Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-fv566 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-22T22:06:46.878Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

All translations in the article are by the author.

References

1 In the context of this article I avoid using Deaf with a capital D because of its anachronistic character. Following Annelies Kusters, Maartje de Meulder, and Dai O'Brien's position in the introduction to their book, Innovations in Deaf Studies, I use the term deaf with a small d as the most inclusive term throughout the article, when no other term is prompted by the context. I keep the terms deaf-mute and deaf and mute anytime authors I quote use them and in the title of institutions. At the time of de l'Epée, the appellation in use was deaf and mutes. The compound word deaf-mute circulated in France starting with the French Revolution, when the National Institute for the Deaf-Mute was created. Kusters, Annelies, de Meulder, Maartje, and O'Brien, Dai, Innovations in Deaf Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 13–15Google Scholar.

2 2003 in the United Kingdom and 2005 in France. Wheatley, Mark and Pabsch, Annika, Sign Language Legislation in the European Union (Brussels: European Union of the Deaf, 2012)Google Scholar; and de Meulder, Maartje, “The Legal Recognition of Sign Languages,” Sign Language Studies 15 no. 4 (Summer 2015), 498–506CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Braithwaite, Ben, “Sign Language Endangerment and Linguistic Diversity,” Language 95, no. 1 (March 2019), e161-e187CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Lane, Harlan L., “The Medicalization of Cultural Deafness in Historical Perspective,” in Looking Back: A Reader on the History of Deaf Communities and Their Sign Languages, ed. Fischer, Renate and Lane, Harlan L. (Hamburg, Germany: Signum, 1993), 486Google Scholar.

5 See, for example, Blume, Stuart S., The Artificial Ear: Cochlear Implants and the Culture of Deafness (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Baynton, Douglas C., Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Quartararo, Anne T., Deaf Identity and Social Images in Nineteenth-Century France (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Rée, Jonathan, I See a Voice, A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses (London: HarperCollins, 1999)Google Scholar; Encrevé, Florence, Les Sourds dans la société française au XIXe siècle: Idée de progrès et langue des signes (Grâne, France: Créaphi, 2012)Google Scholar; and Shea, Gerald, Song without Words, Discovering My Deafness Halfway through Life (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

7 Edwards, R. A. R., Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Charles Michel de l'Epée, La véritable Manière d'instruire les sourds et muets, confirmée par une longue expérience (Paris: Nyon l'aîné, 1784), 101; Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard, Avant-propos à L'Art d'enseigner à parler aux sourds-muets de naissance de l'Abbé de l'Epée, précédé de l’éloge historique de M. l'abbé de l'Epée par M. Bébian (Paris: J. G. Dentu, 1820), iii; and Roch-Ambroise Auguste Bébian, Education des sourds-muets mise à la portée des instituteurs primaires et de tous les parents (n.p., 1831), 9.

9 Dubois, Benjamin, Cause du mutisme chez les sourds (Paris: Chez l'Auteur, 1844)Google Scholar; and Laurent Clerc, “Visits to Some of the Institutions for the Deaf and Dumb in France and England (concluded),” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 1, no. 3 (April 1848), 170–76. Elbeuvien, March 14 (n.p., 1907).

10 Rocha, Solange, O Ines e a educação de surdos no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional de Educação de Surdos, 2008)Google Scholar.

11 Supalla, Ted and Clark, Patricia, Sign Language Archaeology: Understanding the Historical Roots of American Sign Language (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Shaw, Emily and Delaporte, Yves, “New Perspectives on the History of American Sign Language,” Sign Language Studies 11, no. 2 (Winter 2011), 158–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Shaw, Emily and Delaporte, Yves, A Historical and Etymological Dictionary of American Sign Language: The Origin and Evolution of More than 500 Signs (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

