2002JOI 9/23/02 11:49 AM Page 1 INTERNATIONAL SIGN: A PRACTITIONER’S PERSPECTIVE Bill Moody, New York “For centuries, scholars from every country have searched for a universal language and failed. Well, it exists all around you, and it is Sign Language!” Ferdinand Berthier, Paris, 1850 INTRODUCTION International Sign, the international communication used among deaf people, has been in use for at least the past 150 years. It has gone by various names throughout history: uni- versal sign language, international gestures, Gestuno, or International Sign. But what is it, exactly? Today, of course, we know that each deaf community has its own sign language, and those languages are more or less mutually incomprehensible (depending on their historical relations). Then how do we explain the fact that signers fluent in at least one sign language can manage to communicate with signers in a completely dif- ferent and mutually unintelligible sign language? Is International Sign a language? Is it even international? Where did it come from? When did it appear? How does it work?1 With the rapid increase in the number of international con- ferences such as the recent Deaf Way II festival and the World Symposium of Sign Language Interpreters this year in Washington, and the XIV World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf next year in Montreal, interest in International Sign in the US is growing. Now with over 20 years of research on international communication among sign lan- guages, it is time to take another look at what we know about International Sign: its history, its use, and what we as inter- preters can learn from it. I am neither a linguist nor a historian, so this article is basi- cally a narrative of my personal interest in the history and practice of International Sign, supplemented by some of the lin- guistic research of the last 20 years on International Sign. 1 2002JOI 9/23/02 11:49 AM Page 2 2 2002 Journal of Interpretation From 1976-1983, I worked in Paris for the International Visual Theatre (IVT). IVT, the French deaf theater, performed at vari- ous theater festivals in Europe and we met deaf actors and deaf people in every country where they performed. I was amazed by the creativity and efficiency of the international gesture sys- tem we found ourselves using across Europe (we weren’t sure what to call it at the time – some people called it “Gestuno” and some called it “international gestures”). I started interpreting in this thing we are now calling International Sign in 1977 for World Federation of the Deaf conferences and board meetings. I started writing about it in 1979 while living in France. While interpreting in International Sign is a small part of my current practice as an interpreter, I have been called to interpret into International Sign at least once or twice a year in a total of 16 different countries over the past 25 years. The "Village Tower" of the Château de Vincennes, on the east side of Paris, served as headquarters for the International Visual Theatre (the French deaf theatre) from its founding in 1976. Drawing by Xavier de la Garza THE ORIGINS OF SIGN LANGUAGES We do not know when sign languages made their appear- ance on the human scene, though William Stokoe makes a com- pelling case for the hypothesis that a gesture language was the prototype for all human language (Armstrong, Stokoe, & Wilcox, 1994). At any rate, in the course of the evolution of lan- guage, once spoken languages asserted their dominance, deaf people, living in isolation from other deaf people, had to get by on some kind of pantomimic communication, or “home signs.” But when did pantomime or home signs begin evolving into national sign languages, and when did International Sign first appear? We have very few historical records to help us deter- mine an exact time frame, and the records we do have consist 2002JOI 9/23/02 11:49 AM Page 3 International Sign: A Practitioner’s Perspective 3 of the observations of hearing people who were not fluent in signs, who simply observed deaf people and hypothesized about their abilities or their means of communication. What is certain is that as long as deaf people were isolated, there were no deaf communities to permit the elaboration of a true sign language. Most people throughout history considered deaf people as less intelligent than normally hearing people, and probably as uneducable. Aristotle believed that speech was the basis of the structuring of thought and intelligence and therefore congenitally deaf people were inherently retarded, and gesticulation could be no more than a limited and concrete form of communication (Aristotle, 355 BCE). This prejudice, dating from at least as far back as classical Greece, has persist- ed for centuries. When did deaf people start gathering into groups large enough and stable enough to begin evolving language? Before the 18th century, we have to rely on hints from hearing writers who were fairly naive about deafness. Following are a few exam- ples among many. As early as the end of the 4th century CE, St. Augustine wrote of a congenitally deaf family communicating with a sign language and he goes so far as to describe the ges- tures of their sign system as "linguistic signs" in the same sense that words are linguistic signs in a spoken language (St. Augustine, trans. 