Name: The Fascinating History of Sign Language
Uploaded: 2024-01-31T18:33:38.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Fascinating History of Sign Language' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-31. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'The Fascinating History of Sign Language' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-31. Transcript available.

I'm a member of the Deaf community, and I think every Deaf person would say
that, that I belong, but I also was the enemy.
I was the hearing, and so you're...
Why do they think of the hearing as the enemy?
Well, that is a complicated question, and it's because there has been a lot of
enforced oppression on the Deaf community from the outside.
The story of sign language is really fascinating. 300 years ago, there was no
sign language, there was no...
There was only the kind of sign, if you were born... 90% of Deaf people are
born into a hearing family, right?
That's just the way genetics works, like most of the time you don't have Deaf
family members.
And if you were born 350 years ago into one of those families, you just didn't
have language.
You weren't given the gift of language, which is the thing...
I mean, think about how much language plays into your own life, Joe, like...
Yeah.
...speaking and everything you know, every thought process you have is mashed
through the filter of language.
Yeah.
And in that situation, you'd be born into a family and you had zero language.
You would have like a gesturing system that you'd created with your dad to be
able to say, like, "Pass the potatoes," and that was it.
Right. You couldn't say how you feel, you couldn't say what you wanted to do.
You couldn't even think about how you...
I mean, you could think...
I don't know, I mean, I wasn't...
Yeah.
But language is the thing that unlocks reason.
It's the thing that unlocks culture.
Yeah.
And people were stymied from that.
But if you were born lucky enough to have genetic deafness in your family, so
that you and your sibling were both deaf, then the two of you sitting together
could create language, a language of two, right?
You would back and forth between two siblings create a family sign system that
would enable the both of you learning from one another to create a language and
enable you to reason and think and talk about how you feel, even if it was just
with one person.
But you couldn't communicate with the outside world.
Right.
But at least you could communicate with yourself and with one other person.
Right.
I mean, the difference between an isolated deaf person and a pair of siblings
is the world.
It's freedom.
It's everything.
Right.
So one day, a French priest walks along and sees two deaf sisters signing back
and forth to one another.
And he goes, "That's language."
Prior to that, deaf people weren't even considered to be linguistic.
They weren't even considered to be capable of reason.
But he goes, "No.
I know what that is.
I'm looking at language."
So he goes to these sisters.
His name is the Abbe de Epee.
And he says, "Teach me to sign."
Somehow he tells them, like, you know, "Teach me these gestures to them.
Teach me to sign."
They teach him to sign.
And his thing was he wanted them to take the catechism, right?
That he wanted them to be able to go to heaven.
He realized, "Oh, deaf people are linguistically capable, but they can't get
into heaven unless they can take the catechism and confess their faith and take
communion."
Right?
Which makes sense.
If there is a God that God wouldn't allow them into heaven based on the fact
that they couldn't speak.
He's like, "My hands are tied here, buddy."
You have to say it.
So they teach him.
They teach him and he teaches them back French.
And then he starts to gather the deaf people from around the world.
I'm sorry, from around France.
And he creates the first school for the deaf.
He teaches them French in sign.
In sign.
That's right.
Whoa.
Because French, because sign language and spoken language are not the same.
A lot of people think that, right?
That like, I speak American sign language, but people think, "Oh, it's a
translation of English."
It's not.
It's his complete own language, right?
Oh, I did not know that.
So much so that the way that he would fundraise for this school is he would do
like a traveling road show where he would take his star pupils around France
and around Europe and they would be at like an exhibition hall.
And a person in the audience would ask a question.
He would say, "Oh, Joe, do you have a question for the deaf person?"
And then you'd ask them about some French question.
Like, you know, what is, what degree of suffering can be born by man?
Or how many creams is too many creams for a brie or whatever?
And he would take your question, sign it to his star pupils, and they would
take a piece of chalk, walk up to the blackboard and write the answer in
perfect French.
And it, people lost their fucking minds.
Like they couldn't believe it.
Like deaf people, oh my God.
