Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Sign Languages

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why sign languages are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Sign language. Known for being a language. Famous for using your hands. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why sign language is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode of Podcast All About Why Being Alive is More Interesting Than People Think It Is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my cohost, Katie Golden. Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of sign language?

Hang on, let me, let me, let me, hang on, let me, no, there's not. Oh, she's doing it. I'm wiggling my fingers around and I'm trying to see if Alex is fooled into believing that I know how to do sign language Maybe I should not have said all of that out loud. I Wonder what Katie's scheme is I have no idea. I my headphones fell off for like a minute. I don't know

I I am actually deeply deeply fascinated by sign language And I it's one of my bigger grunts that when my brain was soft and spongy and pliable, that I did not learn it in high school or in elementary school because I think that it is... I mean, I did learn French, so who cares? But it seems like such a unique kind of way to engage in language that I think is, it shows how adaptable and how plastic the brain is. And it also, I think it's kind of seems like something we should all learn to be honest. Now I say this as someone who doesn't know it, right?

But it does seem like an incredibly useful skill and also something that maybe uses like different parts of your brain in conjunction with the language part of your brain, like connecting sort of like gesticulations with language. It just feels like there's a different part of your brain that it's tapping into that helps you connect with people. And so, yeah, I mean, that's my little soapbox rant

that nobody asked me to do. I did. I wanna know what you think about it. Oh, that's right, you did ask. So this is your fault. Everyone write your angry emails to Alex if I said anything silly. Sifat at gmail.com, baby.

And yeah, and that all fits this episode because like quick, simple programming notes that maybe are not even necessary. This episode will not teach you sign language. A great deal of that is because it's audio. And because we don't know it. I don't sign. Yeah. Yeah, this was a listener suggestion and blew up in the polls.

Thank you to Dacoupe Bear with support from Moe from Baloney, not Abalone, and others on the Discord. It's all a name. We have the CIF angle on sign language. This is why it's amazing in ways you wouldn't expect. It's mostly about the cultural role of it. This is probably a podcast episode for people who want to start knowing something about it. And our research sources are often written by people who sign or connected with people who sign. So your next step is further things like that if you want to know more. I want people to know more about sign language than they otherwise would with this episode. Yeah.

Yeah. So let's talk all about this and we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called... Numbers here, numbers here, get your numbers here. Stats for one, stats for one, numbers, numbers, numbers. That got me, that caught me off guard. I was not expecting to get peanuts. Numbers served to me by someone hawking numbers. Good, yeah, that was submitted by tomorrow salad

on the discord. They wanted it to sound like a hot dog vendor. Yeah. And I think I made it a little old timey, but it's fine, it's cool. No, you got it, you got it. That's a, you know, I honestly, I've been to baseball games somewhat recently

and I'm so impressed by the vendors. Because now they've got to carry around enormous trays full of various drinks that are things like of popsicles submerged in vodka and then on top of a cupcake. And then it's completely laden down and they carry it on their heads. And it's like, how is this not like the main event?

Baseball's boring to me compared to this. You want to know what the White Claw company is doing with NASA lately. Not this baseball game. And so we have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a Missillian Wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to sippot at gmail.com. And the first number this week is more than 90%. 90. More than 90%. That's a lot of the percentages because there's only 10% left, Alex, if my math is correct.

That is a broad estimate. It's not very specific, but we think more than 90% of deaf children and hard of hearing children have two parents who hear. They're born to two parents who hear well enough that they wouldn't necessarily use sign language. This gets into sort of the cultural issue, right, about being deaf. Works both ways, right? Like if you're deaf, you often have hearing parents. And if you are a deaf parent, you may also have a hearing child. Exactly. Yeah. Across a lot of sources this

week, I kept running into this idea that I just don't think about much, which is that the people's top of mind thing about sign language is, oh, it's for deaf people or something. And that's true, but also the distribution of deaf people or hard of hearing people in the population is really widespread. There's lots of people who are deaf or hard of hearing and have two hearing parents. There's also people we call the acronym CODA, which means a child of deaf adults. The child might be able to hear and the parents can't. And lots of other people have a loved one or a friend who is deaf. Lots of people just learn sign languages because they want to learn a language. And so

the population using sign language is much larger than the population that can't hear. Sign language is one of the main languages in the world, maybe the only one that is passed from child to child or peer to peer. And there will also be maybe a surprising use case for it in a person's life. And most other languages we are either taught by our parents in our community or we take a class for in school. You don't really go to school to learn how to speak English if you're a native English speaker and then you carry that over to any other sort of language, right? Yeah, yeah. if you're a native English speaker, and then you carry that over to any other sort of language, right?

You do go to school to learn how to write specific grammatical rules, to improve your vocabulary, understanding of grammar, how to speak better. But the basic learning is sort of, we're very, like a little bit of psychology stuff is that when we're young, we're incredibly primed to pick up, absorb language,

syntax, construction. And we will do it sometimes. If no one's there to teach us a language, we will come up with it on our own. That is how much that is a part of our nature. And so like when you're learning English, right, if you're a native English speaker, you pick it up from your parents, from your peers, from TV, from books. So like for sign language, if you're a child who is deaf, like in general, it should work the same way, right? Like you pick it up in the same way that one would pick up a spoken language. And I should have said that sign language is still passed from parents, like other languages. And yeah, there are videos online of babies trying to do what we consider babbling in sign language, because maybe they have an older relative who signs to them and then they just move their hands back in the same way that babies experiment with spoken sounds

to try to figure out what a language is. They'll also babble in sign language. Which is so cool because it shows you how, in a way predictable, but just these structures that we all have, right, which is that babbling stage that we have in sort of learning a language. Birds do it too, and they're learning bird song. They have kind of a babbling period where they're sort of learning how to make the sounds and put them together.

