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"French Sign Language History."
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A historical and etymological dictionary of American Sign Language : the origin and evolution of more than 500 signs
\"Utilizing 1,150 sign illustrations and historical texts, this reference presents the detailed account of the origins of more than 500 ASL signs, including regional variations\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Order of Signs: Perspectives on the Relationship between Language and Thought during the First Century of Widespread Sign Language Teaching
While current debates oppose the cochlear implant's privileging of speech acquisition to teaching sign language, nineteenth-century debates, in contrast, opposed those who saw sign language as a tool for learning to read and write, and those who saw in it an autonomous language for organizing thought itself. Should the order of gestural signs follow written syntax? Or should it have its own coherence, that is, possibly a different syntax and order of enunciation? Starting with these questions, distinct teaching legacies developed, specifying which kinds of signs to use in which context and what role signs were to fulfill. This article focuses on French deaf and hearing teachers whose positions were influential throughout Europe and the United States, moving from Abbé de l'Epée's 1784 method to Rémi Valade's 1854 publication of the first sign language grammar.
Journal Article
Historical Linguistics and the Case for Sign Language Families
This article offers a brief overview of historical linguistics and explores the value of historical sign linguistics. The specific focus of the article is on the question of the extent to which the concept of “sign language families” is a legitimate and useful one. It is suggested that although lateral transmission and interference may account for a great deal of the similarity between and among sign languages, descent from a common linguistic ancestor (as in the cases of American Sign Language and French Sign Language) can also often be documented. It is observed that sign languages seem to change at a much more rapid rate than do spoken languages, but this is suggested to have at least as much to do with factors such as the intragenerational transmission of most sign languages as any other variable. Finally, it is argued that regardless of its status in historical linguistics more generally, lexicostatistics has consistently been demonstrated to be a powerful methodological tool in understanding the relationships between and among different sign languages.
Journal Article
Remembering Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale: Teaching the \Language of the Enemy\ in U.S. Public Schools
While there are many difficulties faced by world language educators, both teachers and students of certain languages--languages commonly identified with countries and cultures deemed to be hostile to the United States--often find themselves in uniquely paradoxical situations. This article begins with a brief anecdotal description of the personal challenge of speaking a \"language of the enemy,\" and then turns to a discussion of world language education in the United States, emphasizing the distinction between the commonly taught languages (CTLs) and the less commonly taught languages (LCTLs). Next, an overview of linguistic bias in the history of world language education, focusing on the cases of German and Russian, as well as both Farsi and Arabic, is provided, followed by a discussion of the uses of \"soft power\" in the promotion of a country's language and culture. After a brief analysis of the role of media in constructing images of different languages for public consumption, and the impact of such media efforts on the teaching of some of the LCTLs, the article concludes with a discussion of the fundamental dilemma that we face in teaching what are considered by many Americans to be the \"languages of the enemy.\"
Journal Article
On the Most Innovative Outer Access Structure of any Bantu Dictionary: The Lexique kikongo-français by Charles Polis (1938)
In this article a little-known dictionary manuscript from the 1930s, the Lexique kikongo-français by the Jesuit missionary Charles Polis, is analysed in great detail. Section 1 expounds on the goal and raison d'être of the study, Section 2 introduces the manuscript, its author as well as the Kikongo variety dealt with, Section 3 presents the inner workings of the Lexique on macro-, micro- and mediostructural levels, Section 4 gives a lexicographical appreciation based on a large selection of the entries, Section 5 joins the international debate on the exact nature of a dictionary's macrostructure, access structure and access route, and Section 6 compares Polis's work with a dictionary from the same region and period. Conclusions are offered in Section 7, chief among them the fact that Polis designed the most innovative outer access structure of any Bantu dictionary.
Journal Article
\Pourquoi sous cette table?\: More Candlelight on Molière's \Tartuffe\
The author discusses the use of candles as stage properties in the works of Molière, as well as their meaning as signifiers in the 17th century, focusing on the table scene in \"Tartuffe\" and investigating the use of the word \"flambeaux,\" which also meant torches in an outdoor context. Muller suggests that their presence reinforces metadramatic interpretations of that scene and a larger significant role for props generally in the play's performance history. He examines two examples of flambeaux as significant stage properties in later 19th-century French theater: in the original stage adaptation of Victor Hugo's \"Les Misérables,\" and in Victorien Sardou's \"La Tosca,\" positing a link between the use of flambeaux and the signification of Catholic rites.
Journal Article
New Perspectives on the History of American Sign Language
Examinations of the etymology of American Sign Language have typically involved superficial analyses of signs as they exist over a short period of time. While it is widely known that ASL is related to French Sign Language, there has yet to be a comprehensive study of this historic relationship between their lexicons. This article presents preliminary results of an exhaustive study of historic documents in French Sign Language and American Sign Language, as well as fieldwork in regions in France and the United States that will ultimately culminate in a historic dictionary of American Sign Language. We present evidence of relationships in six categories and conclude that a thorough account of the history of ASL requires a systematic examination of contemporary and historic documents in both languages.
Journal Article
The Poetry of a Minority Community
This study investigates the cultural and educational ideas of the French deaf poet-teacher Pierre Pélissier (1814-1863) who was an instructor at the Paris Deaf Institute from the early 1840s until his death in 1863. As a young man, Pélissier became interested in composing poetry and through his verse, captured many of the social frustrations facing deaf people who had to manage in a hearing world. Once he became a teacher, Pélissier devoted his energies to developing the best methods to educate deaf youth. In the mid-nineteenth-century, he found himself defending natural sign language against proponents of spoken language. Pélissier responded with a his own book (published in 1856) on how sign language could be used in the French primary schools to educate deaf children. He advocated a type of bilingual educational environment for primary schools that relied on hearing and deaf students using the manual alphabet and sign language in a shared classroom setting. Pélissier’s analysis of sign language as a pedagogical method clearly challenged the prevailing social view that deaf teachers were somehow less capable educators of deaf children than those who were hearing.
Journal Article
Duchess, Heal Thyself: Elisabeth of Rochlitz and the Patient's Perspective in Early Modern Germany
This article uses the case of German noblewoman Elisabeth of Rochlitz as a window on sixteenth-century patient attitudes toward disease and the body. A widowed duchess of Saxony, Elisabeth spent the last twenty years of her life battling an increasingly serious string of illnesses. Despite her ready access to learned physicians and her friendly relationship with several of them, she used a wide variety of practitioners and frequently privileged lower-status healers when she perceived their methods to be more efficacious. She placed the greatest weight on remedies that would relieve the experienced symptoms of her illness, rather than more holistic methods such as doctors' regimens. This perception of disease as a set of symptoms led to a dispute about the meaning of signs in her final illness.
Journal Article
The Current State of Vico Scholarship
[...]for intellectual historians of religion, Vico constitutes a study in how early moderns could examine the rhetorical functioning of theological vocabularies without necessarily committing themselves to the independent existence of the referents of those vocabularies. [...]for intellectual historians of Enlightenment, Vico confirms that encyclopedism was not a merely French practice in the eighteenth century and that the kind of omnicompetence implicit in encyclopedic multidisciplinarity had roots in rhetorical criticism.
Journal Article