It like unlocked this whole conception of the deaf as like, they can think,
they can reason.
Oh, they, all they need is language to be free, right?
So all this whole network of deaf schools for the deaf started to spring up.
They would, they sprung up in all over Europe and they would copy the, the
teaching methods of the, the school for the deaf.
And, um, and, and a guy from America came over, right?
And he saw this system and he basically took their star pupil.
And one of the things was the deaf would teach each other.
So you would teach them sign and then they would become educated and then they
would become a professor at this school.
And he took like the star professor, Laurent Clerc was his name.
Um, Thomas Gallaudet was the name of the American.
He came over and he saw Laurent Clerc and he said, move to America with me and
let's go do that.
Let's go replicate this in America.
So Thomas Gallaudet says, yes, they get on a boat, they sail to America.
By the time they landed, Thomas Gallaudet knew rudimentary sign.
And Laurent Clerc, who was like a fucking genius, knew, uh, basically had been
taught English.
And they set up the first school for the deaf in America.
They figured out English on a boat?
He was a genius, like a real genius, like a, like an actual, like lucky enough
to have been, you know, these circumstances in history were like the perfect
man at the perfect time.
Yes.
Like they come here, they set up the school here and they start to create
American sign language.
And they, they borrowed from these different worlds, right?
They took French sign language as the base.
Martha's Vineyard, uh, back then had this weird genetic anomaly on the island
of Martha's Vineyard.
This is like before it was just a place for Kennedy's to fuck their mistresses.
This was like back when it was a fishing town, a fishing island.
There was some weird genetic thing that had happened where over the course of
hundreds of years, one in 25 people on Martha's Vineyard was deaf.
Whoa.
And it was this very bizarre, uh, kind of like, like almost the, the equality
that deaf people on Martha's Vineyard felt was almost like the opposite of like
what, uh, affirmative action is attempting to do.
Right.
Affirmative action wants to correct a historic harm by, uh, by changing the
playing field.
This was an equity of everybody was the same because everybody on Martha's Vineyard
knew, uh, either was deaf, knew a deaf person or was related to a deaf person.
So everybody hearing and non-hearing signed on Martha's Vineyard.
It was a, a sign system called, uh, Martha's Vineyard sign language.
They took some of that.
They took the Plains Indian sign language P I S L.
It's called, you know, that like gesture, um, uh, you, you've seen it in like
movies where the, the native Americans will, will gesture to each other.
And you think they presented as if it's like a war language, so they don't have
to make noise.
But what it actually was, was all the tribes in, uh, America spoke different
languages.
So they created this kind of, uh, Esperanto of the tribes so that they could
trade, they could do trade.
And that was called Plains Indian sign language.
And they took all that into like kind of bouillabaisse of, uh, French sign
language base, Martha's Vineyard chaser and Plains Indian sprinkled on top.
And they created American sign language.
And then a hundred years, 200 years later, my mother was born deaf, uh, in, in
Oakland, California.
And she went to the California school for the deaf and she absorbed this
language.
My mother was 13 when she went to the California school for the deaf.
She was in other, uh, an oral school system.
And this is my long winded way of telling you why deaf people have such a
problem with hearing people.
That language that she learned, she was, she was in an oral school system.
So almost as soon as the sign language system came out, hearing people looked
at it and go, we got to get rid of that.
The one thing that unlocked their freedom, the one thing that unlocked their
minds, hearing people saw it and said, we have to take that away from them.
We have to make them more like us by doing the sign.
They're creating more Wakanda.
They're creating an insular sort of closed circuit system of culture.
Right.
And there, and weirdly, this was at a time in American history where those
closed circuits of culture were really frowned upon this.
Like frowning upon deaf people signing to each other.
Deaf people signing to each other.
Italians having their own newspapers, Chinese immigrants, like every at that
time in American history, the idea of creating,
like an immigrant subculture was, was really frowned upon.
And Alexander Graham Bell, whose parents were deaf like me, had a deaf wife.
He became the champion of what was called the oral system.