There's something about language that is sort of just transcends which specific way you are getting across these ideas. Like we have, yes, we do have the ability to vocalize, but we've also got hands. Very, very fine motor skills in our hands. And so it's just, I don't know, I just find that so cool that human beings can kind of like, it's like, all right, if one part's not operating as is typical, well, we've got other parts. Yeah. And we just love to communicate. And the natural next question with there's such a big

population of people signing and using sign language, the natural next question is how many? And there's not an exact answer to that. The most frustrating example to me is that the US Census in the United States does not track American Sign Language. It does a bunch of other questions and data about languages, but not American Sign Language or Sign Language. It seems like an extremely bad oversight. Yeah, and the next census isn't until 2030, so maybe we can add it, you know? But we didn't do it the last time. It's each 10 years.

I definitely have faith that we're going to do that with our new inclusive... Moving on. Anyway, there has been some surveying and research to try to estimate the amount of people using American Sign Language. And an estimate in 2023 guessed that 2.8% of American adults know or use a sign language, which is a pretty amazing number to me. 2.8% is a lot of people in the United States. Even if you don't think about it a lot, you surely know somebody or are around somebody who can use it because 2.8% is a lot of people. It's very common. Yeah, that's a huge number of people. people. Like it's very common. Yeah, that's a huge number of people. The next number here is five. And this is the main number we'll do about the details of signing something. Five is the number of parameters for each gesture in American Sign

Language. There are five parameters to make a sign and just changing one of them changes the meaning of it. Okay. Which is cool. And the source there is a book. It's called 1000 Signs of Life Basic ASL for Everyday Conversation. And that's from the team at Gallaudet University Press. We will talk about Gallaudet University a lot

on this episode. It was the first university created to hold its classes in an accessible way for deaf people. And it's still kind of the main one in the United States. All right, well don't keep me hanging. Tell me about what these five parameters are. Yeah, and I'll just list them quickly then we'll talk about them. The five parameters are hand shape, that's one, hand shape, and then location, movement,

palm orientation, and then a fifth category called non-manual signals, which is just all the other context basically. Oh, okay, okay. I see. So like the context in which the word is signed. Yeah. Yeah, like starting with hand shape, that's simply the shape that the whole hand is making. You basically just need to learn sign language to know the hand shapes.

The second parameter is location, which is where you're putting the sign on or near your body. And one big example of that parameter is the signs for mom and dad. The sign for mom is located at the chin, the sign for dad is located at the forehead, and otherwise, it's exactly the same sign. That's interesting. Cause moms, cause you know how moms are, they're always thinking with their chin

and dads are always thinking with their foreheads. Women be chinning, am I right? I don't know what that would even be. Women be chinning. Men have chins. But yeah, I mean, I think like, I don't know, I guess I don't know if this is a misconception. It was for me when I was a kid.

Maybe I was just kind of a dumb kid, but I thought that like with sign language, it was like, cause I'd always seen the posters of like sign language where it was like the letters of the alphabet. So I thought, man, that must be hard. Cause like I figured they were just like spelling out letters with the various sort of signs. But it's not, a lot of it is mostly like you have a sign that means a specific thing or means something. And then once it's in the context of other signs can mean something more complicated. That's all correct. Yeah. We'll talk about letter signs in a bit, but most of the time someone doing sign language is signing an entire word or concept with one sign. Yeah.

They aren't just like spelling entire sentences letter by letter most of the time. So the first two parameters, handshape and location. Then the next two are the movement and the palm orientation. I'm sort of lumping these together because I love that in sign language, each sign sort of has almost like a runtime. Something happens across a period of time as you do it. The movements can be everything from a shake to a tap to a slide, up and down, side to side, back and forth. And then there's four general palm orientations in ASL. There's inward, down, up, and outward. Just pretty simple. It's toward you, away from you, up and down. And also the palm orientation can change part way through a movement or at the

end of a movement. So there's all kinds of little variation and detail that you can do to make these signs different from each other. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense that you would need all of this complexity, right? I guess variables, right, to swap out so that you have the complexity of creating a full sentence with a syntax structure and grammar and everything. And that really fits the last parameter of non-manual signals. That's a broad category for body language, head position, facial expressions, and that really expands what your hands can sign.

This Gallaudet book says the biggest example is the ASL sign for understand and the ASL sign for don't understand. Because it's the same four parameters with your hands. The difference is what your face is doing. You just use facial expression to say I really understand or I really don't. I see. You know what? That's funny because there's a lot of things in Italian where, say you want to say you want to do this versus do you want to do this? There's no, like, do you want, like the, the do is not necessary. So it's either like,

you want to do this, you want to do this. And the, the, your, uh, the way that you're, you raise the question at the end of the sentence is the entire difference between whether you are making a statement like you want to do this versus do you want to do this. So yeah, very important. Yeah, like every spoken language is as complex as these sign languages. There's so many little variables and things you can change. Their entire words in Mandarin where the four different tones mean totally different words. It's so specific. And well, with also being

clear with it, the other number here is 37, because that's the approximate number of signs in the American manual alphabet, which is a component of ASL. It's 37 signs because it's 26 letters and then the numbers zero through 10. My sources conflicted a little on whether zero is part of the group, but in general, there's 37 signs for the basic letters and numbers of English. I would guess that it'd be safe for names

or for spelling specific nouns, or for spelling specific nouns or explaining how to spell something or maybe a word that's just kind of weird and archaic and doesn't have a common usage. That's right. Yeah, it's for all that. Especially people use it for addresses, phone numbers, data. And it's also for signers to piece together a word they haven't learned yet or piece together a new word that there's not a sign for yet. And also it just helps with translating between ASL and English because some things are not

precisely the same as concepts. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I definitely as a kid was like, man, that seems exhausting to have to like spell everything out. Although when you think about it, I guess it would be it should be equally exhausting to say everything out. Everything's just exhausting all the time. Anyways, continue Alex. Yeah, talking is difficult. Podcasters are heroes is my takeaway. We're heroes. We work so hard.

