MY ONGOING SCHOLARLY PURSUIT

While a student at Gallaudet I decided to major in American Studies (now English), since reading has long been one of my passions and since I knew that to make inroads into the circles of scholarship, I would need to become well versed in an area of scholarship other than ASL which was unavailable.

I also decided to commit myself to learning French for four semesters, which was a thrilling experience for me. As it turned out, I was pretty good at the basics of the language and was always eager for more. However, having been to Paris four times, French was a bit troubling for me because I could barely understand it there. I was textbook-French smart.

All the more reason, I thought, for learning language and culture. My questions were complicated even more as I began to think increasingly about linguistics at Gallaudet, Georgetown and now Hawai'i. The more I studied ASL, the more I became interested in the language documentations that preserve ASL for us, and in the linguistics, which can supposedly help us reconstruct what the original signs were. I kept reverting to my basic question: how does it help us to say that ASL is the inerrant language of the Deaf if in fact we don't have a college or university requiring ASL for the graduation.

This university level ASL dilemma has plagued me and drove me to dig deeper and deeper, to understand what ASL really is. In my paper for my dissertation proposal, I developed a long and complicated argument to the effect that even though Gallaudet University recognizes ASL, it doesn't really mean that Gallaudet advances ASL, because that it takes place in the part of the PR text. My argument in my dissertation proposal is based on the meaning of university level ASL involved and is a bit convoluted.

This kind of realization coincided with the problems I am encountering the more closely I study ASL. It is one thing from my personal experience to say that the originals of ASL went through a language clash with LSF (Langue des signes francaise) at Hartford Deaf School back in 1817, but the reality is that we don't have the originals so saying that ASL was introduced doesn't help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals of ASL. It may be something of a moot point. Not only do we not have the originals, we don't have the copies of the originals. Not even copies of the copies of the originals. ASL lacks a priori claims, and it is therefore easily oppressed.

Language Documentation at the University of Hawai'i at Manao announces: “If these languages and minority languages elsewhere die without being recorded, it will be as if they never existed. This represents an enormous loss of accumulated wisdom and a catastrophic loss of information for linguists, anthropologists, archaeologists, folklorists, historians, psychologists, botanists philosophers, writers, and others. The loss of a language is a loss to all humanity.”