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title:
Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe
author:
Maher, Jane.
publisher:
Gallaudet University Press
isbn10 | asin:
print isbn13:
9781563680533
ebook isbn13:
9780585103310
language:
English
subject
Stokoe, William C, Teachers of the deaf--United States--
Biography, Linguists--United States--Biography, American Sign
Language.
publication date:
1996
lcc:
HV2534.S76M35 1996eb
ddc:
419/.092
subject:
Stokoe, William C, Teachers of the deaf--United States--
Biography, Linguists--United States--Biography, American Sign
Language.
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Seeing Language in Sign
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Seeing Language in Sign
The Work of William C. Stokoe
By Jane Maher
Forward by Oliver Sacks
GALLAUDET UNIVERSITY PRESS WASHINGTON, D.C.
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Gallaudet University Press Washington, DC Text © 1996 by Gallaudet University
Foreword © 1996 by Oliver Sacks
All rights reserved. Published 1996 Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Maher, Jane, 1947- Seeing language in sign : the work of William C.
Stokoe / Jane Maher : foreword by Oliver Sacks p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN ix (alk. paper) i. Stokoe, William C. 2. Teachers of the deafUnited States Biography. 3. Linguists United States Biography. 4. American Sign Language. I. Title.
HV2534.S76M35 1996 419'.092 dc B
CIP The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information
SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI z39.48-1984.
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Page v
FOR MY MOTHER
Anne Peronti
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Seeing Language in Sign
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Page vii
Contents
Foreword
by Oliver Sacks
ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction
1
Chapter One
6
Chapter Two
24
Chapter Three
40
Chapter Four
58
Chapter Five
79
Chapter Six
101
Chapter Seven
131
Chapter Eight
161
Notes
179
Index
191
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Page ix
Foreword
I first met Bill Stokoe in December of 1986. 1 was nervous about meeting him he was the man who had cracked American Sign
Language (intellectually equivalent to cracking the Rosetta Stone, and emotionally, morally, infinitely more difficult because no one, least of all the deaf, thought of Sign as areal language until he did this, and I was a complete outsidernot deaf, not a linguist, not even capable of more than the most rudimentary signing. I had also heard that he was sometimes prickly, impatient,
arrogant, a man of fierce and uncompromising forthrightness.
What I found was a man immensely humble, a man who felt he had been given far more than he had received, and he was immensely generous. I found him wonderfully, bracingly, direct and openso immediate and candid and unguarded that my own diffidence and defenses, the armor with which one encases oneself for first encounters, melted away on the spot. We ranged over many different subjects, and I got an intense sense of the range, the delicacy, and the richness of his mind. A few days later he sent me a parcel of booksincluding his own, much annotated, personal copy of Language Origins;and I, in return, sent him the books I had written, with the hope that we might have future contact. There was this almost explosive feeling of giving and receiving from the startthere are no half-measures with a manlike Bill Stokoe.
I got an enormous letter from him a few days later (Stokoe is a marvelous letter writer, as I was to find. In this first letter, he thought back on his early days at Gallaudet:
Linguistics was getting pretty schematic. I found that Trager and Smith were making a promising integration in 1957, just when Chomsky purported to show that syntax was innate. Linguists became preoccupied with rules any computer