USA. USA, USA, USA. But yeah, and another number here is 2019, the year 2019. That's when Smithsonian Magazine covered news about a sign language translation device that has not proceeded to become popular here at the end of 2024. So it probably isn't going to be a big thing. But people are trying to build technologies that use computers or deep learning to easily translate sign language, and that tends to not work very well. It doesn't seem like that would work very well. I, yeah, that seems pretty hard to get that.

I don't wanna dump on the technology. Maybe it's really cool. It probably is very cool and very interesting how they make it, but that seems incredibly difficult. I think maybe we should just all learn sign language instead. I feel, despite not knowing sign language, I feel very stridently about this, that we

really just should all learn this. It seems like a really good thing to know and learn, and I'm sad I don't know it. This team and this 2019 story, it seems like they're trying to do a good thing, just the tech isn't there yet. In 2019, a team at Michigan State University built a device called Deep ASL, and the article has a picture that will link, the user wears a headset on the camera over their eyes. It records ASL signs and tries to use machine learning to translate entire sentences of

signs. And my take is that it hasn't worked because five years later, it's not really out or being used by anybody. And also in Smithsonian... I mean, part of it is because it looks really dorky, Alex. I think that's an important problem is that it looks dorky as heck. I don't think... That's the thing with all these things like Google Glass and the new Apple VR and this thing. It's like, guys, it can't look like you're scuba diving into the internet. That's just not going to be cool enough. People aren't going to do it.

Yeah. It looks like 15% geekier than a Google Glass, which is too geeky. So sorry. The other thing is this Smithsonian piece, they interview an expert from Gallaudet University, Christian Vogler, a professor of communication studies. And he just broadly criticizes all research into this kind of thing. He said that these devices struggle with the vocabulary and syntax differences between the different languages of English and ASL. between the different languages of English and ASL. He said no device had succeeded at it as of 2019. And he also said that the teams that usually staff these science and engineering projects

make quote, very little contact with the deaf and hard of hearing community Oh. and have very little idea of their real needs, end quote. Well, that's not good. Cause that seems like that'd be the first place you'd want to go. Yeah. And it's not to say these teams are evil or whatever, but it seems like there's just not a lot of deaf and hard of hearing people in the computer science and engineering and machine

learning fields that are trying to do this task. This might just be this Gallaudet guy's opinion, but it's probably true that they're just not connecting with that community enough in the process. They're focused on the tech. The difference between American Sign Language and American English, I would think goes beyond just like one is spoken and one you do with your hands.

Like there's a whole fundamental difference in the grammar, in the syntax. Yeah, ASL doesn't really have articles. Articles are words like a and the. When I see it written in a book, it's in all caps. They don't bother with upper and lowercase, which is a meaningful difference in written English. And there's just a lot of differences in how these things are phrased that I don't totally authentically know because I don't sign. But my research sources say that and I trust it.

Right. A headset that translates it wouldn't necessarily work versus like actually talking to someone who might be able to give a better explanation for how the translation works. Exactly. Yeah. Maybe that's a someday technology, but we don't have it. And if you want to understand sign language, you pretty much need to learn it.

That's the way. I have a vague recollection of reading an article about gloves, where it was supposed to be gloves that tracked your sign language and then translate it. I haven't heard anything about those since then, so I'm assuming those also didn't work. Yes, Smithsonian says that was the big tech idea

before this headset thing. Yeah, it also has not taken off. Yeah, I mean, the cool thing about the gloves though is that you can also use them to do little crimes. So if they don't work to translate sign language, then you can steal jewels with them and leave no prints. I'm a technological flip side here. The next number is three, because that's the number of common signs in American sign language for indicating a telephone. And it turns out that ASL and most sign languages are very good at keeping up

with technological and social change. And the source here is an amazing piece for the New York Times by Amanda Morris, who is a child of deaf adults. And she covers individual signs evolving as tech does. And the biggest example is telephones. Early on in ASL, the sign for a telephone was just imitating what we'd call a candlestick telephone. Like the really old kind where you hold one thing to just your ear and talk into the front of it. And then the second sign is a thumb and pinky outward like a handset telephone. And the third sign is a hand cupping a smartphone. Like they just adapt unlike other icons and symbols do. Yeah, that's interesting to me because like language, like we do have some,

we have like telephone, cell phone. I don't know what the other Alexander Graham Bell phone is called. He said candlestick phone. Yeah, they're in like black and white movies, if people have seen those. Yeah, obviously it's different for it being actually in a sentence in sign language because like these things are happening in motion. But when I'm observing it, there is a bit of intuitiveness to it where it's like, okay, yeah, I see like the difference, like the visual difference between these phones. When you say cell phone, doesn't really,

there's nothing intuitive about that. Like, what do you mean cell? A cell phone? Why is it cellular? Is it like a big cell? Is it like an amoeba that I speak into? Put me through to mitochondria. And then somebody, then an amoeba to switch forward

as moving stuff. Yeah, and so like ASL is, in a lot of ways, more adaptive than something like our graphic design icons, where we're still using a floppy disk for save, but an ASL person would not keep signing a floppy disk or something. They would just move on to the latest version of whatever that symbol is or idea is. Yeah, that is interesting.