And the oral system was, let's not, let's not allow them to sign.
Let's teach them to speak.
Let's make them like us.
Let's make them talk normally and function normally.
Let's make them like us.
But it, it was a crazy failure.
And it makes sense why, right?
Like, they can't hear the sounds.
They can't hear the sounds.
Oliver Sacks said, teaching a deaf person without sign is like teaching you
Japanese from inside of a soundproof booth by holding up flashcards in Japanese
and like putting a symbol next to it.
It was like kind of doomed to failure.
And then they went through this, this 200 years reimposed darkness.
There was a, there was a trial where all the hearing educators decided that
deaf people wouldn't sign anymore.
They fired all the deaf educators and they pushed them out and they created
this oral system, which really, I mean, it worked for some people, some people,
but what it created was you had to be exceptional in order to be average in the
deaf world.
You know, you had to be a genius in order to get that oral system to work for
you because your natural mode of communication had been kind of stamped out.
And then in about the seventies, deaf people started to like kind of rise up
and say, fuck that we're signing.
This is who we are.
This is our native language.
And when I was born in 79, that was the, that was the world I was born into.
And, and, and so from that two sisters on a fucking corner in, in a slum in
Paris, to that school, to Gallaudet, to a boat ride, to the Martha's vineyard,
to the California school for the deaf, to my mother's hands, to my hands.
That was the way that I acquired language.
It was through this crazy historical journey.
And that to me is, is the reason that, that when I was born into the deaf
community, there was, there was so much distrust of the hearing world because
they were like, they stole from us.
The one thing that gave us freedom.
That makes sense.
Wow.
I did not know any of that stuff.
That's incredible.
What, how does someone get to be a fake sign language and be on stage with
Obama?
Was it Obama?
Oh, it's been multiple people, but there was one recently that happened.
Yeah.
But the Obama one was bananas.
Cause this guy was totally insane and he was standing in front of Obama, just
making things up.
I'll tell you how good he is.
I want to see, can I see it?
The Obama guy?
How bad the Obama guy is.
Well, I think it's just gibberish.
Dude.
I think it's just the sign language version of gibberish.
I, my life was going to appointments with my mother and being tasked with the
job of interpreting for my mom's medical appointments for my mom.
It was like a non-consensual internship program.
Right.
Like I, I like her medical appointments.
And then I started to get in trouble.
And then the, the, the subject of the meeting would be me.
It would be like a disciplinary meeting about me.
So you would have to explain what your mom was having a problem with, with you
or what the school system or what the Oakland police department, what their
problem with me was.
Oh my God.
And then you have to do this kind of like this kind of interpretive dance where
you're, you're not re you can't be like, Oh, we think your son is awesome.
He's a cool kid.
We love him.
Cause then your mom, my mom's not stupid.
She'll be like, all right, let's see how bad this guy is.
So here's this guy.
Okay.
Well, that's not Obama.
No, that's not the one.
This is the guy.
I remember the other guy.
It's the same guy.
This was in, at the Nelson Mandela, uh, Memorial.
Yeah.
So check this dude out.
This video doesn't have him knit with Obama.
Okay.
Just show him by himself with that other gentleman.
So what, what does he do in here?
Moshe.
I am at a disadvantage, Joe, because I, this is.
I, this is South Africa and I do not speak South African sign language.
Oh, so there is a South African sign language.
I would assume every system.
You want to hear something crazy.
It is so not a translation of English that, uh, my mother note would have a
much harder time understanding a British sign sign signer than a French signer.
Whoa.
So it has nothing.
It's divorced from English, right?
Ah, this lady.
Okay.
Okay.
So I can tell you that this woman is actually using sign language.
This is actual sign language, but she is very bad at sign language.
Is that what it is?
Yes.
Those are real letters.
And I, this is completely incomprehensible.
It's 55 million is what she just said.
I don't know what that is.
Please.
Announcement tonight.
Handcuffs.
Look, she waved her arms around like she was singing jingle bells, but that's
not true.
Right?
If she's doing some sign language.