12 Françoise Bonnal, “L'Elaboration d'un dictionnaire étymologique et historique de la LSF,” in Actes des Journées “Recherches sur les langues signées des 23 et 24 novembre 2001” (Toulouse, France: Universités de Toulouse-Le Mirail et Paul Sabatier, 2003), 17–26; Françoise Bonnal, “Les signes à la lorgnette des dictionnaires des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles,” Surdités, 5–6 (2004), 17–59; Françoise Bonnal, Sémiogénèse de la langue des signes française: étude critique des signes attestés sur support papier depuis le XVIIIe siècle et nouvelles perspectives de dictionnaires (PhD diss., Université Toulouse II, Toulouse Le Mirail, 2005); Françoise Bonnal-Vergès, “Langue des Signes Française: des lexiques des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles à la dictionnairique du XXIe siècle,” Glottopol 7 (2006), 160–89; Delaporte, Yves and Renard, Marc, Aux origines de la langue des signes française (Paris: Langue des signes éditions, 2002)Google Scholar; Delaporte, Yves, “La variation régionale en langue des signes française,” Marges Linguistiques 10 (2005), 118–32Google Scholar; Yves Delaporte, “Construire un dictionnaire étymologique de la langue des signes française: problèmes de traduction et de transcription,” in Dictionnaires et traduction: actes des ‘Quatrièmes Journées Allemandes des Dictionnaires’ dédiés à la mémoire de Henri Meschonnic, ed. Michaela Heinz (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2012), 305–36; Yves Delaporte, Dictionnaire et étymologique et historique de la langue française (Essarts-le-Roi, France: Editions du fox, 2007); Delaporte, Yves and Pelletier, Yvette, Signes de Pont-de-Beauvoisin, Le dialecte du quartier des filles de l'Institution nationale des sourdes-muettes de Chambery (1910–1960) (Limoges, France: Lambert-Lucas, 2012)Google Scholar.

13 On deaf banquets, see Bernard Mottez, “The Deaf Mute Banquets and the Birth of the Deaf Movement,” in Fischer and Lane, Looking Back, 143–57.

14 Fischer, Renate, “Die Erfoschung der natürlichen Gebärdensprache im Frankreich des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Das Zeichen 63 (2003) 12–20Google Scholar; Reagan, Thimothy, “Ideological Barriers to American Sign Language: Unpacking Linguistic Resistance,” Sign Language Studies 11, no. 4 (2011), 606–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; R. A. R. Edwards, Words Made Flesh; Arnaud, Sabine, “Fingerspelling and the Appropriation of Language: The Shifting Stakes of a Practice of Signs,” Sign Language Studies 19, no. 4 (2019), 565–605CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Arnaud, Sabine, “From Gesture to Sign: Sign Language Dictionaries and the Invention of a Language,” Sign Language Studies 20, no. 1 (Fall 2019), 41–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Cordemoy, Gérauld de, Discours physique de la parole (Paris: Vrin, 2016), 195, 197Google Scholar.

16 Avi Lifschitz, “The Enlightenment Revival of the Epicurean History of Language and Civilisation,” in Epicurus in the Enlightenment, ed. by Neven Leddy and Avi Lifschitz (Oxford, UK: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), 207–26; Lifschitz, Avi, “The Enlightenment's ‘Experimental Metaphysics’: Inquiries into the Origins and History of Language,” in Lumières et histoire– Enlightenment and History, ed. by Coignard, Tristan, Davis, Peggy, and Montoya, Alicia (Paris: Champion, 2010), 63–76Google Scholar; “The Arbitrariness of the Linguistic Sign: Variations on an Enlightenment Theme,” Journal of the History of Ideas 73, no. 4 (2012), 537–57; Avi Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012).

17 Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Dissertation sur les différents moyens dont les hommes se sont servis pour exprimer leurs idées (n.p., 1758), 361, xxxix.

18 Bézagu-Deluy, Maryse, L'Abbé de l'Epée, Instituteur gratuit de sourds et muets, 1712–1789 (Paris: Seguers, 1990)Google Scholar.

19 Charles Michel de l'Epée, La véritable Manière d'instruire les sourds et muets (1784; repr., Paris: Nyon l'aîné, 1984), 11.

