[Slling-l] Veditz considered SL to be universal?

[Betsy McDonald]

I believe there is a discussion of this in the new text "Sign Language Archeology"by Supalla and Clark....2015, pp 2-3 stating that educators stressed the "natural" form of all sign languages..."They believed that the natural language of signs was universal, and therefore useful to all educators, regardless of the spoken languages used."(p. 2)  and in a footnote:  "At the American School for the Deaf (ASD), for instance, books were collected in French, German, and English for faculty to read and use in their own teaching (personal communication, Gary Waite, archivist)."(p. 2).  

Cheers,Betsy 


     On Tuesday, June 2, 2015 2:39 PM, Siglinde Pape <siglinde.pape at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
   

 Hello,
I recently found this statement about G. W. Veditz's discourse on the Preservation of Sign Language:"Veditz, like most educated people of his day, believed that sign language used was universal - that is, that there was one sign language, intelligible all over the world." (https://peopleoftheeye.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/people-of-the-eye-what-does-that-mean/)
Do you have any material that could corroborate this? (for Veditz or other people of that time)
In this same film (at 1:40) does Veditz says, as Carol Padden translated it: "They [= the French Deaf] loved him [= de l'Épée] because he was their first teacher. But they loved him more for being the father and inventor [sic] of their beautiful sign language."? Or is it rather an inclusive pronoun that we could translate as "our" then?
(Maybe we should just not stick to words - after all, some people will tell you that a language is no more than a dialect with an army and a navy... Yet for many SL a common origin or a language contact situation can not necessarily be assumed. Moreover I am more curious here about the representation people have then about the linguistic truth itself.)

So I would be interested in facts showing when the switch was operated within the Deaf community from considering the different SL as local variants of a presumably universal SL to really different sign languages.Any evidences or personal opinions to share?

Siglinde  P a p e_____________________________________________________________________________________________
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