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Old 11-29-2001, 01:25 AM   #1
250
Horus - Egyptian Sky God
 

Join Date: March 4, 2001
Location: either CA or MO
Age: 42
Posts: 2,674
help me read it please!!!

-----------------------------------------------------------

This paper consists of my own understanding of the deaf culture and knowledge acquired through readings as well as interacting with my deaf friends. I hope to provide an insight to the general readers who still remained a vast amount through out the world.

There is not much interesting about deafness, is there? I did not give too much thought about deaf until I met my dear friend Gina who lost her hearings in a very early age, and unfortunately or fortunately, did not acquire the ability of speech, speech in a narrowed sense.

The study of past four months had me spiritually visited the small town of Martha’s Vineyard where the hearings and deaf used sign together, to the Britain Oralism school Northampton, to the unique University for the Deaf Gallaudet, to the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. It opened up my mind and connected it to the great education pioneers, philosophers, and deaf literates of the time: Abbe Sicard, David Wright, Hughlings-Jackson, Harlan Lane etc. It gave me insights on language, community, mind development, and even humanity. Through the studying, I saw a struggling history of deaf achieving the equal positions of their counterpart, of knowledge defeating ignorance, of how we learnt to humbly defer natural instead of arrogantly confront it.

Deafness is not deficiency. It is a culture with its own complete history, ways of communication, techniques of survival, literatures and society codes. It is a unique way of life. It is a gift of natural. It is ethnic.

It is to the people who battered and are still fighting through the prejudices, unjust, ignorance to achieve the places they are now, I dedicate my paper to. And to Gina, who led me into the culture of deaf.
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Old 11-29-2001, 07:14 AM   #2
250
Horus - Egyptian Sky God
 

Join Date: March 4, 2001
Location: either CA or MO
Age: 42
Posts: 2,674
The Deaf Culture

Deaf is a very vague term. There is a wide range of degrees of deafness concerning vast amount of populations. There are about fifteen million or so in the U.S. population are considered “hard of hearing” Those people can manage to hear with the help of hearing aids and certain amount of care and patience from the speakers they are interacting with. And there is also “the severe deaf” resulting from ear disease or injury or trauma in early life; hearing is still possible given the powerful highly sophisticated and computerized hearing devices we now have today. And there is “profound deaf” who number 0.1% of the world population. They cannot hear with the help of whatsoever technology we could implement. There are about 0.5 million profound deaf reside in the United States and Canada. Those are what “the deaf culture” is concerned of.

Deafness is a severely devastating situation one can be in, especially occurred in early age. As studying children language development shown, a child’s language emergency stage occurred at about age three. It is when the child begins to rapidly adopt names, ideas, and concepts from his environment with the use of language. It is also when language develops the swiftest and establishes a strong base for the rest of his life. The process requires the child to be able to give out information as well as receive feedbacks. We know that a child stops speaking when he cannot hear himself. Clearly, for a deaf child, the feedback part is cut off (by means of speech and hearing) from the communication. Without language, or the means to communicate, we are cut off from our human fellows. We cannot express our feelings, desires, hopes and dreams. We cannot acquire information that is so crucial for the survival of human beings. And worse yet, there is a clear “defective” in thinking and grasping conceptual ideas.

There is a connection between language and thought. As Hughling-Jackson wrote: “We do not either speak or think in words or signs only, but in words or signs referring to one another in a particular manner… Without a proper interrelation of its parts, a verbal utterance would be a mere succession of names, a word-heap, embodying no proposition… The unit of speech is a proposition. Loss of speech (aphasia) is, therefore, the loss of power to propositionize… not only loss of power to propostitionize aloud (to talk), but to propositionize either internally or externally… The deaf (edited, original is: speechless patient) has lost speech, not only in the popular sense that he cannot speak aloud, but in the fullest sense. We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is part of thought.” Language gives us the ability to communicate symbolically. It transforms meanings, ideas into something abstract, which we can manipulate and model upon. If we had never been exposed to a language environment (either sign or speech), we do not acquire the ability to interpret the world around us in the symbolic way. Our mind does not make connections between objects. The world remains a relation less place where all things are just names. We cannot think.
Thus the “dumb and mute” slogan was used for thousands of years. Deaf were considered less than human. It came from the biblical time in the Mosaic code of the subhuman status of the mutes. They were not allowed to inherit properties, to marry, to receive education, to have adequately challenging job, to conduct trade --- and were denied fundamental human rights. They were cut off from the mainstream of the society, sometimes even community of their own; confined to a few rudimentary signs or gestures; deprived of literacy and education, all knowledge of the world; forced to do the lowest work; lived close to destitution. The situation was manifestly dreadful.