20 Bézagu-Deluy, L'Abbé de l'Epée.

21 Bulwer, John, Chirologia, or, The Natural Language of the Hand (London: Tho. Harper, 1644)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Giovanni Bonifaccio, L'Arte de’ Cenni, Con la quale formandosi favella visibile si tratta della muta eloquenza, che non è altro che un facondo silentio (Vicenza, Italy: Francesco Grossi, 1616).

22 Cureau de la Chambre, L'art de connoistre les hommes (Paris: P. Rocolet, 1659), 284–336.

23 Knowlson, J. R., “The Idea of Gesture as a Universal Language in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 26, no. 4 (1965), 495–508CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wollock, Jeffrey, “John Bulwer (1606–1656) and the Significance of Gesture of 17th-Century Theories of Language and Cognition,” Gesture 2, no. 2 (2002), 227–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 See Fischer, Renate, “Die Erfoschung der natürlichen Gebärdensprache im Frankreich des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Das Zeichen 63 (2003), 12–20Google Scholar; Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray, eds., Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

25 Pierre Desloges, Observations d'un sourd et muet, sur un cours élémentaire d’éducation des sourds et muets (Amsterdam: 1779), 8.

26 Rosenfeld, Sophia A., A Revolution in Language, The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Rosenfeld, Sophia A., “The Political Uses of Sign Language: The Case of the French Revolution,” Sign Language Studies 6, no. 1 (2006), 17–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Florence Encrevé, Les sourds dans la société française au XIXe siècle: Idée de progrès et langue des signes (Grâne, France: Créaphis Editions, 2012); and Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard, Cours d'instruction d'un sourd-muet de naissance (1799; repr., Paris: n.p., 1803), xv. For more about Sicard's “cruel words,” see Lane, Harlan, When the Mind Hears (New York: Random House, 1984)Google Scholar. Fischer offers an interesting analysis to Sicard's work in relation to Condillac's views on natural sign in Renate Fischer, “Language of Action,” in Fischer and Lane, Looking Back, 429–55.

28 Sicard, Cours d'instruction, 564.

29 Sicard, Cours d'instruction, 564.

30 Sicard, Cours d'instruction, 564.

31 Sicard, Cours d'instruction, 565.

32 Fischer, Renate, “The Study of Natural Sign Language in Eighteenth-Century France,” Sign Language Studies 2, no. 4 (2002), 391–406CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arnaud, Sabine, “Quand des formes de vie se rejoignent: Langue des signes et citoyenneté en France au tournant du 19e siècle,” Raisons politiques 57 (2015), 97–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (Amsterdam: P. Mortier, 1746); Maupertuis, Dissertation sur les différents moyens; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l'origine des langues, in Œuvres posthusmes ou recueil de pièce manuscrites pour servir de supplément aux éditions publiées durant sa vie (Genève: 1781); Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language.

34 Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard, Théorie des signes ou introduction à l’étude des langues, où le sens des mots, au lieu d’être défini, est mis en action (Paris: Dentu, Delamain 1808).

35 Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language, 123–180.

36 Sicard, Théorie des signes ou introduction à l’étude des langues.

37 Sicard, Cours d'instruction; and Sicard, Théorie des signes xxii-xxiii.

38 Sicard, Théorie des signes, xxviii.

39 Sicard, Cours d'instruction, xxviii.

40 Sicard, Cours d'instruction, 566.

41 Sicard, Cours d'instruction, 566.

42 Edwards, Words Made Flesh, 46.

43 Abbé Daras, Le Bienfaiteur des sourds-muets et aveugles (Paris:, n.p., 1853–1855), 55.

44 Daras, Le Bienfaiteur, 55.

45 Théobald, Joseph Nicolas, De l'Enseignement de l'histoire sainte aux sourds-muets et de ses rapports avec l'enseignement de la langue française, Lettre à un ami (Chambery, France: 1870), 16–17Google Scholar.