1950). We would probably call such a system “home signs” today, but two or more generations of deafness in a large family might constitute a fairly elaborate linguistic sys- tem. Was it a language? Did this family live in a community of deaf people who used a sign language as their primary means of communication? We have no way of knowing. At any rate, the vast majority of deaf people until and throughout the middle ages, isolated in their separate villages, were probably consid- ered on a par with the “village idiot.”2 By the 16th century, Michel de Montaigne, the famous French essayist, wrote that deaf people communicated with great efficiency, and even speculated in the second edition of his Essays, published just after his death, that their communication system included, in addition to a “finger alphabet,” some kind of “gestural gram- mar” (Montaigne, 1595). In Spain, Juan Fernandez Navarette, “El Mudo,” or The Mute (1526-1579), the king’s painter, was known to have signed fluently and never spoke (Lane, 1984, p. 92). Was El Mudo, in fact, a part of a Spanish deaf community, or just a fluent pantomimic communicator? We simply do not know. We know that Pedro Ponce de Leon (1520-1584) and Juan Pablo 2002JOI 9/23/02 11:49 AM Page 4 4 2002 Journal of Interpretation Bonet (1579-1623) tutored deaf children of the Spanish nobility, but there is no evidence of a Spanish deaf community in the 16th and 17th centuries. Incidentally, the hand alphabet that Bonet used to teach speech was borrowed from a franciscan monk, Melchor Yebra (1524-1586), who attributed it to St. Bonaventure, and it is this one-handed fingerspelling that sur- vives in French sign language (LSF), American Sign Language (ASL), and many of the one-handed alphabets used by signers today. In England in the latter 16th century, there is a record of two deaf friends in Cornwall (Edward Bone and John Kemp), who “communicate[d] in a sign language not readily understood by most hearing people” (Jackson, 2001). Is this evidence of a deaf community? We do not know. Were they part of a deaf commu- nity in Cornwall, or did they simply have a personal “home sign” system between them? Again, we do not know. In London, John Bulwer (1637-1657) became interested in gesture and sign language when he adopted a daughter who was probably deaf. In his book Philocophus or The Deafe and Dumbe Man’s Friend, he wrote, “What though you cannot express your mindes in these verball contrivances of man’s invention you want not Speech, who have your whole Body for a Tongue, having a lan- guage more naturall and significant which is common to you with us, to wit, gesture, the general and universal language of human nature.” In the book is a lengthy list of deaf people in London: Bulwer might well have been acquainted with at least some of them. This is certainly tantalizing evidence of a 17th century deaf community in England, but we are not certain. Later, near the end of the 17th century, Samuel Pepys mentions in his famous diaries that a British Minister, Sir George Downing from the Kentish Weald, knew enough sign language to communicate with a deaf boy and interpret for him in London. It is plausible that Downing (especially if, say, he had deaf family members) learned some sign language in Kent, from where the Pilgrims left for the New World (some of whom even- tually settled in Martha’s Vineyard); if, in fact, the genetic deaf- ness and the sign language of Martha’s Vineyard originated in Kent, then there might have been sufficient numbers of deaf people interacting in the Kentish community to create a fairly elaborate sign language in the 17th century in England3 (Jackson, 2001). But again, we are not absolutely sure. The first record of a deaf teacher holding classes for deaf 2002JOI 9/23/02 11:49 AM Page 5 International Sign: A Practitioner’s Perspective 5 children comes to us from the abbey St. Jean in Amiens, in the north of France (Truffaut, 1993). Etienne de Fay (c.1669-c.1749), deaf from birth, taught a handful of deaf children in the abbey from the 1730s using sign language.