It did not change until 18th century. There was some enlightenment that people took interest in the deserted and isolated deaf. They began to ask questions as why the deaf were so different from any normal hearing person. The deaf seem to lose their ability of logical discourse and entertain ideas together with their sense of hearing. As Abbe Sicard wrote “Why is the uneducated deaf person isolated in nature and unable to communicate with other men? Why is he reduced to this state of imbecility? Does his biological constitution differ from ours? Does he not have everything he needs for having sensations, acquiring ideas, and combining them to do everything that we do? Does he not get sensory impressions from objects as we do? Are these not, as with us, the occasion of the mind’s sensations and its acquired ideas? Why then does the deaf person remain stupid while we become intelligent?” This question brought back to problems with “language.” If we look at language for what it truly is, we will see that language allows human to “propositionize” meanings as stated above. It was largely part of thought. The lack of it took away the necessary means of freethinking, and caused a gap in making relations from the world to the mind. But the real problem: it was commonly believed, back then, that speech and hearing is the ONLY and TRUE form of language, as pronounced by Aristotle.

It was revolutionary that when Socrate pointed out the possibility that understanding the ideas do not depend on hearing the words. With that impression, Abbe de l’Epee came in contact with the many deaf that roamed in the streets of Paris in the 18th century. He paid minute attention to his pupils, acquired their language (which had scarcely been done before). And then by using pictures and words, he taught the deaf how to read, thus opened their mind to the worldly culture. He created the a system of methodical signs, which is the first part of OFSL. It combined deaf’s own signed language with signed French grammar, and enabled the deaf students to write down what was said to them through a signing interpreter. The method was so successful that it enabled ordinary deaf pupils to read and write in French. There came an explosive clash in the world of both deaf and hearing. It was the first time that the ignored-people comprehend the world fully and the public at large had an open and welcoming heart to the previously out-cast of the humanity. A rapid establishment of deaf schools, manned by deaf teachers, spreaded through Europe, and by the end of 18th century, they built 17 deaf schools.

Then was the coming of Laurent Clerc to United States in 1816. He, the first literate deaf that American teachers had ever been exposed to, caused an extraordinary impact. The impressive intelligence and education displayed by Clerc amazed the public at large, as Abbe de l’Epee did fifty years ago. With Thomas Gaullaudet’s help, they set up the American Asylum for the Deaf in Hartford, 1817. Soon after, many deaf schools were formed with the enthusiasm after the human intellectual awakening. Clerc imported French Sign system and combined with American signs and created one of the most beautiful, unique and expressive language: American Signed Language (ASL). The language was then used widely, taught by deaf teachers, parents with deaf kids in school. It seemed a previously silent group, all of a sudden, came alive onto the historical stage. The awakening had lasted for a century, during the time, the deaf had the opportunity to receive education, and compete in a world with well equipped knowledge and information. Their position as a whole improved dramatically in the hearing world.

