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While current debates oppose the cochlear implant's privileging of speech acquisition to teaching sign language, nineteenth-century debates, in contrast, opposed those who saw sign language as a tool for learning to read and write, and those who saw in it an autonomous language for organizing thought itself. Should the order of gestural signs follow written syntax? Or should it have its own coherence, that is, possibly a different syntax and order of enunciation? Starting with these questions, distinct teaching legacies developed, specifying which kinds of signs to use in which context and what role signs were to fulfill. This article focuses on French deaf and hearing teachers whose positions were influential throughout Europe and the United States, moving from Abbé de l'Epée's 1784 method to Rémi Valade's 1854 publication of the first sign language grammar.

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Recent studies have proven the specificity and advantages of fingerspelling from a linguistic point of view. However, while the use of fingerspelling is widespread today, it is limited to sign language interactions. The appreciation for both sign language and fingerspelling is recent; in fact, the two systems were often opposed to each other in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century worldwide. While a number of teachers, doctors, and politicians considered fingerspelling, or dactylology, to be a communication method that could stand on its own, it was the object of a double controversy concerning its use in school and in society and concerning the proper production of signs. This article will focus on the invention of manual alphabets and the debates around them, which divided the deaf-mute community in France in the time between Jacob Péreire's work in 1750 and F. Legrand's in 1902.SLS 19(4) Pgs 491-627.indd 565 7/26/2019 7:36:57 AM have characterized the role of the constant shift between ASL and fingerspelling as a producer of meaning. They have outlined its capacity to qualify specific aspects of the discourse while signifying the integration of scientific, foreign, or other specific terms, thereby qualifying the type of concept involved in the users' discourse. Beyond fingerspelling's use as a cross-modal bridge between ASL and English, Joshua T. Williams and Sharlene D. Newman ( 2016) have delineated many of the ways in which it encourages literary acquisition in children and facilitates the mastery of spelling and reading. The significant proportion of fingerspelling communications within ASL, 1 and the increasing number of linguistic studies gauging its contribution in the last decade, might make us think that it has always accompanied sign language as a necessary complement and that the history of the support or rejection of fingerspelling closely mirrors that of sign language itself (see, for example, Brentari 2011; Johnson and Liddell 2011;Padden 2006;Padden and Ramsey 2000). Yet that is far from being the case. From the late eighteenth century on, its role has been the object of much discussion among French deaf and hearing teachers and doctors. 2 While many of its defendants have seen in fingerspelling a pedagogical, intellectual, and social tool, offered new versions of it, and strove for its improvement, its detractors have looked upon it with distrust. From these detractors' perspective, finger spelling stands for letters, which express sounds and not meanings. As evidenced by Padden and Gunsauls, who study its contemporary use, "The controversy centers around whether it is a friendly partner of sign language or is antagonistic to it. Ironically, the structural properties of the manual alphabet lend themselves to either purpose: Like sign languages, the manual alphabet represents visible language, yet like speech it consists of a finite set of arbitrary symbols used in sequences to build words and sentences" (Padden and Gunsauls 2003, 13), From the late eighteenth century on, d...

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When, during the Revolution, the French government committed to supporting the education of Deaf people, they left it to teachers to determine the methods and contents of this education. Less than a century later, the Ministry of the Interior of the third Republic reformed the teaching in use in most institutions in the direction of methods of pure speech. This moment coincided with the development of new categories to classify children in relation to the educational project, especially ‘backward’ and ‘abnormal’ at the turn of the twentieth-century. While Deaf writers did not oppose the teaching of speech, they soon questioned the legitimacy of this reform, and exposed the threats it posed for the development of Deaf pupils. In addition to examining the stakes and the impacts of the political decision, this paper will analyze the development of a poetics of contestation throughout Deaf writing, as manifested in the adoption of a variety of rhetorical strategies, ranging from irony to critical analysis, in the rewriting of the category of abnormality. This article will show how these years of struggle were also years of emancipation, insofar as the acquisition of language became a poetical and political act.

The last fifty years have seen the accelerated compilation of sign language dictionaries in many countries, but France is the only country in which early, repeated attempts were made, with nine dictionaries published in the nineteenth century. The challenges were many: creating signs, establishing a national sign language, inventing a format for a sign language dictionary, and instituting the book's authority as the reference for the language of a community. Starting with Abbé de l'Epée's late-eighteenth-century dictionary and working up to Abbé Lambert's in 1865, this article investigates some of the epistemo logical and formal challenges involved in this undertaking.The deve lopme nt of sign language studies over the last fifty years and the recent protections for sign language enacted by the United Nations and the European Union have had an unprecedented result: the accelerated compilation of signs in national dictionaries

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