Well, she's a hustler.
What, whatever this is, but I did, dude, I've been to so many appointments with
my mother, with my mother, where I walk in and, and, and it's an emergency room
appointment.
And I go, you can leave just leave because you aren't qualified to do this.
And this is fucking life or death for my mother.
And you're here.
You shouldn't have taken this fucking job.
You should have known better than to take this job because this is an emergency
room situation.
So that's when I was an interpreter, the, the responsibility of that was like
massive to me.
I, I, I felt that so acutely because I'd lived through it in such a direct way.
Right.
I've told, I've been an interpreter when people were told they were dying.
I've been an interpreter when people were, were graduated from graduate school
from like getting their doctorate.
Although I've been an interpreter where people were in court and it was
literally the, the degree to which I could sign accurately and faithfully was a
difference between them going to prison and not going to prison.
Like I've done all of that.
And that, that weight is like super massive to me and super important.
I can only imagine.
Yeah.
And some funny shit has happened along the way too.
I'm sure.
Like some very strange situations.
Well, how does the deaf community feel about people who get like implants and
can hear again?
So that's a, another complicated question.
Um, I think, have you ever seen the sound and the fury?
No.
It's a fucking beautiful and fantastic documentary about cochlear implants and
the deaf community.
I mean, the thing is deaf, the deaf community had a, and I, and I don't speak
for the deaf community, obviously, but I can speak from my own experience.
My mother has a cochlear implant.
She got one because my mom was like, my mom's like an iconoclast.
And she's like, I'm not going to allow a taboo in deaf society to keep me from
experiencing as much of life as I could possibly experience.
Of course.
But in general, especially at the beginning, deaf people hated the idea of a
cochlear implant because they do not feel.
And I think to some degree, I agree with them that deafness is a disability.
They feel that, that, um, that what it is, is it's a, it's a culture.
I mean, obviously they can't hear that's a disability, but the true disability
comes from the fact that communication barrier.
And so to them, they see the cochlear implant as just another imperialist, now
a robotic mechanism to make them hearing again.
Make them hearing again.

The Fascinating History of Sign Language

I'm a member of the Deaf community, and I think every Deaf person would say
that, that I belong, but I also was the enemy.
I was the hearing, and so you're...
Why do they think of the hearing as the enemy?
Well, that is a complicated question, and it's because there has been a lot of
enforced oppression on the Deaf community from the outside.
The story of sign language is really fascinating. 300 years ago, there was no
sign language, there was no...
There was only the kind of sign, if you were born... 90% of Deaf people are
born into a hearing family, right?
That's just the way genetics works, like most of the time you don't have Deaf
family members.
And if you were born 350 years ago into one of those families, you just didn't
have language.
You weren't given the gift of language, which is the thing...
I mean, think about how much language plays into your own life, Joe, like...
Yeah.
...speaking and everything you know, every thought process you have is mashed
through the filter of language.
Yeah.
And in that situation, you'd be born into a family and you had zero language.
You would have like a gesturing system that you'd created with your dad to be
able to say, like, "Pass the potatoes," and that was it.
Right. You couldn't say how you feel, you couldn't say what you wanted to do.
You couldn't even think about how you...
I mean, you could think...
I don't know, I mean, I wasn't...
Yeah.
But language is the thing that unlocks reason.
It's the thing that unlocks culture.
Yeah.
And people were stymied from that.
But if you were born lucky enough to have genetic deafness in your family, so
that you and your sibling were both deaf, then the two of you sitting together
could create language, a language of two, right?
You would back and forth between two siblings create a family sign system that
would enable the both of you learning from one another to create a language and
enable you to reason and think and talk about how you feel, even if it was just
with one person.
But you couldn't communicate with the outside world.
Right.
But at least you could communicate with yourself and with one other person.
Right.
I mean, the difference between an isolated deaf person and a pair of siblings
is the world.
It's freedom.
It's everything.
Right.
So one day, a French priest walks along and sees two deaf sisters signing back
and forth to one another.
And he goes, "That's language."
