n I am writing in regard to a recent article (“A Language without a culture?” April 24, p. 1). I am continually baffled by the ability of well-educated, rational people to entirely ignore clear facts of the world and frenetically proclaim that American Sign Language is not a language, or even further, proclaim that this language does not have a cultural basis.
I suppose that as there are those who continue to ignore the mountains of continuously growing evidence toward the theories of evolution and gravity and a round Earth, there will always be those who are unable to accept that a language, which just happens to be articulated with fingers instead of with a tongue and vibrating vocal folds, will also continue to exist.
It is simply unfortunate when these people happen to be in positions of power and, thus, affect an enormous body of people into possibly not being able to explore this wonderfully rich and complex language (yes, I said it: language) because it cannot count toward any requirement in their college.
As a linguistics major, I also must absolutely point out to College of Arts and Sciences dean Jeffrey Henderson that, as surprising as it may be, there are many languages that “cut across all boundaries,” including (bear with me here), “genders [and] ethnic[ities].”
For example, I am a man and I speak French. Amazingly, I also happen to personally know a woman who speaks French – several in fact. Shocking, I know, but linguists have been able to find some pretty crazy stuff.
I urge Henderson and whoever is responsible at the College of Communication to please contact me if they simply have not been able to find appropriate references regarding ASL (I know they must’ve looked hard). I would be happy to point them in the direction of some wonderful reading material demonstrating that ASL is both a language (thus the “L”) and based in culture.
Hopefully, such enlightenment would be able to aid them in making a logical decision for allowing the use of ASL to fulfill language requirements and help them understand the vast diversity the languages of our planet happen to display.
Morgan Jenatton
CAS ’08
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