Signed Language, is what awakened the mind of deaf. It is the key that unlocked their capacity, fully allocating their mind resources. There are several things must be said about sign language though.
First, ASL is not another form of English. Sign language is, by itself, a complete language. When the hearing acquires language, his thinking process is accompanied with sound. It is called “phantasm sound” that when he speaks or thinks, he hears imagined voices. It can be the same with a native signer that the person somehow “thinks in sign.” This cannot be understood by any but a native signer. In Martha’s Vineyard, a place where used to have a heredity deaf community, one out of four were born deaf. People here picked up a sign language together. The hearings spoke no less sign than the deaf there. “There was an old lady, who would sometimes fall into a peaceful reverie. As she did so, she might have seemed to be knitting, her hands in constant complex motion. But her daughter, also a signer told me she was not knitting but thinking to herself, thinking in Sign.” (“Seeing Voices” by Oliver Sacks) The very fact that Signed language alone is adequate enough to support thought proves that Sign is a complete language by itself. It does not need aid to complete a mind.

It also has its unique grammar, components, syntax and semantics. The difference between ASL and English is like Chinese and French. One can exist solely without another. For example when saying “I took my girls to store, and one man stole my girl” (a bizarre sentence, I know), the expression in ASL would be “girls (nod) took store, girl (point to the man) stole” The grammar must be mastered in the same way as any other language. Sign language is a visual language, and very different to the old belief, it is capable of expressing any emotion, discuss concrete as well as abstract ideas. The native signers think in sign. This is a very important key, for there are no intermedia symbols to aid his thinking but sign. The signing process makes part of signer’s experiences and is programmed into his mind. That is why there had been utterly no success when a deaf child is forced to learn letters without the help of signed language, or was forced to learn SEE (Signed English). To the deaf child, the only natural way of perceiving and combining information is through visual symbols, while letters, form the pronunciations of verbal speech, which is something, a deaf child has no understanding of. They cannot (or is very hard for them) understand letters alone, because ultimately, letters reflect sound and they don’t receive the information with sound!

Unfortunately, ignorance played an upper hand in history. When Clerc died at 1869, the tide of history turned against the use of Sign by and for the deaf. So that a century’s work was undone within twenty years. There was a Victorian oppressiveness, intolerance of the minorities, minority usages, of every kind. Thus the deaf culture, a minority by number, found themselves hard under pressure to conform. Also, there had been a long time of countercurrent feelings, from teachers and parents of the deaf children, that the goal of education is to let deaf “talk like a normal person” It is out of ignorance that when Alexander Graham Bell, a progressive oralist, threw his authority into the play, Sign was officially banned. In 1880 at the notorious International Congress of Educators of the Deaf held in Milan, where the deaf teachers were themselves excluded from the vote. Thereafter, the teachings intensively focused on making the deaf talk, years of extra labor were added, and the potential cost was outrageously high. Simply put, the deaf cannot understand the hearing form of speech, words, without the aid of sign language. Hearing teachers replaced deaf, signs were forbidden, there were even teachers gone to extreme effort to tie the child’s hands to prevent signing. Despite all these progressive reform, several dozens of years gone by as little progress made. People began to ask, “what had happened? What is happening?” It was only in the 1960s and early 1970s that this situation reached the public through extensive novels, plays and movies. Something needs to be done, so a compromising step was taken to ensure changes. People sought out an alternative form of sign language, which is a confusion intermediate of English and Sign. They tried to blend two languages and bring out the best of the two. They were wrong, and they utterly, completely, fully failed. Sign Language is a different language. Can one find intermediate form for Chinese and French? But the ignorance continued, deaf students were forced to learn Signed English, something that transliterate spoken tongue into sign word by word, phrase by phrase. They were forced to learn some phonetic English sounds they could never hear. Even today, Signed English is still favored against ASL in one way or another. It was more than just denial of “Sign is a language by itself”, but it was a denial of the uniqueness of deaf as a people. It was the denial on the deaf community, culture, inheritage. It defies who the deaf are, out of sheer arrogance and intolerance to what the hearings do not understand.

