Modern American Sign Language has French origins. Two priests, Abbe Charles Michel de l’Epee and the Abbe Sicard were the proximate cause. Abbe de l’Epee had founded a school for the deaf in Paris in the late 1700’s. Abbe Sicard ran it after he died. When Thomas Gallaudet, an American who was trying to found a school for the deaf in Connecticut went to Europe in 1815 to do research, it was Abbe Sicard who helped him. 

Oddly, they met in London. Gallaudet had gone to England first because there was a school for the deaf there but its founders/patrons would not help him. However, Abbe Sicard and a deaf man named Laurent Clerc were there, and invited him to Paris to see their school and methods. 

Clerc, born in 1785, probably lost his hearing when he was a year old and fell into a fire. He had no education at first but when he was 12 his uncle sent him to the school that Abbe l’Epee had founded and he proved to be extremely intelligent. His direct mentor was Jean Massieu** who was also deaf. A brief look at other important deaf educators in France shows that in the early 1800’s they were making incredible strides in teaching deaf children, though the spread of such teaching was slow. 

Abbe de l’Epee saw very small deaf children communicating with signs they had made up. He learned those signs, and then invented more. Clerc, invited by Gallaudet, came to the United States initially on a promise to return to France in three years. Instead, at the end of three years, he fell in love, got married, had children, and stayed for the rest of his life. The signs he knew were the basis for American Sign Language and even now about 60% of ASL is based on French.

Gallaudet did found an important school in Connecticut where Clerc worked and taught. Thomas Gallaudet’s sons, especially Edmund, were also deeply involved in education for the deaf. Hence, the name of the college for the deaf in DC.

Among the things that fascinates me about this is, that the children were spontaneously communicating, inventing their own language, and Abbe de l’Epee made use of this to create a whole language, which could then be turned around and used with the children to open up their world. This spontaneous invention has obvious implications for the invention of language in general.

The Catholic Encyclopedia has a whole article about Deaf Education (circa 1908) and points out that deaf children have always been seen doing this (inventing the beginnings of language). The article discusses the way deaf people were seen and treated over thousands of years, quoting Cicero, Bede, Saint Augustine, and others. De l’Epee was just the one who took everything to another level.

The article also points out that a desire to explain God’s love to deaf people has been part of the constant drive to communicate. Saint Francis de Sales is said to have used signs to communicate with a deaf person who subsequently converted, but the matter went no further. 

The question of the best way to communicate with deaf people was brought to my mind by an article I read about Alexander Graham Bell. Crudely, Bell was against sign language, and wanted deaf people to be taught lip reading instead. The Catholic Encyclopedia article, written in the early 1900’s, pointed out that there is a whole range of deafness, stemming from a whole range of reasons for it, and one single method of reaching out will be utterly insufficient. Particularly, it points out that lip-reading works best with those who were not born profoundly deaf. It doesn’t directly address Bell but it was definitely taking sides in an ongoing argument. 

Fifty years ago I spent time learning a bit of sign language. A fellow student at Rice University was deaf, and thought that a double degree in Art and Architecture wasn’t enough. He became fascinated by Geology, and went for a triple major. This meant that he and his interpreter were in several of my classes. She also taught a bit of sign language to anyone interested. He and she had to invent a lot of signs for the different geological concepts, and this caused quite a bit of trouble when she was absent for some reason and he had to use a different interpreter.

We made an odd discovery at the time. I wasn’t proficient at sign language, but I could understand Mr. Triple Degree better than anyone else around. If he had a question in some class like Petrology, when he had his secondary interpreter, he would ask me his question and I would relay it to the teacher. The answer would go back through the interpreter, who would just spell everything out, and his own lip-reading skills. He was so good at lip-reading that another acquaintance commented on how easy it was to forget that the guy was deaf, until you went walking at dusk, and all of a sudden communication stopped, because he could no longer see your face.

** Massieu is quoted as saying that Gratitude is the memory of the heart. If you reverse the search for this quote, Saint Mary McKillop comes up as an author of this quote. However, she is listed as saying it in 1907 in Australia, whereas Massieu lived in the early 1800’s, and it is claimed as a French proverb after he said it. I’m very interested in ideas about Gratitude and I actually love this one, though I haven’t thought about it nearly enough. The quick sentences I saw on the internet about its meaning were incredibly stupid. 

RABBIT HOLE:  A fascinating side note on the article is that it mentioned people whose names were half familiar to me from my work on Catholic scientists. Lana Terza was mentioned. He’s “famous” in certain circles for his efforts to fly. The name Agricola came up, but this Agricola was Rudolph not George. Worse yet, Rudolph Agricola was really Rudolph Huysman born in 1412 in the Netherlands. He was an important thinker during the Renaissance. Oddly, there’s an Alexander Agricola from the Netherlands born in 1446. Both of these guys were said to be fascinated by music and I do wonder if they were related. Huysman and Agricola both mean farmer. The famous mineralogist, Georges Agricola, (1494-1555) was born Georg Bauer. (Bauer means farmer, you’ll be surprised to know!) 

RABBIT HOLE: Ponce de Leon was also mentioned. This guy was a famous priest, who worked a bit with the deaf, not the famous explorer.