So do we know why it is more like sort of updates more with new technology? Is there a specific reason for that or just that seems to be the trend? It seems to mainly be the, especially with any signs that relate to things we do with our hands, it's just very natural. Oh yeah. That makes so much sense. Yeah. Like why would you keep imitating a candlestick telephone if in your life you have an iPhone? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Like because yeah, like the jarring difference between that is going to be so much more clear when you're

holding something in front of you and then another thing and it's like, what am I doing? It's just this, my hand next to my head. Right, yeah. And then another wonderful thing here is this New York Times article interviews Emily Shaw, who studies the evolution of ASL at Gallaudet University. Like I said, Gallaudet's going to come up a lot. And Shaw says that ASL is thriving and easily adapting to technologies like Skype, Zoom, Apple FaceTime, like the last decade or so of lots of video communication, not just because

of COVID. It's going great for ASL. It's connecting people with it more than ever before. The last decade or so of lots of video communication, not just because of COVID. It's going great for ASL. It's connecting people with it more than ever before. And also signs are changing a little bit to match that medium. Oh, that makes sense. There are a few signs that we've redone. And the biggest example is dog.

Dog pretty much has a new sign now with younger generations. Okay. Okay. Tell me. And we'll let Cookie know. She needs to know. The old sign for dog, which worked perfectly fine, was patting the side of your thigh. Oh, that's not going to show up on Zoom. And because our thigh isn't in the Zoom window, there's a new sign which is the manual alphabet individual letter signs for DGDG. And that sort of spells dog and it also sort of looks like snapping your fingers to get

a dog's attention. Oh, cute. And it happens up by your head, you know? Oh, I love that. So we updated dog easily to fit this new communication medium. That was going to be a question I had about Zoom because it seems like there would be signs that maybe use more of the space, right? Use more space in front of you.

So also just like, I don't know, it seems like some of it like requires a certain amount of like depth perception. So that is really interesting to me that like signs may update for like video and I love that. I love that evolution of language stuff in real time that we can see. Yeah, it's so neat. And then the other thing here with changes is that a lot of ASL speakers are updating signs for like cultural or social reasons. Like they say these signs fit an old framework for how we think about that concept and I want to update it. Oh, okay. And one of the key examples is both of the signs for father and mother. Oh, do moms not think from their chin anymore?

Like are we getting rid of the chin thing for moms? So we kept both of those where the father sign is on your forehead, the mother sign is on your chin, and then we've created a new sign that's between them in the middle of the face, all the same parameters but just in the middle of the face for a not specifically gendered parent. Oh, wow, nice. Yeah. And that opens up a lot of ways of talking about all of the ways people love each other or have a gender.

Like the mom and dad signs are still valuable. We just added this too. You know, it is so interesting where it's like there are spoken languages where there are more neutral terms for people in terms of like gender. And it makes so much sense to have that. It's really annoying. I think that we don't really have that in English. Because it's because like there's a lot like in addition to non-binary people, there's We don't really have that in English.

In addition to non-binary people, there's also just like, when you want to reference someone in general for whom you don't know their gender, then it'd be nice to just have that. You know? Yeah. The tragedy of the Midwest is that we use you guys for non-gendered groups of people, even though guys is so gendered. It's a thing that I've tried to get over and it's just stuck in my head.

I like y'all, but I feel like I'm appropriating Southern culture. But y'all is so good. I really like it. Y'all is strong. I think we should all be using it. Yeah, and I tend to use folks. Folks is a good one. Folks is a good one. But it is like, yeah, y'all are right, it's Southern, but very neutral.

Yeah. Y'all is, I just, I love it. It rolls off the tongue good. It sounds good and it feels good to say it. I'm also imagining a German bursting into the room like, yes, on Noot's agenda. Now you're respected. Three genders in our language. Got you. We were the best the whole time.

We have historically been the most accepting of six languages. Don't look at our history. Don't look at that. I'm German. I can do this joke. Now, ASL is very adaptive and able to thrive with lots of changes like this. And same with most sign languages. And the other reason it can change so easily gets us into a big takeaway number one. There are many hundreds of sign languages worldwide for groups as big as continents

and as small as neighborhoods. Yeah, because we're talking mostly about American Sign Language, but obviously that's American Sign Language. There's other sign languages. There are, and almost all of them start in a very grassroots way. There have been organizations or schools that kind of help codify them, but ASL doesn't have just one iconic dictionary, and most of these happen in a kind of help codify them, but ASL doesn't have just one iconic dictionary and most of these happen in a kind of grassroots way that also leaves people feeling free to innovate and create new signs and change the way we do signs because it's a community thing. I would imagine that a lot of it involves sort of meeting other people in the community. And so that sort of collective interest in the language, it seems like that would be a really fertile ground for innovating things.

Exactly. Yeah. They get to decide it amongst themselves. And that's cool. And in practical ways, it's very lived experience kind of stuff. Yeah. And there are at least a few hundred sign languages that we've defined in the world. And we'll talk about the origin of American sign language later. But there are other cultures or large countries like France and China that have their own national sign languages. They pretty much all grow from a significant population of deaf people being around each other and wanting to communicate and just inventing it day to day. That also means that specific areas can have specific versions of a sign language. And one interesting modern one is in Philadelphia in the United States.

Smithsonian Magazine, a piece by Maris Fessenden, she covers the decline of the Philly accent in American Sign Language. Whoa, the Philly accent. Man, I love that. Of course, I mean, that totally makes sense. Of course, sign language would have accents because there's all sorts of things your hands can do. There's all sorts of things your voice can do.

It's going to have an accent. Yes. And it's fun that in parallel, there's a super specific Philadelphia accent and spoken English that I'll just link clips of. I can't do it. Something's happening in Philly. The thing happening in Philly is that activists started one school for the deaf in Philly in 1820 that became the main origin of anybody using American Sign Language in Philadelphia. And the specific way that school taught it became its own accent, different from other ASL.

And according to UPenn linguistics lecturer, Jamie Fisher, a lot of Philly ASL would not be comprehensible outside of Philadelphia. There are some signs and moves that are not in the rest of it. It's kind of like going from Turin to Naples and trying to understand people from Naples. It's very difficult. Yeah, it's all Elena Ferrante stuff down there. Who knows? Can't figure it out. It's just the accent. The accent and the way that like a lot of vowels are dropped is very hard to understand even for Italians. And then another thing here is globalization.

