Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles

by William C. Stokoe

Analysis of sign language, in descriptive rather than photographic sence. Some illustrations included.

Genres: Language

346 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Jason Pettus · Rating 4 out of 5]

As friends know, here at the age of 50 I've started learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time, and am doing a deep dive into the politics and culture of the Deaf community with a capital "D," as a way of compensating for my ever-decreasing hearing and hopefully opening a new avenue for my shrinking social life. (See my review of A Deaf Adult Speaks Out for a long explanation of what exactly "Deaf culture" is, and why it's so important to learn about before getting involved with the community.) Believe it or not, no one had ever done an academic study of ASL as a legitimate language until William Stokoe took on the challenge in the mid-1960s, as basically a "fun" side project away from his main job as an English literature professor at Gallaudet University; and even more amazingly, when his first book on the subject was published, the obscure 1965 academic tome A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles, it was largely greeted with derision and hostility from the Deaf community, who weren't used to their insular, intimate form of communication being dissected in this manner, with it not being until an entire decade later that it was generally accepted that this academic legitimization of ASL had done more good than harm, and not until 15 years after that that the Supreme Court agreed, and ruled that the US government must recognize ASL as a legitimate language with full legal rights for its speakers.

I wanted to read this first-ever ASL dictionary just to say that I had, just to see this Rosetta stone from which all other ASL dictionaries have come; but I have to confess, it's not really a book that would do a modern signer much good, and the way it presents its information has largely been abandoned by the study guides that have come in the half-century afterwards. And that's because Stokoe as a linguist was interested in presenting ASL in terms of its most basic building blocks (what linguists call a language's "phonemes"), and basically made up his own obtuse terminology and resulting scientific notation in order to express these phonemes on paper; he calls the position on the body of each sign the tabula or tab, the shape the hand makes as the designator or dez, and the movement it makes as the signation or sig. Thus, every sign in existence can be expressed by the formula [dez+tab*sig], or DTs for short, but which is sometimes expressed with two "s"s next to each other (if two movements are performed one after another to form the sign), and sometimes with two "s"s vertically aligned (if two movements are performed at the same time); but then sometimes a sign might have two dezzes, if for example the hand changes shape while performing the sign; and since each dez can have two different sigs, you might sometimes end up with a sign expressed on paper as DTTssss, which Stokoe chose to present as abstract symbols in the style of math and chemistry. And so if you were to write out a typical sentence in sign language, in Stokoe's notation so that it can be preserved for the ages without need of a videocamera, it could very well look like this:



Confused yet? Certainly the native ASL speakers of the 1960s were when this dictionary came out, a deliberately obtuse tome that only a career PhD linguist could ever love, the main reason it was greeted with such hostility and scorn in the first place. I'm giving it four stars anyway, because it's undeniable that this is the book that singlehandedly got society to start thinking of ASL in terms of a formal language in the first place, leading to evermore sophisticated analysis, which in turn has profoundly affected the ability for ASL to become codified and able to be consistently taught in the same way in every classroom across the nation. (For one extremely notable example, in the 1990s it was generally recognized that Stokoe had left out an entire class of phoneme from his original analysis, which is the facial expression a person makes when performing the sign, now academically known as its "non-manual marker" and consistently taught in classrooms alongside all the other phonemes.) It's this analysis that led to ASL being legally recognized as a legitimate language, which is why police, courts and public schools now are required to provide an ASL interpreter to their Deaf participants; but be aware that this original 1965 look at the subject is now more a historical curiosity than a practical textbook, a fascinating look at the subject's history but not really something that will teach you how to actually speak 21st-century ASL. It's worth checking out, but only in this specific fashion.