Chirology

Since I've always been interested in Historical Linguistics for this year I got Jeff Kacirk's Forgotten English as a daily calendar. There are six pages every week and each one lists an antique word that is no longer used. Last week one of the words was chirology. It means "The art of conversing with the hands and fingers."

My husband used to be a Sign Language interpreter, I worked at California School for the Deaf for many years, and we raised three Deaf foster children, so I'm obviously interested in conversing with the hands and fingers.

The quotation describing that word is from the late 1800s. At that time, deaf children were forbidden to use Sign Language to communicate in the schools. People believed that would encourage them to speak and read lips. Since most deaf children had lost their hearing due to high fevers and had already been exposed to spoken language, the "Oral Method" might have worked with some of them. Today most of those illnesses are prevented by inoculations or treated with antibiotics. Most childhood deafness is either hereditary, or caused by prenatal damage, sometimes from drug use.

And all culturally Deaf people resent the oral method, which is not used anymore.

And, in the past, the science of Linguistics defined language as written or spoken communication, so Sign Language wasn't considered a language. But that has changed, and today lots of schools and colleges teach it.  Lots of people who aren't from Deaf families know at least some Sign Language.

Even though almost nobody would use that antique word to describe it, chirology is accepted and available.

Languages

I've always been interested in languages. Maybe that's partly because when I was five years old my family moved from the East Coast to California and I was surprised by the difference in dialects.

As a kid I intended to learn all the languages in the world but, for some strange reason, that didn't happen. However I did take Latin and German in High School and French in college because English is related to those three languages.

I've forgotten most of the Latin, but using English words of Latin derivation has helped me communicate with people who speak Spanish.

A family from Germany with little kids moved in next door to us the week I began studying German. I actually used that language, so I remember it better than the other ones I took in school.

My French professor was from Quebec. At that time people in Canada were trying to get French accepted as an official language, so that's probably why she told us over and over again that French was the best language in the world and much better than English. I knew no language was better than  others, so I pretty much flushed French out of my brain after passing the tests in her class.

As an adult I learned American Sign Language and became fluent in that one because I've actually used it to communicate with Deaf people for many years.

And I've even learned some dog language from a deaf dalmatian we once had. I wrote about that dog in a story published in the Chicken Soup for the Soul book, I Can't Believe My Dog Did That.

I still wish I could learn every language in the world, but don't have the time or energy to study even one more. Oh, well, I guess I know enough to get by.

Baby Signs

Earlier this week I blogged about sign language and Deaf children. Today I want to follow up with a post about using American Sign Language (ASL) with hearing kids.

When my daughter was born we had three Deaf foster kids and signed all the time in our home. She started making up her own signs when she was about five months old and soon learned to use real ones. Once she realized she could get what she wanted by communicating her needs and wishes she was motivated to learn to talk as well, and by the time she was a year old she had a vocabulary of about 30 words and signs. By 18 months she could communicate - and understand - just about anything. And being bi-lingual made it easy for her to learn a third language when she was older.

Since it's easier for babies to control the muscles in their hands than the ones in their mouths they can learn to sign sooner than they can learn to speak.

BUT...

The "Baby Signs" books, videos, etc. are often not real ASL and many Deaf people find them insulting.

Nobody would make up sounds and call them "Baby Spanish" or "Baby German." Parents might copy their own child's baby talk or simplify the pronunciation of certain words, but they would also use the real vocabulary and pronunciation of their own language in the presence of the baby. And parents seldom try to teach their little ones to use the same baby talk as other people's kids.

Anyone who wants to use ASL with a baby can find the real signs in several locations. One online resource showing specific signs in a video dictionary is ASL Pro .