There's a lot of places where a small community or country developed a local sign language and then a larger group sign language influenced it. And one big example is that American sign Language has spread across a lot of North America, but it's also met with existing ones in places. So apparently prior to the 1960s, people learned what's now called Old Costa Rican Sign Language in the country of Costa Rica and in that area. And then since the 60s, younger Costa Ricans have used sort of a merging between American Sign Language and old Costa Rican Sign Language.

I wonder how that merging manifests, right? Like how, whether you're incorporating like just the new signs or if the old signs are sort of shifting a little bit or changing a little bit to be more similar to the ASL signs. I bet that's so fascinating for linguists. Yeah, apparently it's a patchwork, not just because I don't know either of those sign languages. It's truly on an individual basis, family to family, house to house. People do one or the other above. Wow. That's so interesting. And then a separate example here is Nicaraguan sign language. Right? Because Nicaragua is sort of similar to Costa Rica, right? It's a small country in Central America. But Nicaragua has a different political and diplomatic history regarding the United States.

Yeah. What do we do down there, Alex? Surely nothing sinister. So in the 1930s, the United States propped up a dictatorship in Nicaragua. What? No! Yeah. The Somoza family became a dictatorship ruling it. And this slowed down the adoption of American Sign Language, even though the government was close to the United States, because this dictatorship basically spent nothing on education, to the point that a lot of the population was illiterate as recently as the 1970s. And so everybody, including deaf people, didn't learn enough language and writing and so on. So then, 1979, this dictator family gets overthrown by a revolutionary socialist movement called the Sandinistas.

And the Sandinistas begin a national campaign to end illiteracy, complete with badges and flags of we have crushed illiteracy in this town kind of thing. What did that look like? Was it like a fist punching illiteracy in this town kind of thing. What did that look like? Was it like a fist punching illiteracy? It's destroying the opposite of a book somehow. I don't know how that works. Yeah. It's like a fist punching a book that's evil because it doesn't have words in it.

And so as part of that, not only do the Sandininistas set up many, many schools, they set up one central school for deaf children. But the thing is, the Sandinistas had a hostile relationship to the United States for reasons that make sense. Yeah. And so, the deaf Nicaraguan children do not learn American Sign Language, and they coin their own Nicaraguan Sign Language. Because not only are they finally being educated, but they're suddenly all in one place and

they just start coining sign language to talk to each other. Which is something that happens and has happened throughout history. Especially with young people like children, when you get a group of deaf children together, they will start spontaneously creating sign language, which is, I mean, it's really incredible, right? It really shows how powerful the human need for communication is. Absolutely. Yeah. And a whole nother example that happened within the United States is what's called Martha's Vineyard Sign Language.

Yay, the story. Storytime teller. And I think you know some of it. Yeah, this is... I do, but I like it being told to me. I've got, because I get to munch on popcorn. I'm not, because it's bad podcasting, but I'm thinking about the flavor of popcorn right now. Because I love this story. It's very cool to me. I'm gonna fully annoy you if you're making cocktails and slicing turkey.

Yeah, so Martha's Vineyard. This isn't the Bill Maher podcast, Alex. I'm not gonna clink glasses around. I love his forced casualness on Club Random. He's the most angry man in the world. He's trying to act like he ever chills out. Let me cut you off right there, Alex, to pour some ice into this glass noisily. Folks, you don't need to know what we're talking about.

In fact, it's better that you don't. Yeah, avoid it. Stay on Martha's Vineyard. Avoid it. It's not good. This is good. Martha's Vineyard. Let's talk about it. Today, Martha's Vineyard is probably it. It's not good. This is good. Martha's Vineyard, let's talk about it. Today, Martha's Vineyard is probably well known as a lovely vacation spot.

It's an island near Cape Cod in Massachusetts. But in the 1800s and earlier, it was relatively remote and isolated and difficult to live on. It was swampy. It had a lot of rocks around it. And so there was a population there that was relatively cut off from the rest of the United States. And in just one portion of Martha's Vineyard, which is less than 100 square miles, it's not a big island, but if you subdivide Martha's Vineyard, if you look at

just a place called Squibnocket, and in an area called Chillmark? Yeah. Squibnocket. Like, the group of people there had a relatively strong genetic predisposition toward deafness. Oh, that's interesting, yeah. Apparently in the 1850s, one out of every 25 people in Squibnocket was deaf. Oh, wow. That's very high. It's more like one out of several thousand in the rest of the population. I'm not necessarily going to say genetic bottleneck because I don't know if that's true, but especially if you have an isolated population of people that can happen where certain genes become

more present because your population is small. It's more likely that a recessive gene is going to get doubled up and passed on. It does seem like there was at least some genetic bottlenecking too, yeah. Because a lot of these folks on Martha's Vineyard came from the English county of Kent in the 1600s. And then there was not a lot of further migration. And so yeah, that's part of why this was sustained. And you know, one out of 25 people being deaf, that means most people had a deaf loved

one or even just a deaf person they needed to do business with or get to know. And so that tiny community developed what we now call MVSL, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language. And apparently it's most linguistically similar to British Sign Language because of those colonists from Kent and because they were separate from the United States, even though they're in the United States. And we also think there might've been a little influence from Wampanoag native people. There was a community of them near Squibnock at Unmarthas Vineyard.

So it's a totally unique scene and this tiny community made an entire sign language too. You don't have to be the size of the United States to do it. No, I mean, I'm struggling to remember the specific location of this, but I've also read about cases where you have like just specific schools of children like for the deaf where they spontaneously like kids come up with it. It's not going to be as complex as say like American Sign Language or the Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, but they'll come up with something because like that is what we crave as people is communication. Totally. And the last other super specific example here is people who, at least when

they start their job, have their hearing. The other example is some industrial workers. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Have you seen the movie The Sound of Metal? No, I haven't seen it. I've seen it. It's about, I mean, this is not about industry, but it's a drummer in a heavy metal band and he loses his hearing. And so as an adult, he has to adjust to being very hard of hearing to being completely deaf. That makes sense. Yeah. And I figure some of these people authentically lost their hearing eventually because in old timey times, a lot of facilities, we didn't like protect people's hearing.