Prior to that, deaf people weren't even considered to be linguistic.
They weren't even considered to be capable of reason.
But he goes, "No.
I know what that is.
I'm looking at language."
So he goes to these sisters.
His name is the Abbe de Epee.
And he says, "Teach me to sign."
Somehow he tells them, like, you know, "Teach me these gestures to them.
Teach me to sign."
They teach him to sign.
And his thing was he wanted them to take the catechism, right?
That he wanted them to be able to go to heaven.
He realized, "Oh, deaf people are linguistically capable, but they can't get
into heaven unless they can take the catechism and confess their faith and take
communion."
Right?
Which makes sense.
If there is a God that God wouldn't allow them into heaven based on the fact
that they couldn't speak.
He's like, "My hands are tied here, buddy."
You have to say it.
So they teach him.
They teach him and he teaches them back French.
And then he starts to gather the deaf people from around the world.
I'm sorry, from around France.
And he creates the first school for the deaf.
He teaches them French in sign.
In sign.
That's right.
Whoa.
Because French, because sign language and spoken language are not the same.
A lot of people think that, right?
That like, I speak American sign language, but people think, "Oh, it's a
translation of English."
It's not.
It's his complete own language, right?
Oh, I did not know that.
So much so that the way that he would fundraise for this school is he would do
like a traveling road show where he would take his star pupils around France
and around Europe and they would be at like an exhibition hall.
And a person in the audience would ask a question.
He would say, "Oh, Joe, do you have a question for the deaf person?"
And then you'd ask them about some French question.
Like, you know, what is, what degree of suffering can be born by man?
Or how many creams is too many creams for a brie or whatever?
And he would take your question, sign it to his star pupils, and they would
take a piece of chalk, walk up to the blackboard and write the answer in
perfect French.
And it, people lost their fucking minds.
Like they couldn't believe it.
Like deaf people, oh my God.
It like unlocked this whole conception of the deaf as like, they can think,
they can reason.
Oh, they, all they need is language to be free, right?
So all this whole network of deaf schools for the deaf started to spring up.
They would, they sprung up in all over Europe and they would copy the, the
teaching methods of the, the school for the deaf.
And, um, and, and a guy from America came over, right?
And he saw this system and he basically took their star pupil.
And one of the things was the deaf would teach each other.
So you would teach them sign and then they would become educated and then they
would become a professor at this school.
And he took like the star professor, Laurent Clerc was his name.
Um, Thomas Gallaudet was the name of the American.
He came over and he saw Laurent Clerc and he said, move to America with me and
let's go do that.
Let's go replicate this in America.
So Thomas Gallaudet says, yes, they get on a boat, they sail to America.
By the time they landed, Thomas Gallaudet knew rudimentary sign.
And Laurent Clerc, who was like a fucking genius, knew, uh, basically had been
taught English.
And they set up the first school for the deaf in America.
They figured out English on a boat?
He was a genius, like a real genius, like a, like an actual, like lucky enough
to have been, you know, these circumstances in history were like the perfect
man at the perfect time.
Yes.
Like they come here, they set up the school here and they start to create
American sign language.
And they, they borrowed from these different worlds, right?
They took French sign language as the base.
Martha's Vineyard, uh, back then had this weird genetic anomaly on the island
of Martha's Vineyard.
This is like before it was just a place for Kennedy's to fuck their mistresses.
This was like back when it was a fishing town, a fishing island.
There was some weird genetic thing that had happened where over the course of
hundreds of years, one in 25 people on Martha's Vineyard was deaf.
Whoa.
And it was this very bizarre, uh, kind of like, like almost the, the equality
that deaf people on Martha's Vineyard felt was almost like the opposite of like
what, uh, affirmative action is attempting to do.
Right.
Affirmative action wants to correct a historic harm by, uh, by changing the
playing field.
This was an equity of everybody was the same because everybody on Martha's Vineyard
knew, uh, either was deaf, knew a deaf person or was related to a deaf person.
So everybody hearing and non-hearing signed on Martha's Vineyard.
