Sentient beings are 'knowledge-sponges'; they soak up knowledge without ever thinking about it. Some knowledge is acquired through experience; this hammer hurts if I bring it down on my thumb instead of the clout. Some knowledge is acquired through education; this, juvenile orca, is the way to get that seal off of the ice-floe, let daddy demonstrate wave-hunting. Some knowledge is acquired by the medium of language, whether written or spoken; here is a lecture and a textbook which tells you how to split the atom or make an atomic bomb. (Al-Qaeda thankfully missed that lecture.)
As some kind of respite from all of the 'natural history' or palaeontological books that I have been reading recently, I was presented with a choice; Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, which like Melville's 'Moby Dick' I have struggled with (see blogs 2008 passim) both in French and English, and Oliver Sacks' 'Seeing Voices'* about the congenitally or the prelinguinally deaf. As Fricka was somewhat hesitant about taking more than her fair share of the feeding duties for little Fjörgen while I continued my struggle with Rabelais, I chose the latter.
I have only managed around twenty-five pages so far but, almost immediately, I was struck by a thought which I have had reason to expound upon on occasion; what is it to be a bat? Or a bird? I have, I feel, a little insider knowledge of what it must be like to be congenitally or prelinguinally deaf. My own language is unlike that of most humans, being somewhat based on gesture and posture and subtle inflections of tone and pitch; how else do you think that we are able to unfailingly find our own chick amidst so many in the teeming rookery? I have had to learn to write and to read English in a way that it is, perhaps, similar to that manner in which a deaf person might because I can't make sense of any of the sounds which make up human spoken language, whichever one you happen to speak.
Language is fundamental to the acquisition of the broad range of knowledge which humans now possess; it is only language which allows humankind a doorway, an entrance, to the vast stores of information to which you have access and allows people to get beyond the limits of pure existence and exceed the limitations of your ape-like ancestors and contemporaries. An orca may teach its offspring how to wave hunt and a chimpanzee may teach its fellows the 'smart' trick of wheedling ants or grubs from a rotten tree stump with the aid of a thin stick but they have no way of ensuring, with any degree of certainty, that these 'smart' tricks are handed down from generation to generation in the absence of language.
Sometime during their second or third year, human children begin to process the sounds that make up human speech (the phonemes) into fully articulated words and concepts complete with grammar and syntax, although quite how they do it is still shrouded in a good deal of mystery. Perhaps, as Chomsky reasoned, human brains are simply predisposed to acquiring language; it, at a very basic level, is pre-programmed or hard-wired into the developing brain. And there is, perhaps, no better illustration of this than what happens in the developing child who is congenitally or prelinguinally deaf. Providing that they have other profoundly deaf people to interact with, they develop a language all their very own; sign language.
Forget ASL (American Sign Language or its many variants), which is largely a learned system of communication, which has clearly defined parameters, look instead at what deaf people do in the absence of such a system; they devise a means to express themselves with 'sign' which is often unique to that community. Although the profoundly deaf have been treated abysmally in the past, a pioneering, French, and a very enlightened one for an eighteenth century 'philosophe', cleric, one Abbé Sicard, realised that the deaf were not stupid but capable of just as much intelligence as any other human being and so started a short-lived experiment in which the deaf were brought together in schools in which they could be educated using sign language. The results were good enough to translate 'across the pond' and led to the establishment of the first university to specifically cater for the particular needs of the profoundly deaf.
And then disaster struck in the mid-nineteenth century; at least for the deaf. The concept was abandoned and the next century was spent in forcing children into spoken language, something which they clearly couldn't do, at least not well. One memoir speaks of the disillusionment felt by the deaf, who could not cope with acquiring knowledge through normal means, but still managed to communicate with each other, although it was banned and subject to punishment, by devising their own sign language in the absence of a more formal system.
It is, perhaps, too late in the day to introduce sign language as a general, second language, much as French or Spanish is taught in schools now, to allow even greater interaction with the general population who can hear. Pretty much a whole community, Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, were once conversant with sign, so many of its inhabitants were congenitally deaf, and it was a natural mode of expression even though not everyone was deaf; perhaps it is time to think again.
Human societies are now encouraged to be thoughtful and caring to the physically and mentally challenged, the poor and the destitute, the elderly and the infirm; shouldn't you go just a little way to accommodating the one in a thousand who are profoundly deaf and have been that way since they were born? As with the black man or woman in the post-slavery US, the Africans and Asians exploited through centuries of colonialism, economic and political, one half of your species, women; don't you now owe them just a little by means of education of the hearing-unimpaired to make up for just a little of what they have had to suffer in the past?
As MG once pointed through the medium of MY blog, the loss of the ability to communicate, in the aftermath of his stroke, is a trial which isolates you from your fellows; how much more of a trial would that have been in the past to the profoundly and congenitally deaf?
* If ever there was an apt title for a book, then this is it. I have not gone far enough into the book to learn whether deaf people 'learn' to think in language other than sign, although I doubt it. Hearing individuals often claim, probably quite rightly, that thought is a process of verbal dialogue with themselves. Just imagine yourself conducting a dialogue with yourself about whether you should do something, or feel something, or philosophising, entirely in semaphore! Tricky, no? Easy-peasy for the congenitally or the prelinguinally deaf! Such is the ubiquity and value of language, however it is couched, among the entirety of the human species. Tool-making and upright posture was not the route to hegemony; language was!
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