Yeah. Apparently for a long time, linguists were aware that the crews of facilities like sawmills had hand signs for the work of sawing wood and basic stuff like that. But recently they've discovered that a few of these facilities and industries developed alternate sign language, as they call it, more than just for the work. In the 1970s, a team of linguists went to sawmills in Western Canada and discovered the workers saying things like, you crazy old farmer, you're full of crap. And they said that the foreman was, quote, f***ing around over there.

They could talk about sports, alcohol, marriages, children, cars, women's breasts. Wait, so was this, they were not, correct me if I'm wrong, but they were not deaf. This was because they were trying to communicate over the sound of the saw milling. It was not that they were permanently deaf. Exactly. They were just in a workspace where it was too loud and it's boring if you can't talk all day. And they also wanted to sneak stuff past their bosses.

Right. I really wonder what the sign language is for that woman has nice breasts. I bet it's unexpected. I bet it's just cartoonishly obvious. Everyone knows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just holding a pair of melons. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, even such a tiny community as a company, right? You might not work there your whole life, you still bother to learn an entire sign language for joking with your buddies on the job. It's really cool. It's so important. We have an incredibly rich set of sign languages all over the world. And folks that was a ton of numbers and a big takeaway about them, we're going to take a quick break then return with a couple more takeaways about ASL.

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Maxfunstore.com, go get something special or kinda dumb. We've got it all. And we're back and we're back with take away number two. American Sign Language originated in France. France! France? Gosh, darn it, we're going to have to call it freedom language now. Yeah, Sacrebleu. Yeah, it turns out the most common sign language in the United States has extensive roots in

French Sign Language and in deaf educators and communities in Paris. How did that happen? Was there like a bunch of French people who had immigrated to the US and taught a sign language? It's because one guy from America met the amazing people behind a Paris institution. Ah, okay. And said, oh, we should just do this.

Oh my God, are you really sure? But yeah. Yet another thing we've stolen from France, like their fries, their big green lady, and the concept of menage à trois. Freedom threesome? Yeah. A threesome.

Yeah. So, key sources here are digital resources from Gallaudet University and also a wonderful book. It's called Seeing Voices. It's by Oliver Sacks, an iconic neurologist and more. Oh yeah. Good ol' Oliver Sacks. So American Sign Language, most of it starts at a school in Connecticut in 1817. But that school got most of its personnel and philosophy from France. It was basically coming from one American and three French people. Did they solve the problem that Connecticut is spelled bad and it's spelled like Connecticut?

Did they like say like, let's change this because we don't need that kind of BS in our new nice language. It just like turns out that the ASL sign for Connecticut makes way more sense. Like, oh, that's really good. It probably does, honestly. It probably does. It's a pantomime of a nutmeg. I'm like, thank you. Yes.

Pantomime of a nutmeg? That's the nutmeg state, yeah. They love nutmeg. Not everybody knows that. Anyway, it's a very stupid fact. The Nutmeg state, of course. Yes. So the one American here, his name is Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. And his son goes on to found Gallaudet University. So that family is really the leading family of educating

deaf people in America. Were they themselves deaf or this was just an interest in terms of being language teachers? So it was like a charitable interest, yeah. Thomas Gallaudet's goal was to be a minister in Connecticut and his son also hears. But Thomas had a neighbor with a deaf daughter. And so while Thomas Gallaudet is just doing good works as a minister, he spends some of his spare time teaching this daughter some basic words for concepts. He does it by drawing pictures in the dirt with a stick.

Because that was more than the existing deaf education apparatus of nothing. So he did that. Yeah. That's, it's wild to me though that it took us even that long, right? Like to actually start to codify sign language. Because what did we do? Kind of nothing. What would we do before then? That's so weird though. Yeah, like community. It's just the thing we described of kids or deaf adults would

try to like come up with some signs for each other. I see. And you know, if you had a deaf person in your family, you'd try to make it work. That was basically the system. Yeah, I guess we do have a long history of being like, if you're different, sorry, we're not going to try. And we had less systems and support for like everything. So that included deaf people.

Yeah. Yeah. And so Thomas Gallaudet does this. And his neighbor, who's the father of this deaf daughter, is very impressed. His neighbor is also very wealthy and says, I'm sending you to Britain. I'm paying for the whole thing. There might be new principles in deaf education there.

I read something about it in like a letter or something. So go to Britain. Find out. Right. Right. And he went there. And then they're just trying to get him to eat jellied eels and like figgy pudding. And he's like, all right, screw this. I'm going to France. Is that what happened? Almost. So in the bonus show this week,

we'll talk about the conflicts between manualism and oralism. But it's super short version. Whoa, those are two words that I don't know. Teach me. Super short version. Manualism is sign language as a central way for deaf people to communicate. Oralism is what these British people were doing when Thomas Gallaudet visited. It's a thing of saying, hey, deaf kids, you need to get amazing at reading lips. You need to like through trial and error

and a person coaching you generate verbal speech. Like you need to learn what that feels like in your body and make an approximation of it. Basically like deafness is something you just need to fit into the existing hearing society. Yeah, but like, because there's a big problem with that, which is the mouth not as good as making shapes as hands. Hands, very good at making shapes. A lot of shapes you can make with hands. Like check this out, weee. I made a little way for Alex to see.

Mouth can't do that. Mouth can't. Reading lips seems very difficult to me in terms of like actually being able to fluidly do a language with that and then let alone sort of like forcing sound out. It's just that's not an intuitive, that doesn't give you the flexibility that you need to like learn language in the intuitive way that people can learn language. I mean, I don't know.

