• From Curiosity to Collaboration—Linguistic Explorations of Sign Language in Belgium
• Filip Loncke (bio)

In 1973, Bernard Tervoort of the University of Amsterdam published an article in the journal Semiotica with the title "Could There Be a Human Sign Language?" The question that Tervoort had asked in this article must be seen against a theoretical and almost philosophical discussion. Only a decade earlier, in 1960, Charles Hockett, an influential and widely respected linguist, had pointed to the use of the vocal-auditory channel as the most obviously defining design feature of what languages are. However, that same year, 1960, saw the publication of an initially hardly noticed booklet "Sign Language Structure" by Stokoe. And the 1960s was also the decade in which linguists adopted theories and views that suggested that the acquisition of a language might rely on an inborn biological tendency shared by all humans. Interest in sign language and sign language research emerged as a natural byproduct.

Of course, I didn't know any of that when I started my first job in 1973. I had graduated with a bachelor's degree in educational [End Page 344]

Bernard Tervoort. Photo courtesy of lingoblog.dk.

psychology from the University of Ghent in Belgium. I was hired to work as a coordinator of teaching and other educational staff in a school for children and adolescents with special needs, including about one hundred deaf students between six and sixteen years old. On my first day, the director of the school was going to give me a tour and explain how things were organized. When I arrived at his office to start the tour, I found him in a (in my eyes, very fluent) signing conversation with one of the deaf students. Once we started our tour, he explained the pedagogy that was followed in the school, including a statement that sign language was not used because it interfered with the educational goals, the ability to speak being a primary one.

This all felt very confusing to me. I did not know anything about deafness or deaf education, let alone of the existence of a deaf [End Page 345] community. I started to ask and read left and right and was, at the same time, amazed to find almost entirely disconnected circuits of thinking with, on the one hand, a growing fascination of language in the visual modality and, on the other hand, a total lack of interest or curiosity on how these new findings should be urging a rethinking of old ideas and educational practices.

Was sign language a language or not, and if it was, what does this mean? I listened to what educators told me and what I could find in the literature, which was initially not too much.

I found Tervoort's 1953 doctoral dissertation in the school's library—it consisted of two volumes in Dutch, which would be reedited and translated into English in 1975 as Developmental Features of Visual Communication. A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Deaf Children's Growth in Communicative Competence. Interestingly, Tervoort shied away from describing the communication he had observed in schools for the deaf as sign language but used the more prudent term esoteric communication. It appears to me that the choice of that term at that moment might be indicative of his uncertainty of the linguistic status of this form of communication. However, the study ends with an appeal to take this observed communication seriously and to recognize its value and, implicitly, its usefulness in educational settings.

Out of the blue, in 1975, an uncle of mine (whom I had only met once when I was ten), a sinologist at the University of Washington, sent me a photocopy of Nancy Frishberg's 1974 article on historical changes in ASL, which had been published in Language. Clearly, if a prestigious journal such as Language publishes sign language research articles, one takes notice. Sign language research and linguistics are important: it was worth pursuing this a bit more.

In the meantime, while I was at my job, I started a master's program in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics at the University of Brussels. I...

• 从好奇到合作——比利时手语的语言探索
• 菲利普·朗克 (简介)

1973年，阿姆斯特丹大学的伯纳德·特沃特在《Semotica》杂志上发表了一篇文章，题为“人类手语存在吗？” 特沃特在本文中提出的问题必须通过理论和近乎哲学的讨论来看待。就在十年前，即 1960 年，查尔斯·霍克特 (Charles Hockett)，一位颇具影响力且广受尊敬的语言学家，曾指出声音听觉通道的使用是语言最明显的设计特征。然而，同年，即 1960 年，斯托科出版了一本最初几乎没有引起人们注意的小册子《手语结构》。20 世纪 60 年代也是语言学家采用的理论和观点认为语言的习得可能依赖于全人类共有的先天生物倾向的十年。对手语和手语研究的兴趣是自然而然的副产品。

当然，当我1973年开始第一份工作时，我根本不知道这些。我毕业时获得了教育学学士学位[完第344页]

伯纳德·特沃特. 照片由 lingoblog.dk 提供。

比利时根特大学心理学专业。我被聘为一所为有特殊需要的儿童和青少年开设的学校，担任教学和其他教育人员的协调员，其中包括大约一百名六岁至十六岁的聋哑学生。第一天，学校主任要带我参观并解释事情的组织方式。当我到达他的办公室开始参观时，我发现他正在与一名聋哑学生进行手语对话（在我看来，非常流利）。我们开始参观后，他解释了学校遵循的教学法，包括声明不使用手语，因为它干扰了教育目标，而说话能力是首要目标。

这一切让我感到非常困惑。我对耳聋或聋人教育一无所知，更不知道聋人[完第345页]社区的存在。我开始左右询问和阅读，同时惊讶地发现思维回路几乎完全脱节，一方面，视觉形态中的语言越来越着迷，另一方面，对于这些新发现如何敦促人们重新思考旧观念和教育实践完全缺乏兴趣或好奇。

手语是否是一种语言？如果是，这意味着什么？我听取了教育工作者告诉我的内容以及我在文献中可以找到的内容，最初并不算太多。

我在学校图书馆找到了特沃特 1953 年的博士论文——它由两卷荷兰语组成，于 1975 年被重新编辑并翻译成英语，名为《视觉传达的发展特征》。聋哑儿童沟通能力成长的心理语言学分析。有趣的是，特沃特回避将他在聋人学校观察到的交流描述为手语，而是使用了更谨慎的术语“深奥交流”。在我看来，当时选择这个术语可能表明他对这种交流形式的语言地位的不确定性。然而，该研究最后呼吁认真对待这种观察到的交流，并认识到其价值及其在教育环境中的用处。

1975 年，我的一位华盛顿大学汉学家叔叔（我十岁时只见过他一次）出乎意料地给我寄来了南希·弗里施伯格 1974 年关于美国手语历史变迁的文章的复印件。已发表于语言. 显然，如果《语言》等著名期刊发表手语研究文章，就会引起人们的注意。手语研究和语言学很重要：值得进一步研究。

与此同时，在工作期间，我在布鲁塞尔大学开始了心理语言学和神经语言学硕士学位课程。我...