The limits of my language means the limits of my world.
--Ludwig
Wittgenstein
About 2,400 years ago, in Athens, Greece, Aristotle enrolled in Plato's Academy where he must have read and critiqued Socrates in one of Plato's earliest books, Cratylus, which is about naming in language. Plato has Socrates question whether signs by the Deaf be equated to spoken words. Aristotle disputed that by arguing that an incapacity of a deaf person to repeat the same words implies imbecility. Aristotle had irrevocably launched an era of language bigotry against deaf people and sign language.
Fast forward to a recent celebration that commemorated the 25th anniversary of the 1988 Deaf President Now Demonstration at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., where the fraternity of deaf presidents were on a panel, carefully orchestrated to talk about their academic leadership. On the videotape, it shows that these presidents are basically Aristotelian because they sign "EAR-CLOSE," so glossed in uppercase terms when they are talking about deaf people. What do they exactly mean? If a sense of hearing is lacking, how can speaking be an intellectual activity, including intonation—changing pitches in sentence utterances—when no one can lipread it and no amplification and cochlear implants are engineered to pick it up.
In American Sign Language (ASL), being deaf is the raison d'être—the human right. In the surface structure of ASL, the sign DEAF can be linguistically examined to an articulatory bundle, consisting of the hold-movement model, HMH. The first hold consists of the pointing finger to EAR and the second hold is the pointing finger to LIP. Aristotelians, on the other hand, who believe that it is essential that deaf people can speak a language other than ASL came up with the change of sign by replacing the second hold--LIP sign--with the sign CLOSE, before it appears on the surface structure. This is language bastardization; it is an implicit discrimination against deaf people with intelligible speech.
In the lexicon of ASL, deafness, whether total or only partial, implies a different channel—Sight—through which information, knowledge, and communication are conveyed. ASL is a sight-oriented language. To paraphrase Ludwig Wittgenstein, bastardizing my language means bastardizing my world.
Carl Schroeder, M.Ed.
