Chapter 6 Signed Languages

Chapter 6 Signed Languages A few years ago, the noted linguist David Perlmutter published an essay that began with the fol- lowing story,1 told to him by one of his students: The young man told of how, when he was a child, he had a friend with whom he had many good times, although for some reason this girl never talked to him. Once, he went home with her and met her mother and had a very surprising experience. The mother came down the stairs, and it suddenly became obvious to the boy that his friend and her mother were communicating somehow, although he couldn't see how they were managing to do so. When he returned to his own home, he told his mother about it, and his mother explained, ‘They're different from us. They speak. We sign.’ And she did her best to explain to him that there is something called ‘sound’ and something called ‘hearing’, and that his friend and her mother were communicating by means of sound, rather than gesture. As the boy struggled to understand these strange concepts,2 he said, ‘Wow! Are there other people like that?’ And his mother said, ‘Yes. Most people speak. We are the ones who are different.’ For the past few weeks we've been examining the sounds that are characteristic of spoken language, as well as some of the ways spoken language can be represented in writing. But we should all admit that we have been ignoring an important segment of human linguistic activity. Not all human language is spoken. Not all human language uses sound as a medium. Obviously, written language is not spoken and does not use sound as a medium. I can write a book which can be read and (perhaps) enjoyed by thousands of people long after i have left this world; and we are similarly able to enjoy and appreciate the linguistic output of writers from cen- turies ago. But the words i write are representations of the same sort of words that i speak. Since i am more comfortable with languages making use of alphabetic or semi-alphabetic writing sys- tems, the words i write are in fact direct representations of spoken words, even if they are not actually spoken as i write them. But even a logographic writing system such as 漢字, with its use of ‘phonetic cues’, presupposes the existence of a spoken language that it is meant to represent. And i'm sure that even the finest calligraphers among the great poets of the Chinese nation conceived their finest verses primarily in spoken form, intending them more to be heard by the ear than read by the eye. This is an interesting circumstance, when you think about it. We are primates, and one of the characteristics that sets primates as an order apart from other mammals is that we are very vision- oriented. Unlike most other mammals we are extremely sensitive to colour; our eyes are located in the fronts of our heads, endowing us with binocular vision and excellent depth perception. And yet, one of the things that most defines us as a species, our linguistic ability, is very much geared not toward vision but toward hearing. There are evolutionary, or at least historical, rea- sons for this seeming paradox, but a paradox it remains. But it's not entirely true, as we must admit to ourselves. Some human languages are never spoken and have no acoustic component but are entirely visual. These are called sign languages or gestural languages and are developed by and for the use of the deaf, who cannot hear, or the mute, who cannot speak. These languages make use entirely of visual signs — gestures with the hands 1‘No Nearer the Soul’, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory (1986), 4:515–23. 2and, incidentally, began to understand why it had always seemed to him that his friend never talked to him 132 and arms, in some cases supplemented by facial expressions — to communicate all the things we ‘normal’ people communicate by modulating the air passing out of our lungs. It's only been quite recently that linguists and other researchers have begun taking a serious look at the communication methods used by the deaf, and there are many misconceptions among normal, hearing people like us about sign languages, which are only recently being corrected. These misconceptions can be grouped into three basic errors; i'm going to spend some time explaining what is erroneous about each of them. Misconception #1: Sign language is basically mime/iconic We all of us make gestures in communicating. We wave to a friend; we flag down a taxi or a bus; we nod or shake our heads to signify ‘yes’ or ‘no’; we point to things as we talk about them. We express our feelings with facial expressions. Some of these gestures are universal. Some aren't. Some communicative gestures are restric- ted to certain cultures. For instance, here in the Chinese cultural region the gesture in Fig. 6.1 means ‘10’ and the one in Fig. 6.2 means ‘6’. In North American culture, Fig. 6.1 does not mean ‘10’, and Fig. 6.2 means nothing at all. On the other hand, in North American culture Fig. 6.3 means ‘10’, Fig. 6.4 means ‘time's up’, and Fig. 6.5 means ‘i'm not sure what i'm saying is really true’, or something like that; i doubt whether any of these gestures has any such meaning in Chi- nese culture. So there's a certain amount of arbitrariness and conventionalization about communicative gestures. I can understand why Fig. 6.1 means ‘10’ here,3 and perhaps you can understand why Fig. 6.4 means ‘time's up’ in my culture — both gestures relate to the relevant written language. And perhaps you can understand why Fig. 6.3 means ‘10’ in my culture. But some of these conventionalized, culture-bound gestures are quite mysterious to an outsider; for instance, it would take me quite a while to explain to you why Fig. 6.5 means what it does. Fig. 6.1 ‘十’ Fig. 6.2 ‘六’ (Chinese cultural gesture) (Chinese cultural gesture) Fig. 6.3 ‘10’ Fig. 6.4 ‘time's up’ Fig. 6.5 ‘i'm uncertain (American (American whether this is true’ cultural gesture) cultural gesture) (American cultural gesture) 3I think the same is true for why Fig. 6.2 means ‘6’, but i'm not sure. 133 Communicative gestures that in some way represent what they're supposed to mean are said to be iconic. Holding up a certain number of fingers to represent that same number as an abstrac- tion is an iconic gesture. In this sense, the Western gesture for ‘10’ is iconic in that it actually presents a visual image of ‘10’, while the Chinese gesture for ‘10’ is not iconic since it depends upon an association with the way the Chinese word for ‘10’ is conventionally written. But even iconic gestures can be conventionalized and adapted within a certain cultural context, and as a result they can be confusing to outsiders. For instance: In my culture, there are several gestures that communicate an invitation or a request to come closer, but they all of them involve the palm being upward. I can beckon with a single finger (as in Fig. 6.6), or with all the fingers together (as in Fig. 6.7), but in both cases my palm is upward. In some Southern-European cultures, however, the same meaning is expressed by gestures that involve the palm turned downward (as in Fig. 6.8).4 Fig. 6.6 ‘come here’ Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8 ‘come here’ (Northern European) (Southern European; Chinese?) ‘go away’ (Northern European) Now, note what's happening when i perform either gesture; i'm not merely flexing my fingers once, i'm moving them back and forth, right? I move them one way, then i move them back in order to repeat the motion. Now, which movement is the meaningful one? Am i deliberately moving my fingers toward me, or away from me? How can you tell? You can't, really, unless you're already culturally conditioned to interpret the gesture one way and not the other. The result is that if i see the gesture in Fig. 6.8 i'm just as likely to interpret it as a request to move away as i am as a request to come closer; in fact, given my own cultural background, that's pro- bably how i will interpret it, since it rather resembles a gesture that i would use to figuratively push something away from me. In Chapter 10 i discuss the conventionalization of onomatopœia — how different language- communities have differing opinions about how to represent various natural sounds by linguistic means, so that, in a sense, roosters crow differently, dogs bark differently, cows low differently in different countries. Well, obviously, what has been said about onomatopoeia can be said equally well about ‘iconic’ gestures; they, too, are conventionalized and vary from culture to culture. What this means for the purposes of today's subject is that even iconic gestures aren't transparent; you can't assume that merely because a gesture's meaning is obvious to you or is somehow iconic that its meaning will be equally obvious to any intelligent human being. Supposedly ‘iconic’ gestures, the ones that are supposed to most clearly represent in visual terms what they mean, are therefore to some extent as culture-bound as any other kind of sign-system, including language.

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