From Socrates to Saussure to Stokoe

 

Ancient Greeks viewed language as the highest human accomplishment of all.  The famous Athenian rhetorician Isocrates (438-338 BC) eloquently argued:

In most of our abilities we differ not at all from the animals; we are in act behind many in swiftness and strength and other resources.  But because there is born in us the power to persuade each other and to show ourselves whatever we wish, we not only have escaped from living as brutes, but also by coming together have founded cities and set up laws and invented arts, and speech has helped us attain practically all of the things we have devised.  For it is speech that has made law about justice and injustice and honor and disgrace, without which provisions we should not be able to live together….

Isocrates



The term ‘speech’ is translated from the Greek word logos, which designates not merely the capacity for articulating thoughts but the rational faculty underlying and informing the meaning in all its forms.  It is logos which distinguishes humanity from all other living species; it is logos that separates us, the human beings, from all the animals.

Ancient Greek culture was linguistically self-centered.  Most Greeks were mostly monoglot: they were not interested in studying languages from other civilizations—Egypt, Italy, and Spain—but they were highly conscious of their own dialectic varieties of Greek itself.  They were also interested in how words and languages originated, and they attributed to the Egyptians the invention of writing, and credited Cadmus (circa 2000 BC) with the introduction of the alphabet—a grammata lygra, literally 'ominous etchings'—and linear writing into the Hellenic world.

Plato (429-347 BC) wrote an imaginatively reconstructed linguistic discussion between Socrates and his interlocutors, Hermogenes and Cratylus, and published his book Cratylus in circa 360 BC.  In part, Socrates questions Hermogenes whether words be replaced by signs made by the Deaf:

SOCRATES: Well, then, how can the earliest names, which we are not as yet based upon any others, make clear to us the nature of things, so far as that is possible, which they must do if they are to be names at all?  Answer me this question: Id we had no voice or tongue, and wished to make things clear to one another, should we not try, as [deaf] people actually do, to make signs with our hands and head and person generally?

HERMOGENES: Yes. What other method is there, Socrates?

SOCRATES: Is we wished to designate that which is above and is light, we should, I fancy, raise our hand towards heaven in imitation of the nature of thing in question: but if the things to be designated were below or heavy, we should extend our hands towards the ground; and if we wished to mention a galloping horse or any animal, we should, of course, make our bodily attitudes as much like theirs as possible.

HERMOGENES: I think they are quite right; there is no other way.

SOCRATES: For the expression of anything, I fancy, would be accomplished by bodily imitation of that which was to be expressed.

HERMOGENES: I think you are quite right; there is no other way.

SOCRATES: For the expression of anything, I fancy, would be accomplished by bodily imitation of that which was to be expressed.

HERMOGENES: Yes. 

(Cratylus 422)

Cratylus

by Nancy Rourke

By imitation in names, Socrates says he does not mean the echoic replication of the sounds of animals or birds, but a representation of the essential nature of each thing:

Just as painters, when they wish to produce an imitation, sometimes mix many colors, as when they are making a picture of a man or something of that sort, employing each color, I suppose, as they think the particular picture demands it.  In just this way we, too, shall apply letters to things, using one letter for one thing, when that seems to be required, or many letters together, forming syllables, as they are called, and in turn combining syllables….

(Cratylus 424)

Here Socrates embarks upon a speculative analysis of names and signs (by the Deaf) in order to test the assumption that their composition is based on mimetic principles.

The Greek civilization began to expand through the conquests of Alexander the Great (365-323 BC), which brought Greece into closer contact with other civilizations.  Under the reign of Ptolemy, Egypt’s last ruling dynasty of ancient times, Alexandria, Egypt became a major center of Greek literary, and many important writings, especially Septuagint—the name given to the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures—was translated between 300-200 BC and widely used among Hellenic Jews who spread throughout the empire, losing their Hebrew language.  The process of translating the Hebrew to Greek also occurred and gave many non-Jews a glimpse into Judaism.  The term Septuagint means seventy in Latin, and the text is so named to the credit of 70 Jewish scholars who were commissioned by Ptolemy Philadelphus to carry out the task of translation, thus introducing what was eventually to become an important new element into European linguistic thought, with its very specific account of the origin of language and of the cause of linguistic diversity.

By the time this cross-linguistic influence was felt, Greece had fallen under Rome as the dominant military and administrative power of the ancient world.  Roman writers took over the Greek attitude toward language as part and parcel of their legacy of Greek culture, and their pursuit of linguistic studies was based (1) on the arts of rhetoric, logic, and grammar, and (2) on the fact that public debate played an essential role in education and government and the courts of law.

The expansion of the Roman Empire brought the Latin language in a way that Greek had never been in the conquests of Alexander the Great.  It was linguistic colonization, and it has been a lasting mark on the linguistic mentality of European and American civilizations—the fundamental issue of the degree of control which we gave over our language.  In one form or another, so entitled here, from Socrates to Saussure to Stokoe, this remains a permanent topic of linguistic debate.

The Middle Ages began with the fall of the Roman Empire in circa 400 AD, and ended with the discovery of America in 1642 AD.  The end of the Middle Ages also began to bring new languages to power in the great cities of the former Roman Empire: French, Italian, Spanish—independent Romance languages—German, Dutch, English (Anglo-Saxon)—independent Teutonic languages.  However, schools and universities of medieval Europe and early America offered Latin grammar, rhetoric, and logic as their ‘linguistic’ subjects, constituting the so-called trivium of the syllabus.

The Renaissance began as early as the 1350s and ended as late as the 1700s in Europe. It hinges on the historical coincidence that a great ‘rebirth’ of linguistic ‘nationalism’ overlapped with the demise of Latin as the lingua franca of intellectual life. 