Despite all the chaos, sign wasn’t lost. Even though it was forced to go underground for what seemed like a century. Deaf teachers secretly passed on their hand codes to their students, deaf among themselves signed with each other. A vivid description of how life found its way was provided by David Wright, “ Confusion stuns the eye, arms whirl like windmills in a hurricane … the emphatic silent vocabulary of the body—look, expression, bearing, glancing of eye; hands perform their pantomime. Absolutely engrossing pandemonium… I begin to sort out what’s going on. The seemingly corybantic brandishing of hands and arms reduces itself to a convention, a code which as yet conveys nothing. It is in fact a kind of vernacular. The school has evolved its own peculiar language or argot, though not a verbal one… All communications were supposed to be oral. Our own sign-argot was of course prohibited… But these rules could not be enforced without the presence of the staff. What I have been describing is not how we talked, but how we talked among ourselves when no hearing person was present. At such times our behaviour and conversation were quite different. We relaxed inhibitions, wore no masks.” One cannot suppress against nature. To verbalize the deaf is essentially the same as one culture claiming superiority over another. Deaf is a culture.

Fortunately “in the 1950's William Stokoe was hired by Gallaudet to teach English Literature and ended up proving that sign was a language in itself. In 1960 he published Sign Language Structure and in 1965 the Dictionary of American Sign Language. His findings brought back the strong sense of community and the culture that the Deaf people had lost.” (http://www.aslinfo.com/aboutasl3.cfm) ASL began to resurface as more and more people opened up their mind, and see deafness in light of a gift rather than deficit, different rather than handicapped. There still exist prejudices and unjust against deaf people through out the United States, and the world in that matter, but their positions are improving by days, and their “voices” are being heard. Many deaf took pride and strong sense of self-identify in their expressions. They are proud of who they are, and proud of their culture. And, indeed, Sign Language is a gift. It is an amazing visual language that expresses the complex ideas with simple hand movements. Its beauty marvels the most creative artwork and poems. It is the creation of mind; it is the remarkable evidence of how life found its way to prosper. Deaf is a culture.
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Old 11-29-2001, 08:31 AM   #3
250
Horus - Egyptian Sky God
 

Join Date: March 4, 2001
Location: either CA or MO
Age: 42
Posts: 2,674
read ittttttttttt
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Old 11-29-2001, 09:50 AM   #4
Melusine
Dracolisk
 

Join Date: January 8, 2001
Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Age: 43
Posts: 6,541
I can't help you with the informative side, 250, as I know too little about the subject, but I have attempted to help with small spelling mistakes and typos. As I am not a native speaker myself, I cannot guarantee you 100% infallibility, but for my study I am expected to reach a degree of near-native speaking perfection, so I'll give it a try. [img]smile.gif[/img] (italics all mine)

The Deaf Culture

Deafness is a very vague term. There is a wide range of degrees of deafness concerning vast amounts of populations. There are approximately fifteen million people in the U.S. population that are considered “hard of hearing”. Those people can manage to hear with the help of hearing aids and a certain amount of care and patience from the (hearing) people they are interacting with. And there is also “severe deafness” resulting from ear disease or injury or trauma in early life; hearing is still possible given the powerful highly sophisticated and computerized hearing devices we now have today. Lastly, about 0.1% of the world population is considered "profound(ly?) deaf". They cannot hear with the help of whatsoever technology we could implement. There are about 0.5 million profound deaf residing in the United States and Canada. Those are what “the deaf culture” is concerned of These are what "the deaf culture" consists of/is concerned with(not sure which you meant to say here).

Deafness is a severely devastating situation one can be in (to be in?), especially when occurring at an early age. As studies of children's language development show, a child’s language emergency stage occurs at about age three. It is when the child begins to rapidly adopt names, ideas, and concepts from his environment with the use of language. It is at this stage that children's linguistic skills develop the swiftest and establish a strong base for the rest of their lives. The process requires the child to be able to give out information as well as receive feedbacks. We know that a child stops speaking when he cannot hear himself. Clearly, for a deaf child, the feedback part is cut off (by means of speech and hearing) from the communication. Without language, or the means to communicate, we are cut off from our human fellows. We cannot express our feelings, desires, hopes and dreams. We cannot acquire information that is so crucial for the survival of human beings. And worse yet, there is a clear defective in thinking and grasping conceptual ideas.

