, who lost her sight and hearing to scarlet fever in eighteen-thirties New Hampshire, had signs for “father” and “spinning wheel” . But, without a wider community, home signs can’t grow into full languages. In 1837, the educator Samuel Gridley Howe recruited Bridgman to attend what would later be called Perkins, the first American school for the blind, in Massachusetts.
Nuccio had come to sign language late. As an adolescent, she attended a school in St. Louis that taught the oralist method, drilling Deaf students in gruelling exercises to learn how to read lips and produce speech. “The nuns said if you signed, you were stupid,” she said. “If you point at something in sign, you look like an animal.” She learned A.S.L.
Nuccio and granda called their method Protactile, and, within a few years, they were holding trainings. But, for the most part, the sight-reliant people were set in their ways. They often arrived, found a chair, and sat down, waiting for their interpreters. “I said, ‘If you need to know where anything is, you can ask a DeafBlind person,’ ” Nuccio said. She would take their hands, and together they’d touch the drinks and the snacks.
This past December, a half-dozen of Protactile’s most fluent speakers met up at the University of Chicago. They had come at the invitation of Terra Edwards, a linguistic anthropologist who is studying Protactile with her colleague Brentari, the sign-language linguist. By visual standards, the lab had a drab, provisional air: it was empty aside from a haphazard scattering of metal folding chairs and a table pushed against the wall.
Unlike with spoken language, which can be transcribed or taped, or visual sign language, which can be filmed, there is still no way to make a tactile recording. This means that the only way to communicate in Protactile is in person. At one point, graduate students demonstrated new devices that could send taps and presses from a distance—a kind of primitive haptic FaceTime.
In the absence of a shared language, people will create new ones. In the seventeenth century, French colonizers brought enslaved Africans to what would eventually be called. These Africans brought their languages—Igbo, Fongbe, Bantu, and many others—with them. As they communicated, their language converged, drawing from the varieties of French that were spoken on the island, and incorporating elements of West African grammars.
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