There were two successful deaf artists in Renaissance Italy—Pinturicchio (1454-1513 AD) and Cristoforo de Pretis (1440-1486), who had influenced both Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519 AD) who in turn encouraged other artists, especially Rapheal Sanzio (1483-1520 AD) in The School of Athens (1510-12 AD), to learn from the expressivity of the Deaf.  Pinturicchio painted with Michelangelo (1475-1564 AD) in the Sistine Chapel, and Cristoforo inspired Leonardo da Vinci to paint his finger-spelled initials LDV in The Madonna of the Rock (1483), wherein Mary’s right hand is seen to represent the manual letter L; the angel’s hand represents the letter D; and the baby Jesus’ hand the letter V.

Madonna of the Rocks

by Leonardo da Vinci



Between 1600s and 1800s monasteries became more influential in visual-linguistic allocation in France, England, and Spain. Pedro Ponce de Leon (1520-1584 AD), the Spanish Benedictine monk, was appointed to tutor deaf children of wealthy aristocrats at the San Salvador Monastery in Madrid, Spain where he first introduced a series of manual gestures—developed by the Middle Age monks who took the vow of silence and used manual alphabet to cite the words of God—to represent letters that corresponded to position of the tongue, teeth, and lips for sounds.  In 1680, George Dalgarno (1628-1687 AD), who was interested in constructing what he called a philosophical language, wrote and published The Didascalocophus, or The Deaf and Dumb Man’s Tutor, to propose a totally new linguistic system for use by the Deaf. Umberto Eco (1932) wrote a full chapter about George Dalgarno in The Search for the Perfect Language:

Dalgarno saw that a universal language needed to comprehend two distinct aspects: first, a content-plane, that is, a classification of all knowledge, and that was a task for a philosopher; second, an expression-level, that is, a grammar that organized the character so that they can properly denote the content elements—and this was a task for a grammarian.  Dalgarno regarded himself as a grammarian rather than a philosopher; hence he merely outlined the principles of classification upon which his language would be based, hoping that others might carry this task to fruition.

 

Dalgarno had developed “a two handed system, in which each letter was represented by a designated spot on the left hand. In order to indicate a letter, a signer would touch the designated spot with any finger of the right hand (for vowels) or the right thumb (for consonants).”

 

The infiltration of the New World brought in the new framework of linguistic inquiry: The dead languages—Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, American Indian, etc.—were still more alive than the living.  It also brought in the new framework of linguistic dynamic for the Deaf.  In the early 1800s, The Reverend Hopkins Gallaudet introduced Laurent Clerc, the deaf French educator, to America.  Clerc who also brought French Sign Language, or langue des signes francias (LSF), to the first American Deaf School established in Hartford, Connecticut.  There must be the first signed language clash between LSF and signed language used on the 17^th -19^th century Martha Vineyard Island.  On Martha’s Vineyard, as Nora Ellen Groce reported in Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language, signed language and the spoken language English were never merged into a single dialect. It was just a lingua franca of Martha’s Vineyard Island.  Groce writes:

The most important lesson to be learned from Martha's Vineyard is that disabled people can be full and useful members of a community if the community makes an effort to include them.

By the end of the last century, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), whose posthumously published Cours de linguistque generale (1916), was heavily influenced by Buddhist philosophy. He rejected that linguistic change was governed by laws and claimed that languages underwent a stable, structured linguistic evolution. Saussure challenges the Socratic tradition of linguistic thought by rejecting the Socratic question of how words and signs relate to the world as an irrelevant and misleading starting point or linguistic inquiry and by asking his students to examine the spoken word as a starting point for understanding the individuality of every expressive act. Saussure developed a new framework for linguistics—the difference between langue(what we can do with language) and parole(what we do when we use language).

Then enter William C. Stokoe of the mid-20^th century.  Gallaudet College (now University) was (and still is) the world’s only center of higher learning and teaching exclusively for the Deaf where Stokoe got appointed to spearhead the English department in 1955.  Trained in Old and Middle English, he quickly observed that signed language is completely different from English.  Stokoe commented about his observation of Carl G. Croneberg, a deaf English professor who helped him to write A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles—the book that changes the world of the Deaf—published in 1965:

Carl had a student come in with a paper that contained the word “backlog,” and the student didn’t know what the word meant; he had never encountered it before.  Carl started to explain to him in signing and in fingerspelling, and the students suddenly signed “understand.”  The student then made a sign which, literally translated, meant “have behind.”  Once the student had grasped the idea, he almost automatically came out with its expression in ASL.

In Stokoe’s introduction to the dictionary, Stokoe wrote:

A first look into a dictionary may be more perplexing than enlightening to one unfamiliar with the language, but even those readers who know the American sign language best will find this dictionary strange at first because the language has never before been written.

Stokoe began to make us to see and analyze the three linguistic parts of a sign he called the tabula or tab for the onset/coda location of the sign, the designator or dez for the hand configuration, and the signation or sig for the action it made.  Stokoe opened the door of ASL linguistics to offer a new way to think about languages, signed and spoken alike.

 

Gallaudet University



ASL is like the forest—an abstract structure.  It is big, very big, but it is also great.  Very great.  ASL has dignity and other aspects of greatness.  Socrates had a right idea about our language and culture; Saussure was right that we the Deaf do have known the difference between langue (what we do with ASL) and parole (what we do when we use ASL); and Stokoe gave us the speech community.

There are many ways of experiencing the ASL community. I would rather assert, however, ASL has innumerable aspects or, even better, that the language and culture of the Deaf everywhere may be used to designate vastly different entities. It is why I could easily liken ASL to the abstract structure of the forest. As Arne Naess points out:

…Some of the people living around the forest do not communicate only with themselves, but with the forest as well. They go into the woods, and therefore they have a richer part of reality within reach.