I've never tried it. I've never tried to read lips, so I wouldn't know. But that's what it seems like to me. Yeah, it doesn't have like five different parameters like ASL. It's just not as fitting with how they work as deaf people. You can't change the angle of, you can't like change the rotation of your mouth. I've tried. I had to go to the hospital. Yeah, Katie's in a big brace right now as we take-

A mouth brace. ... flowers. Yeah. So luckily, while he's in Britain, in particular Scotland, seeing this, Gallaudet says, I really don't think this works. And then he happens to meet a French guy and then two other French guys who work with him. But he just said, hello, I'm very French and I could have noticed you too, look down upon the British. A little bit, I guess. Yeah. So the leader of this is a clergyman who can hear, he's a Catholic abbot named Sikhar, S-I-C-A-R-D. And Abbe

Sikhar is the head of a royal institution for the deaf in Paris. And both Gallaudet and Sikhar's stories, they point to kind clergy people being some of the origin of deaf education just because they're trying to do good works all over the place, you know, in all sorts of ways. So they're not really trained in this, but they just try. And Sikhar was doing a pretty good job of running, not just a school for the deaf in Paris, but also a community where the kids could come up with sign language amongst each other and use and learn that. It was a manualist school. It was a sign language oriented school. And they came up with what we now call French Sign Language. That's a sign language to this day.

Okay. And like, is, so French Sign Language is still in use. Is it pretty similar still to American Sign Language? I don't really know about my sources say American Sign Language borrowed a lot from it. I see, okay. And apparently also one of the big differences is British sign language tends to be both hands for most of the signs. And American and French, you can use just one hand for a lot of the signs.

And also it's not a parameter which hand you're using. People just use their dominant hand. That's not part of the message. I see. That seems useful because then you can use one hand to like do stuff like pet a dog while also talking to that dog. Eat chips. Yeah.

Yeah. Talking eat chips. I was just thinking of our two favorite things. Pet dog eat chips. That's all I want to do. I have a hand for each. Pretty much. There's definitely been a day this week where all I could do was eat chips, pet dog.

I did that with cats, yeah. So, yeah, so French sign language, like Sikhar, basically through kindness and some basic intelligence is able to run this well. And he inspires two of his students to become some of the first deaf people who become deaf educators. Their names were Laurent Claire and Jean-Monsieur. Claire lost his hearing as a child due to injuries and a fire. Monsieur was born deaf. He was one of five deaf children in a family of eight kids. So just their genes are very prone to

it. Both their lives were totally changed by this school. In particular, we think Jean-Monsieur lacked any language at all until he was almost 14 years old and got to go to this school. In particular, we think Jean Messier lacked any language at all until he was almost 14 years old and got to go to this school. And suddenly he could speak at all by signing. Wow. That must be so wild to go through, right? Because most of us can't remember the like before times when we didn't have a language. And I'm sure like probably if you're 14 years old, you come up with sort of something for your own self, right? Like you must come up with sort of some version

of a language for yourself, but to not have a way to communicate fully with the outside world that must be so interesting to like be that old and then like go through the learning process of now you have acquired a language. And then how weird it would be to go from the old way of thinking, right? Because most of us, when we have a language, we kind of think in that language a bit. Right, right.

If he learns it at 14, he probably goes from thinking in the way that he learned on his own to think to now starting to think in this language. That's got to be wild to go through. Exactly. Yeah. It's part of why both Claire and Misto said we're dedicating our lives to educating the deaf.

We know how massive this change feels because we were old enough to be forming solid memories and everyone should get this gift. Yeah. That's very cool. That's incredibly cool. Yeah. And so, so Gallaudet just talks to Abbé Cicard and says, oh, that's probably the way to do it. Drops everything, goes to Paris and spends several months just learning how they do it. And then he says, I'm going back to Connecticut. I'm setting up this exact kind of school. And he also lobbies these guys to come do it with him. And Sikhar stays in Paris, Massieu founds other deaf schools in France, in particular the city of Lille. But Laurent Claire agrees to go with him. Initially the promise is I'll only come for a short time and then Claire stays the rest of his life. They co-found this school in Hartford, Connecticut called the American Asylum for the Deaf in 1817. Claire founds that Philadelphia

school where we get the Philly accents. They both found all sorts of copies of this Paris school doing what we now call American Sign Language that's sort of a copy of French Sign Language. language that's sort of a copy of French sign language. Also that term, the word asylum, I think it's important to note that like asylum just means refuge. This was not like a asylum in the sense that I think we think about it today. It's like how people- It's a positive meaning. Like political asylum. It's a positive meaning. Yeah. And I mean, like today we also use it for people, refugees seeking asylum, right? Like it's the same, that's the same meaning. Yeah. And I mean, like today we also use it for people, refugees seeking

asylum, right? Like it's the same, that's the same meaning. Yeah. No one, no one had like heard of a mental asylum doing anything bad in 1817. So the word was only good. Yeah. It was like this great. Yeah. And so I just find that amazing too with the, like the evolution of sign languages. I think people sort of assume every sign language just comes from the spoken language of that place, but the spoken language in the US comes from England and the sign language in the US comes from Americans and French people. It's a combination of French ideas and some American original signs. So I do have a question, which is I assume people who use sign language probably learn

the written version of English, right? Like if you're in the US. That must be pretty interesting to kind of like, because it's not like sign language and written English are just two sides of the same coin. It's a completely different language. So you're learning two languages if you grow up learning sign language and then also written English. Yeah, you're essentially bilingual. Yeah. Written direct translations of signs that I've seen are just a set of all caps words.

