In its use of space, Signing lays out a splendid repertoire combining the actual act of seeing with zooming, both in and out, in all its filmic richness of topographic depiction and intellectual connotation. It’s richer than oral language
This is a community that remains invisible to most hearing persons. Broadly, it comprises two groups: The pre-lingual deaf and the post-lingual deaf. The former is born deaf or lost hearing very early in infancy before acquiring the oral language. The post-lingual deaf are those who lose hearing after acquiring oral language. Deaf children of hearing parents, who happen to have their condition detected early and sent to special schools, can learn to communicate in Sign.
A deaf child of deaf parents has that very special edge which baby talk in Sign language gives it over deaf infants of hearing parents. A deaf child of hearing parents is challenged by unintended and often, unnoticed exclusion from baby talk. It’s an exclusion very stark; absolute if the child is blind too.
It is incorrect to think of Sign as a gestural approximation of oral language. The inherent structure of Sign languages affords Signers as much improvisation as the deep structure of language imbues every instance of lingual communication with creative possibilities. The impression that Sign language is universal, is wrong. For instance, American Sign language, French Sign language, Aborigine Sign language and Irish Sign language are very different from one another.
Signers, especially if they have learned Sign as a primary language, even think and dream in Sign and in some instances, use Sign while thinking audibly or dreaming. A friend, who lost hearing well into adulthood, once said that the dreams of the post-lingual deaf are remarkably loud. This must be because their construction of sounds, drawing upon memories of an aurally endowed past, plays out on a template of perfect or near silence. It's as if one’s aurally animated past is a numerator atop a zero-sonic present, resulting in an aural boom that tends to thunder in decibels as alienating and deafening as the
muted present.
A subtext of this is that the past shows up in shapes moulded by the present. There is no registering of the present uninfluenced by prior conceptions.
Since Signers can eavesdrop on other Signers at a peer gathering, there are etiquette about separate groups avoiding listening in to each other’s conversations. But there must be some nosy parkers among Signers too. How do they pryIJ PeepdropIJ
Of course, moral conditioning of one’s eyes to pretend to avert,where gazing may be considered risqué, is routine politics of everyday experience. But what, to hearing persons, must be extraordinary about the norming of Signers’ eyes is that it is, operationally, lingual first and social next.
There is an interesting parallel at the neurological level between Signing and oral language as praxis. Just as oral language users with cerebral impairment — for instance, lesions in the left hemisphere of the brain following a strokecan become victims of aphasia (loss or impairment of speech or ability to understand language or, both), Signing aphasia occurs in similarly afflicted Signers!
Sign language is as self-contained as oral communication. So much so that experts have reason to argue that Signers and the way they go about their lives constitute a distinctive culture. Of course, proficiency in Signing is most developed in native Signers. There are, broadly, two categories of native Signers: the pre-lingual deaf and the hearing-endowed children of deaf parent(s) lucky to be exposed to Signing, preferably at the critical age — according to some, between 21 and 36 months when the neuro-psychological genius for acquiring language, whether oral or Sign, blooms like never again in a person’s lifetime. Hearing signers have the benefit of being bicultural in a way quite different than the aurally-endowed do.
This, of course, is to say nothing of the ability of some hearing-impaired people to fluently identify differences in scale and tone by tactile reading of the vibrations.
Sign language, in the course of communicating, uses all four dimensions: Time and space. linguistic language has only three dimensions at its disposal: Time and when written, plane surface, comprising the length and the breadth. Signing embodies a complex inter-weaving of the three-dimensional space on the one hand, and on the other, time, both in terms of its passage as part of the communicational process and its denotation as a purport of the message, inclusive of flashbacks and flash forwards.
In its use of space, Signing lays out a splendid repertoire combining the actual act of seeing with zooming — both in and out — in all its filmic richness of topographic depiction and intellectual connotation. Consequently, experts like the polymath psychiatrist, Oliver Sacks, hold that Sign has facilities of perceptional, conceptual, and communicational felicity which oral language lacks.
There is much more to Signing than is dreamt of in insignate philosophy. ‘Deaf and dumb’ is grossly incorrect. ‘Deaf and mute’ is a sight closer. Somewhat.
(The writer is a former civil servant)