Sign Systems, Methodical

Signes méthodiques, that is, methodical signs, is the name Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Épée gave to the visuo-gestural means by which he taught his deaf pupils. It was a sign system that he himself distinguished clearly from the sign language used by the contemporary Parisian Deaf community. It is sometimes said that de l’Épée’s signing was nothing more than signed French; others would have it that, quite on the contrary, he was the inventor of French Sign Language. Although erroneous, both interpretations may stem from de l’Épée’s huge impact. He was the first historical person known to gather numerous deaf people at his house for schooling, an endeavor that later was to become the famous Paris School for the Deaf, which laid the basis for the first Deaf movement and which introduced signed communication to a wide and highly interested public. He broke down complex concepts as contained in French words, making them visible through signing that may, at times or to the eye of a novice, have resembled signed French.

The Abbé de l’Épée invented his teaching (the methodical signs included) between 1760 and 1771. As he tells us in his first book published in 1776, he happened to meet two deaf sisters who had just lost their teacher (Père Vanin, who died in 1760) and were bereft of instruction. The encounter motivated de l’Épée to conceive of a teaching method for the sisters and deaf people in general, and he based his nascent method on the principle of using, as he said, the window when the door is barred—that is, of using visual signs when audible signs cannot be perceived. He opened his house for as many deaf people as possible in order to instruct them, and to make this endeavor known widely, he started public demonstrations of the pupils’ abilities.The first such demonstration took place in 1771.

In the 18th century, French was considered a sophisticated language able to express technical terms as well as philosophical ideas in the most delicate way. De l’Épée felt an obligation to give deaf people access to this language, which also meant access to the knowledge confined therein. Therefore, he sought a device to bridge the gap between French as a foreign language to his pupils and their own language, which was sign language. He conceived of this process as a matter of translation, and the means to bridge the gap was his methodical signs.

Today, within bilingual education, sign language is considered the direct means to give pupils access to spoken/written languages. De l’Épée looked for an intermediate, or bridging, device in addition to the two distinct languages involved. He let himself be inspired by prominent philosophical concepts of his time that spelled out the relationship between the development of linguistic and cognitive capacities. So de l’Épée sought to analyze the complex and abstract concepts expressed by French words and make every single component visible through signs. He distinguished different classes of signs and considered not just the words but also their grammatical endings. Present, past, singular, or plural—they each counted for him as meaningful aspects to be visualized in signs. For a sign to be a suitable means for translation it had to be a “natural” sign, that is, a highly iconic sign allowing for immediate, or universal, understanding of the respective meaning component. As a result, de l’Épée translated French sentences into long sequences of signs, and it was exclusively in class that he did so. Although length in itself was not necessarily a problem of this signing—after all, the Deaf writer Pierre Desloges, in 1779, spoke in favor of de l’Épée´s signs, which were similar to sign sequences of the Deaf community of the time—it led to overlong [Page 869]sequences that in the end were simply confusing. For example, de l’Épée wrote, “I believe in God,” in French on the board and then performed each idea contained within this sentence through methodical signs, a procedure relying on definition instead of communicative statement. While French was visible on the board and the bridging methodical signs visibly in accord with the written sentence, the third part—that is, the pupils’ natural sign language—was not visible. The translation was presumed to be occurring spontaneously within each pupil’s mind, which turned out not to be the case. The pupils excelled with linking methodical signs to written language, but their overall intellectual development was not on a par with that of their peers and would instead have profited from using the third linguistic device involved, their natural sign language.

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