Like the Gallaudet book talks about the signs for asking someone if they're married. And they wrote down a few different sign versions of you married, married you, and you married you, which all have different connotations. Like either you're heading on someone or just inquisitive, you know? But so yeah, it's not a direct one-to-one. People who use sign language are pretty much always bilingual in a written language. Probably if I tried to learn sign language, I'm going to be accidentally asking a lot

of people to marry me. Like a lot like, you marry me? Marry me. Would you marry me? Marry me. Yes, accidentally, wink, wink, wink, trying to marry everyone, dude. It's great. Not starting a polygamous cult over here.

And we have one more quick takeaway for the main episode because takeaway number three, sign language users at the main deaf university invented sports huddles. Ooh. Yeah, the Scaladet University. Right. That makes sense. You're in the huddle and you got to keep your voices real quiet because the other team's going to do stuff in the steel yard.

Your cool baseball ideas. And so you got to sign stuff and be, you know, be all secret about it. I don't know. Baseball. Yeah, like the football team, American football at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, changed all of sports. And they invented the huddle before a lot of the basic components of American football were even invented. Interesting. So they huddled because like, it was a way to be able to sign with each other without the other

team noticing? Yes, and in a very specific way. Key sources here, along with all the previous books, are sports coverage from the Associated Press and the NCAA. Gallaudet University, they were founded in 1864, and they formed an American football team in 1883, which is very early in the history of that sport. That was decades before the forward pass was part of the game. It was back when it was kind of like rugby, and it was shortly after the first Harvard-Yale football game. Gallaudet's players

could usually just use sign language with each other openly. To this day, most of their opponents are teams of primarily hearing people, like their main rivals, a Catholic college in DC that's not oriented to the deaf at all. And so Gallaudet's football team, the players would just sign to each other because it was essentially secret code. Like the hearing team didn't know what the plays are that they're sharing with each other. And then one day in 1894, Gallaudet plays against another team of deaf players. Uh-oh. And suddenly they don't have a secret code anymore for sports. Yeah. And American football is very oriented to constantly telling each other new plays. That's most of what's happening. That's why it feels like there's a lot of big pauses. On the spot,

Gallaudet quarterback Paul Hubbard thinks we need to keep our signs secret. He tells his teammates on offense, gather around me in a tight low circle and I'll sign you the plays. A nice secret circle. Yeah, and we just feel like huddles have been part of American football forever. This was actually the first one. Players just did not do that yet in 1894. And then players who could hear copied this from the Gallaudet team.

Because a primary challenge is just secretly communicating plays in general in American football Like they use codes when they're audibling verbally and there's a lot of like hiding your mouth with a playbook or something Yeah, and so everybody borrowed this Gallaudet idea of huddling Throw the ball. What? Throw the ball to me. What? Throw the ball to me! We want to win. And Gallaudet remains an important football team in the history of the entire sport. And also players do other little huddles in other sports just because they like to. It's handy. Just to like cuddle a little bit.

I feel like that's a nice thing in sports sports like in baseball when they're huddling. I bet half the time they're just like, hey Jeremy, how's it going? What you doing? How you doing? It's just nice to have human contact, you know? Yeah. That's the pro-scape interview. Oh boy. ESPN sad. Okay. And yeah, and Gallaudet, by the way, their team mascot is the Bison. Awesome. But the Gallaudet Bison, they're still a team in Division 3 college football.

They won conference championships in 2022 and 2023. And their other recent innovation is using drums instead of whistles. So players feel the vibration instead of listening for a whistle. Because you want to know when the play ended and not keep tackling people. Yeah. I wonder if like, but then it's kind of like, then you can sort of plead like plausible deniability and keep tackling someone.

It's like, what? I didn't know. I didn't hear any whistle. Tackle, tackle. Yeah. Just late hit city. Yeah. That's why they win the best net. But yeah. And so like not only is this an innovative football team for the sport, it's also become an icon of, you know, there's all sorts of ways that people who are differently abled express that they're still fully part of society.

Like we have an entire Paralympics and stuff, right? And so this is sort of the leader in American football for that. Which I honestly feel like the Paralympics kicks a lot of a** in, maybe I'm not supposed to say a**, but it's like, I don't want to like do an Olympics, Olympics. I think they both kick a lot of butt, but man, Paralympics is really, really cool. Right when we did our London show, you and Brett, like got me and Brenda onto that wheelchair basketball that was going on in the Paralympics and we watched the men's gold medal game. It was amazing. Oh man. It is so cool. It's so violent too. They're knocking each other over and stuff. It's awesome. It's great to see folks. We love our blood sports, our inclusive blood sports.

USA, yeah. USA, USA, USA! Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as self remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, there are many hundreds of sign languages worldwide for groups as big as continents and as small as neighborhoods. Takeaway number two, American sign language

originated in France. Takeaway number three, American Sign Language originated in France. Takeaway number three, sign language users at the main deaf university invented sports huddles. That's Gallaudet University, go Bison. And then so many stats and numbers about the parameters of American Sign Language, the diversity of world sign languages, the number of people who can hear and still use sign language, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at

maximumfun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is Alexander Graham Bell and the War Against Sign Language. Visit sifpod.fund for that bonus show, for a library of more than 18 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include a lot of books, such the reference guide 1000 signs of life basic ASL

for everyday conversation that's from the team at Gallaudet University Press, a history book called Forbidden Signs American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language that's by Douglas C. Bainton professor of history at the University of Iowa and an ASL teacher and then lots of journalism from people who have deaf people in their lives or spoke to deaf experts. Especially a piece for Folklife magazine by Caroline Cassinelli. Folklife is a publication of the Smithsonian. And an amazing piece with lots of visuals for the New York Times that's by Amanda Morris,

who is a child of deaf adults. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Also Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here.

That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIFT Discord where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 112 that's about the topic of drive-throughs.

Fun fact, the first ever McDonald's drive-through was designed to accommodate a military base and a red light district. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Goldin weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken, Un-Shavin' by the BUDOS band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode.

Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows, supported directly by you.