It was a, a sign system called, uh, Martha's Vineyard sign language.
They took some of that.
They took the Plains Indian sign language P I S L.
It's called, you know, that like gesture, um, uh, you, you've seen it in like
movies where the, the native Americans will, will gesture to each other.
And you think they presented as if it's like a war language, so they don't have
to make noise.
But what it actually was, was all the tribes in, uh, America spoke different
languages.
So they created this kind of, uh, Esperanto of the tribes so that they could
trade, they could do trade.
And that was called Plains Indian sign language.
And they took all that into like kind of bouillabaisse of, uh, French sign
language base, Martha's Vineyard chaser and Plains Indian sprinkled on top.
And they created American sign language.
And then a hundred years, 200 years later, my mother was born deaf, uh, in, in
Oakland, California.
And she went to the California school for the deaf and she absorbed this
language.
My mother was 13 when she went to the California school for the deaf.
She was in other, uh, an oral school system.
And this is my long winded way of telling you why deaf people have such a
problem with hearing people.
That language that she learned, she was, she was in an oral school system.
So almost as soon as the sign language system came out, hearing people looked
at it and go, we got to get rid of that.
The one thing that unlocked their freedom, the one thing that unlocked their
minds, hearing people saw it and said, we have to take that away from them.
We have to make them more like us by doing the sign.
They're creating more Wakanda.
They're creating an insular sort of closed circuit system of culture.
Right.
And there, and weirdly, this was at a time in American history where those
closed circuits of culture were really frowned upon this.
Like frowning upon deaf people signing to each other.
Deaf people signing to each other.
Italians having their own newspapers, Chinese immigrants, like every at that
time in American history, the idea of creating,
like an immigrant subculture was, was really frowned upon.
And Alexander Graham Bell, whose parents were deaf like me, had a deaf wife.
He became the champion of what was called the oral system.
And the oral system was, let's not, let's not allow them to sign.
Let's teach them to speak.
Let's make them like us.
Let's make them talk normally and function normally.
Let's make them like us.
But it, it was a crazy failure.
And it makes sense why, right?
Like, they can't hear the sounds.
They can't hear the sounds.
Oliver Sacks said, teaching a deaf person without sign is like teaching you
Japanese from inside of a soundproof booth by holding up flashcards in Japanese
and like putting a symbol next to it.
It was like kind of doomed to failure.
And then they went through this, this 200 years reimposed darkness.
There was a, there was a trial where all the hearing educators decided that
deaf people wouldn't sign anymore.
They fired all the deaf educators and they pushed them out and they created
this oral system, which really, I mean, it worked for some people, some people,
but what it created was you had to be exceptional in order to be average in the
deaf world.
You know, you had to be a genius in order to get that oral system to work for
you because your natural mode of communication had been kind of stamped out.
And then in about the seventies, deaf people started to like kind of rise up
and say, fuck that we're signing.
This is who we are.
This is our native language.
And when I was born in 79, that was the, that was the world I was born into.
And, and, and so from that two sisters on a fucking corner in, in a slum in
Paris, to that school, to Gallaudet, to a boat ride, to the Martha's vineyard,
to the California school for the deaf, to my mother's hands, to my hands.
That was the way that I acquired language.
It was through this crazy historical journey.
And that to me is, is the reason that, that when I was born into the deaf
community, there was, there was so much distrust of the hearing world because
they were like, they stole from us.
The one thing that gave us freedom.
That makes sense.
Wow.
I did not know any of that stuff.
That's incredible.
What, how does someone get to be a fake sign language and be on stage with
Obama?
Was it Obama?
Oh, it's been multiple people, but there was one recently that happened.
Yeah.
But the Obama one was bananas.
Cause this guy was totally insane and he was standing in front of Obama, just
making things up.
I'll tell you how good he is.
I want to see, can I see it?
The Obama guy?
How bad the Obama guy is.
Well, I think it's just gibberish.
Dude.
I think it's just the sign language version of gibberish.
I, my life was going to appointments with my mother and being task