Through Deaf Eyes
a documentary on PBS
My friend, George, recommended I check out a documentary on PBS called Through Deaf Eyes. I recorded it on my DVR and I think I'll save it for awhile. It was excellent. Through Deaf Eyes is a 2-hour documentary that goes through the history of the deaf culture in America. A lot of the things they discuss I'd learned from my cousins, but it was neat to learn the details.
Two of my cousins are deaf and because of them I've learned sign language. I'm not fluent, but I can hold a conversation. They're very patient with me and correct me when I sign the wrong word, and teach me new ones when I come to a word that I don't know (and being the kind and loving cousin that she is, Elyse is always happy to laugh at me when I say the WAY wrong word... like for some reason I always mix up the sign for "kill" with something quite innocent, I forget what it is now... but she always snickers at me). I think that technically I know "Spoken English Sign Language", which means that I simply sign the words that I want to express, in the same order as I do when I speak them aloud. American Sign Language is a full language unto itself, with its own sentence structure that is different from English.
I absolutely love knowing Sign Language. I love being able to speak with my cousins, and I love getting a glimpse into the Deaf culture. I've taken French and Spanish in school, but I never got good enough to hold a conversation or really express myself. I'm always impressed by people who can. I really like that I can do it in Sign Language. Sometimes when I'm out at a loud bar, my hands will automatically start talking, even though the friends I'm talking to can't understand them. Its so much easier to talk in a loud environment in a language that doesn't depend on sound to communicate. You can talk with your mouth full. You can talk from across a room. You can talk in a noisy bar. How cool is that.
A couple interesting things you may not know about Sign Language:
- American Sign Language and British Sign Language use completely different signs. Although a person who speaks American Sign and British Sign can communicate by writing back and forth in English, they can't communicate through sign. (Check out the American Sign Language alphabet and the British Sign Language alphabet.
- American Sign Language was developed by Laurent Clerc a deaf Frenchman who came to the US to teach at the first School for the Deaf which was started by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. He combined his native French sign language with signs the US students were using. Check out how similar the French signed alphabet (LSF) is to the American alphabet.
I think one of my favorite parts about watching Through Deaf Eyes was reading the sign language. It was neat to just try to read what the people were saying and then using the spoken interpretation to correct myself or to pick up on the parts that I missed when they spoke it in sign language. I can practice signing on my own (signing along to songs on the radio, or practicing fingerspelling) but I can't really practice reading sign language without having someone to watch (and Elyse and Vicci both live a few hours away), so it was neat to be able to practice while I was watching the show. YouTube has made it easier for me to practice too, there's a deaf comedian named Keith Wann who's put some of his skits online (Deaf Technology ruined pizza night and You smell like farts). He's pretty funny, check him out.