There is a connection between language and thought. As Hughling-Jackson wrote: “We do not either speak or think in words or signs only, but in words or signs referring to one another in a particular manner[...]Without a proper interrelation of its parts, a verbal utterance would be a mere succession of names, a word-heap, embodying no proposition[...]The unit of speech is a proposition. Loss of speech (aphasia) is, therefore, the loss of power to propositionize[...]not only loss of power to propostitionize aloud (to talk), but to propositionize either internally or externally[...] The deaf (edited, original is: speechless patient) has lost speech, not only in the popular sense that he cannot speak aloud, but in the fullest sense. We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is part of thought.” Language gives us the ability to communicate symbolically. It transforms meanings, ideas into something abstract, which we can manipulate and model upon. If we had never been exposed to a language environment (either sign or speech), we would not acquire the ability to interpret the world around us in the symbolic way. Our mind does not make connections between objects. The world remains a relation-less place where all things are just names. We cannot think.
Thus the “dumb and mute” slogan was used for thousands of years. Deaf were considered less than human. It came ? do you mean: This idea originates in? from the biblical time in the Mosaic code of the subhuman status of the mutes. They were not allowed to inherit properties, to marry, to receive education, to have adequately challenging job, to conduct trade, and were denied fundamental human rights. They were cut off from the mainstream of the society, sometimes even from a community of their own; confined to a few rudimentary signs or gestures; deprived of literacy and education, all knowledge of the world; forced to do the lowest work; lived close to destitution. The situation was manifestly dreadful.

This situation did not change until the 18th century. There was some enlightenment in that people took interest in the deserted and isolated deaf. They began to ask questions as(? like?) why the deaf were so different from any normal hearing person. The deaf seemed to lose their ability of logical discourse and entertain ideas together with their sense of hearing. As Abbe Sicard wrote “Why is the uneducated deaf person isolated in nature and unable to communicate with other men? Why is he reduced to this state of imbecility? Does his biological constitution differ from ours? Does he not have everything he needs for having sensations, acquiring ideas, and combining them to do everything that we do? Does he not get sensory impressions from objects as we do? Are these not, as with us, the occasion of the mind’s sensations and its acquired ideas? Why then does the deaf person remain stupid while we become intelligent?” This question brought back to problems with “language.” If we look at language for what it truly is, we will see that language allows human to “propositionize” meanings as stated above. It was largely part of thought. The lack of it took away the necessary means of freethinking, and caused a gap in making relations from the world to the mind. But the real problem: it was commonly believed, back then, that speech and hearing is the ONLY and TRUE form of language, as pronounced by Aristotle.

[i]Socrate pointed out the revolutionary possibility that it was not necessary to hear the words in order to understand the ideas. With that impression in mind, Abbe de l’Epee came in contact with the many deaf that roamed in the streets of Paris in the 18th century. He paid minute attention to his pupils, acquired their language (which had scarcely been done before). And then, by using pictures and words, he taught the deaf how to read, thus opening their minds to the worldly culture. He created the a system of methodical signs, which is the first part of OFSL(you need to give a definition when you first mention this abbreviation). It combined the deaf’s own signed language with signed French grammar, and enabled the deaf students to write down what was said to them through a signing interpreter. The method was so successful that it enabled ordinary deaf pupils to read and write in French. There came an explosive clash in the world of both deaf and hearing. It was the first time that the ignored people comprehended the world fully and the public at large had an open and welcoming heart to this previously outcast part of the humanity. A rapid establishment of deaf schools, manned by deaf teachers, spreaded through Europe, and by the end of 18th century, they built 17 schools for the deaf.

In 1816, Laurent Clerc came to the United States. He, the first literate deaf that American teachers had ever been exposed to, caused an extraordinary impact. The impressive intelligence and education displayed by Clerc amazed the general public, as Abbe de l’Epee had done fifty years ago. With Thomas Gaullaudet’s help, they set up the American Asylum for the Deaf in Hartford, 1817. Soon after, many deaf schools were formed with the enthusiasm after the human intellectual awakening. Clerc imported French Sign system and combined with American signs and created one of the most beautiful, unique and expressive of languages: American Signed Language (ASL). The language was then used widely, taught by deaf teachers and parents with deaf kids in school. It seemed as if a previously silent group, all of a sudden, came alive onto the historical stage. The awakening lasted for a century, during which time the deaf had the opportunity to receive education, and compete in a world with well equipped knowledge and information. Their position as a whole improved dramatically in the hearing world.

