Gallaudet University founded (16-2-1857)
From
Ross Clark@21:1/5 to
All on Fri Feb 16 23:47:41 2024
Well, actually, what was founded on that date was the "Columbia
Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind", in Washington, D.C. Its first director was Edward Miner Gallaudet.
The institution struggled on, under various names, expanding its student numbers and its breadth of curriculum. In 1894 it was finally named
Gallaudet College (not University until 1986) -- not in honour of E.M.Gallaudet, but of his father, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who founded
the first American school for the deaf, in Hartford, Connecticut, in
1816. Gallaudet Sr. had travelled to France, observed the use of sign
language in the education of the deaf, and returned with a skilled
teacher, Laurent Clerc, who introduced these methods to the new school.
Which is why the closest relative of American Sign Language (ASL) is
Langue des Signes Française (LSF). ASL remains the working language of Gallaudet University.
William C.Stokoe, who joined the English department at Gallaudet in
1955, began to apply structural linguistic methods to the analysis of
ASL, and thus launched an entire field -- sign language studies -- which resulted in an awareness (among linguists at least) that signed
languages are structured, autonomous systems like spoken languages.
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