46 Théobald, De l'Enseignement de l'histoire sainte, 18.

47 Théobald, De l'Enseignement de l'histoire sainte, 18.

48 Théobald, De l'Enseignement de l'histoire sainte, 19.

49 Théobald, De l'Enseignement de l'histoire sainte, 22–23.

50 Roch-Ambroise Auguste Bébian, Essai sur les sourds-muets et sur le langage naturel, ou, Introduction a une classification naturelle des idées avec leurs signes propres (Paris: J. G. Dentu, 1817); Roch-Ambroise Auguste Bébian, Mimographie ou essai d’écriture mimique propre à régulariser le langage des sourds-muets (Paris: 1825); and Quartararo, Deaf Identity.

51 Pélissier, Pierre, L'Enseignement primaire des sourds-muets mis à la portée de tout le monde, avec une iconographie des signes (Paris: Paul Dupont, 1856)Google Scholar.

52 Valette, J., Origine de l'enseignement des sourds-muets en France (Toulouse: 1862), 35Google Scholar.

53 Cited in Jean-René Presneau, Signes et institutions des sourds. 18e -19e siècles (Seyssel, France: Champ Vallon, 1998), 161.

54 Valette, Origine de l'enseignement, 23.

55 Richardin, Claude Joseph, Exercices de grammaire à l'usage des jeunes sourds-muets (Nancy, France: 1844)Google Scholar; Pélissier, L'Enseignement primaire.

56 On the role of congregations in deaf education, see also Neil Pemberton, “Deafness and Holiness, Home Missions, Deaf Congregations and Natural Language 1860–1890,” Victorian Review 35, no. 2 (Fall 2009), 65–82.

57 Sœur Alleau, “Lettre à Monsieur le Préfet de Maine et Loire,” Sept. 17 1863, Registre de correspondances avec le Préfet, in Série X: Bienfaisance et Pièces Diverses, X528 : Sourds-Muets– ouvroir, correspondances, états nominatifs (1814–1929), Archives de la Congrégation de la Charité Sainte-Marie d'Angers, Manuscript.

58 Sœur Alleau, Série 6M3F, Discours non datés, Archives de la Congrégation de la Charité Sainte-Marie d'Angers, Manuscript, [date unknown, about 1880].

59 Sœur Alleau, Série 6M3F, Discours non datés.

60 Sœur Alleau, Série 6M3F, Discours non datés.

61 Cited in Vergès, Françoise Bonnal, “Introduction,” Petit Dictionnaire usuel de mimique et de dactylologie d'Alexandre-Louis-Paul Blanchet (Lambert-Lucas: Limoges, 2007), LXI-LXIVGoogle Scholar.

62 Yves-L. Rémi Valade, Etudes sur la lexicologie et la grammaire du langage naturel des signes (Paris: Libraire Philosophique de Ladrange, 1854).

63 Programme d’études et d'enseignement de l'Institution Impériales des sourds-muets (Paris: n.p., 1870), 38.

64 Valade, Etudes sur la lexicologie et la grammaire, 61.

65 Valade, Etudes sur la lexicologie et la grammaire, 171.

66 Valade, Etudes sur la lexicologie et la grammaire, 91.

67 Valade, Etudes sur la lexicologie et la grammaire, 174.

68 Peet, Harvey P., “Signs Unnecessary as the ‘Representation of Words’ of Deaf-Mutes,” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 10, no. 3 (July 1858) 129–136, 133Google Scholar.

69 Peet, “Signs Unnecessary as the ‘Representation of Words’ of Deaf-Mutes.”

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.

71 Valade, “Sign-Language in Primitive Times,” 34.

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.

73 On the construction of Deaf identity, see especially Padden, Carol and Humphries, Tom, Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Padden, Carol and Humphries, Tom, Inside Deaf Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Baynton, Douglas, “Beyond Culture: Deaf Studies and the Deaf Body,” in Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking, ed. Dirksen, H. and Bauman, L. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 293–312Google Scholar; and Frank Brechter, “The Deaf Convert Culture and Its Lessons for Deaf Theory,” in Dirksen and Bauman, Open Your Eyes, 60–79.