Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
The History of the Deaf
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Sarah is a young deaf woman in revolt, refusing to speak. She marries James, an orthophonist who works in a special school for the deaf. However, what gradually emerges in the course of their relationship is the latent suffering caused by what each of the partners isn't getting. James, tired of acting as Sarah's interpreter, frustrated by the limits of what they can share, shouts out:
You want to be independent of me, you want to be a person in your own right, you want people not to pity you … then you [must] learn to read my lips and you [must] learn to use that little mouth of yours for something besides eating and showing me you're better than hearing girls in bed! Come on! Read my lips? What am I saying? Say what I'm saying … You always have to be dependent on someone, and you always will for the rest of your life until you learn to speak. Now come on! I want you to speak to me. Let me hear it. Speak! Speak! Speak! …
1. In the sense of gestural signals as used by the deaf.
2. M. Medoff, Children of a Lesser God. A play in Two Acts, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1987, p. 84.
3. Mark Medoff's play was first produced on Broadway in 1980. The American film version of it earned the deaf actress Marlee Matlin (who has not been afraid to take speaking roles in other films) an Oscar, while its French stage version won a Molière award for the deaf actress Emmanuelle Laborit. The context of the play lent itself quite well to an exploration, along the lines of political correctness, of the themes of difference and minority experience.
4. See, for example, the medieval farce Le Chaudronnier (ed. by A. Tissier), Paris, 1984, p. 71.
5. This notion is well brought out by J. Dardenne, himself a deaf person, in his L'Expérience d'integration urbaine des sourds. Une approche du handicap incident, thèse universitaire, University of Bordeau II, 1992; it has been taken up by the sociologist Bernard Mottez in the term "handicap induit."
6. Some American and European linguists who have worked on sign language argue that, if deaf children acquire sign language correctly, they will then pos sess a linguistic structure adequate to master reading and writing, in spite of the differences of syntactic construction. On this point see D. Bouvet, La Parole de l'enfant. Pour une éducation bilingue de l'enfanf sourd, Paris, 1989, pp. 289-333.
7. C. Padden and T. Humphries, Deaf in America. Voices from a Culture, Cam bridge, Mass., 1988, pp. 111ff.
8. On this question, see the article by Yau Shun-chiu below.
9. Currently a distinction is made between actual sign languages (S.L.), which were spontaneously developed by the deaf themselves and possess a syntax of their own without regard to our spoken and written languages, and sign systems that have been adapted to the languages of the countries in which they are used (and which are called pidgin by the supporters of S.L.), as well as gestural codes such as Cued Speech, the French Langue Parlé Complète, or other versions to which orthophonists have recourse.
10. Among parental offenses, the most important are violations of sexual taboos, classic expressions of which are to be found in Jewish and Islamic writings. Thus, in the eyes of the community, a child afflicted with a disability is reveal ing the sins of his parents.
11. I wish to thank Jean Botteno who gave me this valuable information.
12. Plato, Cratylus, Cambridge, Mass., 1963, XXXIV, 423a and 423s.
13. Aristotle, Poetics, Ann Arbor, 1967, IV, 2.
14. Idem, De sensu and de memoria, New York, 1973, 437a.
15. Lucretius, De natura rerum, V, 1050-1055; Cicero, Tusculanes, V; Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia, XXXV, 21 (where the young deaf-mute Quintus Pedius is characterized as a talented painter).
16. G. Durand, Le Rational ou Manuel des divins offices, 6 vols., Paris 1848-54, pp. 352f.
17. In our day the very same kind of irritation is caused by those who demand the right to their difference, in this case deaf people who sign and who are voluntarily opposed (or at least in appearance, many of them having in fact experienced failure) to the use of hearing aids and other such devices. Instead they loudly and forcefully "signal" their belonging to another culture, that of deaf people. Here the label "stranger" or "foreigner" which has been defended in works of ethnolinguistics (C. Cuxac) and neurology (O. Sacks), becomes a coat of arms…. On this idea of "deaf culture" which was born in the United States, see the article by Patrick Seamans below, or the dissertation by Philippe Sero-Guillaume, L'interprétation en Langue des Signes Française, which was defended in 1994 at the Ecole supérieure d'interprêtes et de tra ducteurs, Sorbonne, Paris III.
18. St. Paul, "Epistle to the Galatians," in: The Holy Bible (King James Version), pp. 1157ff.
19. According to documents, the first communities to propose the acceptance of deaf children were in the French province of Lorraine (Bouxières-aux-Dames) and in Austria (Ossiach) in the tenth century.
20. R. Chartier, "La naissance de la marginalité," in: L'Histoire, 43 (March 1982), pp. 106ff.
21. A. de Saint-Loup, "Les voies du sourd-muet dans l'Occident médiéval," in: D. Jacquart (ed.), Comprendre et matriser la nature au Moyen Age (Essays in honor of G. Beaujouan), Paris, 1994, pp. 205ff.
22. Yau, S.-c., Création gestuelle et débuts du langage, Paris, 1992.
23. Montaigne, Essais, Book II, Paris, 1969, Vol. II, Ch. 12, pp.120f.,125.
24. Carnets de Léonard de Vinci, excerpted from the Codice Atlantico and translated by L. Servicen, fol. 139 r.d., Vol. II, Paris, 1942, p. 275.
25. L. de Vinci, Traité de la peinture, Paris, 1910, Ch. 14, pp. 163-73.
26. Rabelais, Le Tiers Livre, Chs. 19 and 20.
27. Quoted in: Feijoo, Teatro critico universal (1726), Clásicos Castellanos, 1924, Vol. II, p. 292.
28. Ibid., pp. 150f.
29. See his Chironomia and his Chirologia of 1644, followed in 1648 by Philosophe (or Friend of the deaf-mutes).
30. See his De loquela of 1653.
31. See his Ars signorum of 1661 and his Didascalocophus (or Tutor of the deaf and mute) of 1680.
32. In the fourteenth century, the Italian jurist Bartole described, in his Digesta Nova (II, 45), a deaf man by the name of Nellus Gabrielis who was able to read lips. Also in the fourteenth century, Cardinal Nicolas of Cues described a deaf woman who practiced lip reading with her daughter (Le tableau ou la vision de Dieu, XXII, 1453), while the philosopher Rodolphe Agricola, a lecturer at Hei delberg University who died in 1485, mentions a deaf man who could read and write, but did not speak (De inventione dialectica, III, 16). It was this exam ple that led the humanist Jerome Cardan (1501-1576) to affirm, perhaps a bit too hastily, that a deaf person could learn directly to read and write (Par alipomenona, III, 8, and De utilitate ex adversis capienda, II, 7).
33. P. Sero-Guillaume (note 17 above).
