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The Order of Signs: Perspectives on the Relationship between Language and Thought during the First Century of Widespread Sign Language Teaching

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2020

Sabine Arnaud
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Abstract

While current debates oppose the cochlear implant's privileging of speech acquisition to teaching sign language, nineteenth-century debates, in contrast, opposed those who saw sign language as a tool for learning to read and write, and those who saw in it an autonomous language for organizing thought itself. Should the order of gestural signs follow written syntax? Or should it have its own coherence, that is, possibly a different syntax and order of enunciation? Starting with these questions, distinct teaching legacies developed, specifying which kinds of signs to use in which context and what role signs were to fulfill. This article focuses on French deaf and hearing teachers whose positions were influential throughout Europe and the United States, moving from Abbé de l'Epée's 1784 method to Rémi Valade's 1854 publication of the first sign language grammar.

Keywords

French sign languagemethodical signsnatural signsSicardnineteenth-century deafnesssyntax
Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 520 - 545
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 History of Education Society

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Footnotes

All translations in the article are by the author.

References

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70 The editor remarked upon the similarities of the views exposed to those of some American instructors during a recent congress, which seems to imply that Valade's view had since been plagiarized in the United States: “If some portions of the article strangely recall to such of our readers as were present at the Indianapolis convention of 1870 one of the papers read on that occasion, the dates certainly prove that M. Valade is not responsible for the resemblance.” Valade, Rémi, “The Sign-Language in Primitive Times,” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 18, no. 1 (Jan. 1873), 27–41, 27Google Scholar.

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72 “Pour l’égalité des droits et des chances, la participation et la citoyenneté des personnes handicapées” [For the equality of rights and opportunities, the participation and citizenship of handicapped people], Loi 2005–102, February 11, 2005.

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