History of sign language
Sign languages have as well as the spoken languages a story. Even Plato, Augustine, and Leonardo da Vinci -signing deaf people reported. In the Jewish Talmud, the marriage of deaf marriage willing to sign is mentioned. The known history of the modern sign languages begins in the 18th century with the education of deaf children.
It would have probably always been some relatively simple sign languages that have spontaneously arisen and evolved over a long period. Sign language was everywhere, where deaf people met. It grew from a simple index or reference gestures, sketching replicas of objects with one or both hands and pantomime replicas of actions. With increasing extent the sign character also received a structured sequence, a grammar.
Sign language systems that originated in different places in different groups are not the same, but have similar structures. One obstacle to the uniform emergence and dissemination was the dispersal of only small groups of deaf people.
A stabilizing development learned sign language with the educational care of deaf children. , First in privileged circles, for example, by the monk Pedro Ponce de León in Spain, which used around 1550 gestures from San Salvador de Ona monastery to teach deaf children of the nobility
Founder of the first public school for deaf children was 1755 in Paris the priest Abbé de l' Epée. He was there mid-18th century saw the deaf, talking to each other in streets with hands. In even the deaf bookbinder Pierre Desloges had in 1779 a small book "Observations " tells how he himself had entertained with other deaf adults untrained in sign " about everything there is under the sun ." De l' Epée quickly realized that this language could form the basis for the education of deaf children.
After founding his school for deaf children was under his leadership from the " road sign " with the help of French grammar developed a sign language developed ( see assembly language ). This sign language quickly spread and became popular. Towards the end of the 18th century, there were 21 schools for deaf children, to whom, however, has also been attempted in part, primarily to teach the spoken language deaf children.
Nonetheless, the children used in oral schools, the time in which the teachers could not keep in mind to each other to converse in sign language. The schools for deaf children were so in any case, the places where the sign language evolved or emerged again and again in the underground, where it was forbidden.
1816 learned the deaf graduate of the above-mentioned school in Paris and Laurent Clerc teacher know at the same school the American clergyman Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. He traveled to the study of education for deaf children to England and France. Thereupon Clerc decided to Gallaudet to go to America to take care of there to the education of deaf children. After Clerc and Gallaudet had founded in 1817 in Hartford, Connecticut, the American Asylum for the Deaf, where the American Sign Language (ASL ) was developed. ASL quickly spread in other states across the U.S. and Canada. In 1864 was in Washington, D.C. the first higher -building institution for deaf students with Edward Miner Gallaudet, the youngest son of Thomas H. Gallaudet as president. Later she got in honor of Thomas H. Gallaudet Gallaudet College and then the name of Gallaudet University. This institution owes its existence to the most extensive standardization of ASL throughout the United States and in English-speaking parts of Canada.
Setbacks
Beginning of the 19th century, however, it became popular to educate deaf children just to talk. The so-called " Oralists ", none of whom was deaf, fought the sign language by any means. She was portrayed as "ape language". This view led to the 1880 decision of the Milan Congress of 1880, the sign language in general to banish from school and allow only speaking. Then the sign language was banned in almost all schools of all countries. To date, sign language has not regained the same position it had before. In France, the sign ban was lifted in schools for deaf children by law until 1991.
Scientific Exploration
The Listening educator and linguist Bernard Tervoort in the Netherlands had in 1953 emphasizes the value of sign language for communication between deaf people before William Stokoe, a listening linguist at Gallaudet College, 1960 examined the structures of American Sign Language using the means of modern linguistics and convincingly proved that sign language spoken language in no way inferior.
Since 1975, the German Sign Language ( DGS) has been systematically studied by the linguist Siegmund Prillwitz.
Similarly, the sign language is also being researched in universities in other European countries, especially in Sweden and the UK.
Since 1977, published in Germany, the so-called "Blue Books " ' The Sign of the Deaf ' of the Deaf educators Starcke, mash and smear.
Around 1982 came under the direction of Prillwitz the Institute of German Sign Language and Communication of the Deaf.
Since about 1985, grew up in Germany in the circles of deaf people a proud self-confidence through the knowledge of the full value of their sign language.