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Sign Language Basics Revealed

Have you ever been curious about sign language and how it started? Truly a fascinating language, it uses hand signals, arm gestrues, and body movements as well as facial expressions to convey communication. Sign language is a lifesaver tor the deaf, and represents a way to communicate with the outside world to live a more normal life.

Sign language is used around the world, and has been in some form or another for many centuries. Beginning in the 2nd Century Judea, the Mishnah (oral Jewish tradition) it was stated that for the purpose of commercial transactions a deaf-mute could hold a conversation by means of physical gestures, and at times even through lip motions. This was the earliest known study of sign language.

Later on, in France a man named Abbé de l'Épée founded the first school for deaf children in Paris. This was how the basis for American Sign Language (ASL) got it’s start, although there are many different versions of sign language used by different countries around the world. In the U.S. American Sign Language is considered to be the fourth most used language in the entire country.

A very common misconception about learn sign language is that the gestures used represent an exact one-to-one representation of individual letters in the alphabet, or at best individual words in a sentence. This is not always true, although for spelling out words there are exact gestures for each letter in a specific alphabet generally this is not how a conversation is performed. In other words, they are not a visual rendition of an oral language. Manual alphabets, also called fingerspelling, are used in sign languages although mostly for proper names and technical vocabulary that is borrowed from spoken languages.

A conversation is more typically a series of gestures used to convey an idea, and emphasis can be used to clarify a meaning by facial expression or other means. For the most part, deaf sign languages are completely independent of oral languages and follow their own paths of development. As an example, British Sign Language and American Sign Language are very different and mutually unintelligible to students of each, even though the hearing people of Britain and America share the same oral language.

In some countries there may actually be more than one accepted sign language, even though there is but one oral language. This is simply a matter of when and where schools for the deaf were instituted in that country, as preferences for one sign language may be more popular during certain periods in time.

Teachers in schools for the deaf such as Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet are often incorrectly referred to as “inventors” of sign language, although Gallaudet was instrumental in founding the American Sign Language. His interest in sign language was to help a neighbor of his get training for his deaf daughter, and he set out to learn sign language in London. Later he traveled to France where the language was better trained.

Although many in France during Gallaudet visit there were hesitant to teach him, a man by the name of Abbe Sicard was willing to not only help him learn but came to America where the American School for The Deaf was founded in Hartford in 1817. This later became the Gallaudet University. Learn more about sign language basics now and get hooked too!

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