Signed Language is what awakened the mind of deaf. It is the key that unlocked their capacity, fully allocating their minds' resources. However, there are several things must be said about sign language.
First (where is your "Second"?), ASL is not another form of English. Sign language is, by itself, a complete language. When the hearing acquires language, his thinking process is accompanied with sound. It is called “phantasm sound” that when he speaks or thinks, he hears imagined voices. It can be the same with a native signer that the person somehow “thinks in sign.” This cannot be understood by any but a native signer. In Martha’s Vineyard, a place that used to have a hereditary deaf community, one out of four children were born deaf. People here picked up (?) a sign language together. The hearing people spoke no less in signs than the deaf there. “There was an old lady, who would sometimes fall into a peaceful reverie. As she did so, she might have seemed to be knitting, her hands in constant complex motion. But her daughter, also a signer told me she was not knitting but thinking to herself, thinking in Sign.” (from: “Seeing Voices” by Oliver Sacks) The very fact that Signed language alone is adequate enough to support thought proves that Sign is a complete language by itself. It does not need aid to complete a mind.

(Second?) It also has its unique grammar, components, syntax and semantics. The difference between ASL and English is like Chinese and French. One can exist solely without another. For example when saying “I took my girls to store, and one man stole my girl” (a bizarre sentence, I know), the expression in ASL would be “girls (nod) took store, girl (point to the man) stole” The grammar must be mastered in the same way as any other language. Sign language is a visual language, and contrary to popular belief, it is capable of expressing any emotion and discussing concrete as well as abstract ideas. The native signers think in sign. This is a very important key, for there are no intermediate symbols to aid their thinking but sign. The signing process is a part of signer’s experiences and is programmed into his mind. That is why there will be utterly no success when a deaf child is forced to learn letters without the help of signed language, or is forced to learn SEE (Signed English). To the deaf child, the only natural way of perceiving and combining information is through visual symbols, while letters form the pronunciations of verbal speech, which is something a deaf child has no understanding of. They cannot (or only with great difficulty) understand letters alone, because ultimately, letters reflect sound and they don’t receive the information with sound (=auditory)!

Unfortunately, ignorance played an upper hand in history. When Clerc died in 1869, the tide of history turned against the use of Sign by and for the deaf. In this way, a century’s work was undone within twenty years. There was a Victorian oppressiveness, intolerance of the minorities and minority usages, of every kind. Thus the deaf culture, a minority by number, found themselves hard under pressure to conform. Also, there had been a long time of countercurrent feelings, from teachers and parents of the deaf children, that the goal of education is to let deaf “talk like a normal person” It is out of ignorance that Alexander Graham Bell, a progressive oralist, threw his authority into play. In 1880 at the notorious International Congress of Educators of the Deaf held in Milan, Sign language was officially banned, and the deaf teachers were excluded from the vote. Thereafter, the teachings intensively focused on making the deaf talk, years of extra labor were added, and the potential cost was outrageously high. Simply put, the deaf cannot understand the hearing form of speech, words, without the aid of sign language. Hearing teachers replaced deaf, signs were forbidden, there were even teachers gone to extreme effort to tie the child’s hands to prevent signing. Despite all this progressive reform, several dozens of years gone by and little progress was made. People began to ask what had happened, what was still happening? It was only in the 1960s and early 1970s that this situation reached the attention of the public through extensive(?) novels, plays and movies. Something needed to be done, so a compromising step was taken to ensure changes. People sought out an alternative form of sign language, which is a confusing intermediate of English and Sign. They tried to blend two languages and bring out the best of the two. They were wrong, and they utterly, completely, fully failed (--may be a bit strong). Sign Language is a separate language. Can one find an intermediate mix of Chinese and French? But the ignorance continued, deaf students were forced to learn Signed English, something that transliterated the spoken tongue into sign word by word, phrase by phrase. They were forced to learn some phonetic English sounds they could never hear. Even today, Signed English is still favored against ASL in one way or another. It is more than just denial of “Sign is a language by itself”, but it is a denial of the uniqueness of the deaf as a people. It is the denial of the deaf community, culture and heritage. It defies who the deaf are, out of sheer arrogance and intolerance to what the hearing do not understand.

