as Stokoe promised Rather, as one reviewer of the dictionary observes, "even a person fluent in the sign language would require considerable exposure to the notation system before he would be able to immediately recognize a transcription. And so the practical use of the dictionary will not be great at first, but for the time being it will be of theoretic use and interest.''36
Despite the criticism, Stokoe's notational system made an enormous contribution to the recognition of American Sign Language as a genuine language of a cultural minority. But it took time. Lou Fant recalls that his own appreciation of Stokoe's insight dawned slowly:
Four years after Bill's work was published, I decided to write a sign language textbook. I concluded that Bill had come up with at least one valuable thing about signs, and that was that each sign had three parts to it the handshape, the place where the sign occurred, and the type of movement. I organized my book so that the signs in each lesson all had the same handshape, and only the place and movement varied. I felt this organization would facilitate learning the signs . . . Later I left Gallaudet to become one of the founding members of the National Theatre of the Deaf [NTD]. Nearly all of the productions of the NTD were rendered in manually coded English, because ASL was considered bastardized English and not proper for use on the stage. Occasionally we

Download 2.48 Mb.

Share with your friends: