The following is in response to Oliver Sacks’s review of When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf by Harlan Lane, The Deaf Experience: Classics in Language and Education edited by Harlan Lane, and Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard by Nora Ellen Groce, in the March 27 issue.
To the Editors:
I want to thank you and Oliver Sacks for publicizing the true history and awful plight of the profoundly deaf. Reading Sacks’s essay was like reading a biography of my daughter. She was born profoundly deaf, a rubella victim, in 1964. It would be fair to say that at the time, at least in New Jersey, nobody knew how to diagnose deafness. We toted Suzannah from doctor to doctor and audiologist to audiologist for two years before someone finally had the knowledge to refer us to Dr. Isabelle Rapin at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Thus, diagnosed correctly only at age three, Suzannah had already missed much of the “prime time” for language acquisition.
Once diagnosed, however, she could at least start attending a school for the deaf, no? No. The New Jersey school for the deaf, the state school in Trenton, would not accept my daughter because her hearing loss was too severe. Incredible? The school was oral. A paradox of oralism is that oralists only wanted to teach those deaf who were not too deaf. For it is only the not-too-deaf who can “mainstream.”
Eventually—losing, each day, more of the precious time during which she could acquire language—we were able to find a solitary deaf class for Suzannah at Newark State College. The woman who taught it did so unofficially, as an overload, with little institutional support. Her charges were all severely to profoundly deaf; finding that oralism did not work with them, she had the courage and compassion to begin to teach them Sign. Indeed, she had to learn it herself as she went. This occurred in 1969, yet it sounds like Sacks’s account of the “discovery” of Sign by the Abbé de l’Epée in the 1750s.
I wish I could say that Suzannah’s story has a happy ending, however belated. It does not, just because she was belated. She has acquired language, at the second-grade level (a little below the usual level for the profoundly deaf). She has great difficulty dealing with the working world, even at its most menial, for the working world, even now, does not sign. Yet I don’t believe her situation is significantly worse than that of many (most?) of her peers. Their greatest affliction is not deafness itself; it is having to be sequestered, because only in “sheltered” environments can they meet others who share their language. As social arrangements now stand, this means that, instead of Martha’s Vineyard; the deaf have only the “institution,” the “home,” the “development center” (i.e., workshop for brain-damaged people), with all their attendant uncertainties of state support. The condition of the deaf today is better than it was 250 years ago, I suppose. But not much.
William McCarthy
Ames, Iowa
To the Editors:
Dr. Sacks’s wonderful article about the Culture of the Deaf, in America and elsewhere, was much talked (signed) about by the people who came to the Library of Congress’s program of Sign Language culture, “To Hear a Hand” March 20, 1986. I hope that it will be reprinted in some anthologies devoted to deaf culture.
However, I wish to take issue with one small item. Dr. Sacks praises American Sign Language (ASL) for its beauty and “purity” and criticizes “Signed Exact English” as a compromise and an “absurdity.” As someone who has worked with the deaf and has been studying Sign Language for the past year, I am no expert, but I think that Dr. Sacks has overstated the case. The ASL he praises has changed over the years and is not standardized throughout the United States. Because, from 1880 to about 1975, nearly every US school for the deaf tried to forbid the use of Sign, Sign Language was passed on to new students by older students secretly, and many deaf learned it and developed their habits in it without having seen an adult Signer nor understanding their teachers’ language; the result is that they grew up using a Sign Language whose structure was geared to the grammar of illiterate elementary schoolchildren (ASL does not, for example, have a passive form), and whose structure may have differed from that passed along in other schools. My deaf friends have been polite enough to let me expound this notion and some have agreed with me. Very few books are available to teach ASL grammar, even assuming that there is one standard of grammar for ASL. Certainly the Martha’s Vineyard Sign, which Dr. Sacks also thinks is beautiful is not ASL but something different that may resemble the Signing used in Kent, England, in the seventeenth century!
Now that Sign is a recently accepted mode of communication in most of the schools for the deaf, an effort has been made to use it to teach English grammar to children who have never heard it, as well as to encourage the use of Sign by the hearing who are already accustomed to English. In order to enable English to become these children’s first language, and to facilitate the use of Sign by teachers (who are supposed to talk and Sign simultaneously), various Englished forms of Sign were devised, which use ASL signs and recognizable variants of ASL signs in English language order. The simple forms of this (just ASL signs in English order) are called Pidgin Sign English or “Siglish,” but “school” versions have been devised which add special signs to provide the many English parts of speech that represent tenses, conjugations, etc.; these forms of “Manually Coded English” (MCE) include Signed English (devised and used at the Gallaudet campus), Seeing Essential English (SEE I), Signing Exact English (SEE II), and Linguistics of Visual English (LOVE). But these are intended for the classroom and possibly for hearing-deaf conversations where some grammatical precision is required. It appears that deaf children raised in Signed English homes and classrooms will slip into Pidgin Sign English with their friends. While it is possible to speak and sign in MCE, the refinements do make the signing a bit slower than Pidgin or ASL.
Frankly, it appears that “pure” ASL is used by a minority of the Signing Deaf, mostly those deaf from the cradle, while those who are partially hearing or were raised with some success in an oral environment or became deaf after hearing some English, use some form of Pidgin. Most ASL signers will shift into some sort of Pidgin when confronted with a non-ASL signer.
So the use of some Englished form of Sign is not quite an absurdity or the linguistic equivalent of Munich. Rather it is an excellent tool for enabling the hearing to learn to communicate with the Deaf, and for Deaf children to become literate. As such it expands the horizons rather than darkens them.
Bernard J. Sussman
Washington, D.C.
To the Editors:
At the end of his review article “Mysteries of the Deaf,” Oliver Sacks packs up his tape recorder (audio), drives to Martha’s Vineyard (where no deaf person has lived since 1952), and interviews a ninety-year-old hearing woman.
The review deals entirely with historical deafness. The books by Harlan Lane concern nineteenth-century figures, and the sign language community on Martha’s Vineyard is a thing of the past. But the deaf have not become extinct. Nor have they descended into the depths which Sacks finds the only logical outcome of their history. On the contrary, they have prevailed against oral education in serious ways. Moreover, the oral/manual controversy that diverted intellectuals for several centuries was essentially concluded within the last three decades.
From the beginning, oralism in America was honored in theory more than in practice. Throughout the entire period, though few children learned speech, virtually all learned American Sign Language (ASL). It is the fourth most commonly used language in the United States (some estimates place it third), after English, Spanish, and Italian, with a signing population of more than 500,000. This figure corresponds precisely with the number of profoundly and prelingually deaf in America cited by Sacks. They are the same population. All of them attended oral schools. ASL signers are not “pitifully handicapped” as Sacks describes the prelingually deaf child Vanessa, nor are they “defective in their language,” as he says all profoundly and prelingually deaf children must be. There is nothing the matter with their language—they are all fluent in ASL.
Sacks misleads the reader when he assumes that deaf people who are orally educated are thereafter cut off from society, illiterate, and their lives “qualitatively different.” Yes, reading is certainly a difficult skill for those among us who cannot hear; alphabetic writing is a sound-based system. The oral schools failed, as all the data show. Yet the most casual inquiry reveals that reading and writing play an indispensable role in contemporary deaf life. The deaf use TTYs (telephones that transmit typed messages), captioned television, captioned films. Before captioned movies became available in the 1960s, deaf people went to foreign films with subtitles. The traditional craft pursued by deaf men in this century is printing. English was learned along with typesetting in the print shops of residential schools that were usually staffed by deaf teachers.
The rise of oralism was greatly influenced by demography, and so was its demise. Oralism no longer exists in its nineteenth century form. If the system worked at all, it worked for the adventitious (postlingual) deaf who accounted for 60% of all deaf children at the turn of the century. The elite oral schools (the Clarke School, for example), were highly selective, preferred postlingually deaf children, and only admitted those who seemed certain to succeed. Reverence for speech was not the only issue. At the core of oralist conviction was an imperfectly disguised horror of the defective gene—a horror expressed for them by A.G. Bell in his Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race. Not merely an historical artifact, the book is still in print, still discussed, and still recommended to teachers and parents of deaf children.
Since World War II, and the development of antibiotics, postlingually deafened children have become rare. Today, most children who are deaf were born profoundly deaf. In the 1960s and 1970s, because of a series of rubella epidemics, the school-aged population soared. All existing facilities expanded, and in expanding were evaluated. Oralism, already under criticism, was further discredited. Meanwhile, research into sign language had produced important findings. In 1960 and 1965, William Stokoe of Gallaudet College (not Klima and Bellugi, as Sacks believes), published linguistic analyses of ASL that established it as a true language with a complex grammar and a well regulated syntax. ASL research continues today in several academic settings.