Despite all the chaos, sign language was not lost, even if it was forced to go underground for what seemed like a century. Deaf teachers secretly passed on their hand codes to their students, deaf among themselves signed with each other. A vivid description of how life(?) found its way was provided by David Wright, “ Confusion stuns the eye, arms whirl like windmills in a hurricane [...] the emphatic silent vocabulary of the body—look, expression, bearing, glancing of eye; hands perform their pantomime. Absolutely engrossing pandemonium[...] I begin to sort out what’s going on. The seemingly corybantic brandishing of hands and arms reduces itself to a convention, a code which as yet conveys nothing. It is in fact a kind of vernacular. The school has evolved its own peculiar language or argot, though not a verbal one… All communications were supposed to be oral. Our own sign-argot was of course prohibited[...] But these rules could not be enforced without the presence of the staff. What I have been describing is not how we talked, but how we talked among ourselves when no hearing person was present. At such times our behaviour and conversation were quite different. We relaxed inhibitions, wore no masks.” One cannot suppress against nature. To verbalize the deaf is essentially the same as one culture claiming superiority over another. Deaf is a culture.

Fortunately, “in the 1950's William Stokoe was hired by Gallaudet to teach English Literature and ended up proving that sign was a language in itself. In 1960 he published Sign Language Structure and in 1965 the Dictionary of American Sign Language. His findings brought back the strong sense of community and the culture that the Deaf people had lost.” (from: http://www.aslinfo.com/aboutasl3.cfm) ASL began to resurface as more and more people opened up their mind, and saw deafness as a gift rather than a deficit, as different rather than handicapped. There still exist prejudices against deaf people throughout the United States, and the world, for that matter, but their positions are improving every day, and their “voices” are being heard. Many deaf took pride and strong sense of self-identity in their expressions. They are proud of who they are, and proud of their culture. And, indeed, Sign Language is a gift. It is an amazing visual language that expresses the complex ideas with simple hand movements. Its beauty marvels the most creative artwork and poems. It is the creation of mind; it is the remarkable evidence of how life found its way to prosper. Deafness is a culture.


*************
Note: I stopped using italics to indicate any changes I made about half-way down the essay, but I did change some things, mostly incongruency in your use of verb forms, use of punctuation and sentence structure.


Hope this helps you. It's a very good essay, btw. Good luck! [img]graemlins/thumbsup.gif[/img]
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[img]\"hosted/melusine.jpg\" alt=\" - \" /><br />Your voice is ambrosia
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Old 11-29-2001, 10:19 AM   #5
250
Horus - Egyptian Sky God
 

Join Date: March 4, 2001
Location: either CA or MO
Age: 42
Posts: 2,674
wow.... WOW!!

thank you Melusine!! thank you so much!! **french hug** ok, me dont wanna go to far with my respected lady here... **grin**
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Old 11-29-2001, 10:42 AM   #6
Melusine
Dracolisk
 

Join Date: January 8, 2001
Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Age: 43
Posts: 6,541
quote:
Originally posted by 250:
wow.... WOW!!

thank you Melusine!! thank you so much!! **french hug** ok, me dont wanna go to far with my respected lady here... **grin**




Hehe [img]graemlins/showoff.gif[/img] glad you appreciate it

Anyway there are still a few things that I should have corrected maybe, but it was quite a lot of work... if someone else sees anything, please post it here [img]smile.gif[/img]
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