Manually coded language

It is unknown when the first attempts were made to represent an oral language with gesture. Indeed, some have speculated that oral languages may have evolved from sign languages, and there may be undocumented cases in history when vocal and signed modes of a language existed side by side. It is not uncommon for people to develop gestures to replace words or phrases in contexts where speech is not possible or not permitted, such as in a television studio, but these are usually limited in scope and rarely develop into complete representations of an oral language. One of the most elaborated examples of this kind of auxiliary manual system is Warlpiri Sign Language, a complete signed mode of spoken Warlpiri which was developed by an Indigenous community in central Australia due to cultural proscriptions against speech. Sign language linguists usually make a distinction between these auxiliary sign languages and manually coded languages; the latter are specifically designed for use in Deaf education, and usually represent the written form of the language.

In seventh century England, the years of (672-735), Venerable Bede, a Benedictine monk, proposed a system for representing the letters of the Latin script on the fingers called fingerspelling. Monastic sign languages used throughout medieval Europe used manual alphabets as well as signs, and were capable of representing a written language, if one had enough patience. Aside from the commonly understood rationale of observing a "vow of silence", they also served as mnemonics for preachers.[2] These manual alphabets began to be used to teach the deaf children of royalty in 17th century Spain. Such alphabets are in widespread use today by signing deaf communities for representing words or phrases of the oral language used in their part of the world.

The earliest known attempt to develop a complete signed mode of a language which could be used to teach deaf children was by the Abbé de l'Épée, an educator from 18th century France. While the Deaf community already used a sign language (now known as Old French Sign Language), Épée thought it must be primitive, and set about designing a complete visual-gestural system to represent the concepts of religion and law that he wanted to impart to his pupils. His system of signes méthodiques (usually known in English as Methodical Signs) was quite idiosyncratic, and although it was not a strict representation of French, its success laid the groundwork for the "signed oral languages" of today. The real proliferation of such systems occurred in the latter half of the 20th century, and by the 1980s manually coded languages were the dominant form of communication used by teachers and interpreters in classrooms with deaf students in many parts of the world. Most sign language "interpreting" seen on television in the 1970s and 1980s would have in fact been a transliteration of an oral language into a manually coded language.

The emerging recognition of sign languages in recent times has curbed the growth of manually coded languages, and in many places interpreting and educational services now favor the use of the natural sign languages of the Deaf community. In some parts of the world, MCLs continue to be developed and supported by state institutions; a contemporary example is Arabic Sign Language. Some MCL systems (such as the Paget Gorman Sign System) have survived by shifting their focus from deaf education to people with other kinds of communication needs.

The use of MCLs is controversial and has been opposed since Épée's time by "oralists" who believe Deaf people should speak, lipread and use hearing aids rather than sign—and on the other side by members of the American Sign Language (ASL) community (see Deaf culture) who resist a wide or exclusive application of MCLs for both philosophical and practical reasons. English is not fully able to express the ability of those with disabled hearing to communicate, and just as written forms of spoken languages are useful but cumbersome for daily communication, these manual codes cannot supplant a natural Signed Language. Nevertheless, elements of these systems have had some influence on deaf sign languages (see Contact sign).

Research in the U.S. has shown that manually coded English is usually applied incompletely and inconsistently in classrooms: Hearing teachers tend to "cut corners" by not signing word endings and "function words", most likely because they slow down the pace and distort the phrasing of the teacher's natural speech. The result is a kind of "Pidgin Sign English" which lacks the grammatical complexity of both English and American Sign Language.

There have been many different approaches to manually coding oral languages. Some consist of fingerspelling everything, a technique sometimes known in English as the "Rochester method" after Rochester School for the Deaf in New York where it was used from 1878 until the 1940s. While most MCLs are slower than spoken or sign languages, this method is especially so and in modern times is generally considered not to be accessible to children. However, some deafblind people still communicate primarily using the Rochester Method. Most manually coded languages can accommodate simultaneous communication—that is, signing and speaking at the same time—although the natural pace of speech may need to be slowed down at times.

The Paget Gorman Sign System (PGSS) is an MCL that began development in the 1930s by Sir Richard Paget. He studied extant sign languages and looked to create an easier way to understand signs that were pantomimic in nature. He worked with Grace Paget (his wife) and Pierre Gorman, who both took over his work after his death in 1955. Paget published a book in 1951 focusing on children's vocabulary that included 900 signs.

In 1964, PGSS was taught for the first time to a group of deaf adults in an experiment. It evolved from education for the deaf to teaching those with speech and language disorders. New systems were developed for deaf adults to transition into British Sign Language (BSL), thus causing the pivot in use.

PGSS currently has an estimated 56,000 word combinations.[3]

Below are some of the signed systems that have been developed for various oral languages. They range from formal systems that encode the grammar of the oral language, to informal systems of using sign together with speech, to translating oral words one-by-one to sign.

See Australian Aboriginal sign languages for traditional manually coded languages such as Warlpiri Sign Language.

• Contact sign — a variety or style of signing arising from contact between a spoken or manually coded language and a deaf sign language.
• Fingerspelling — a means of representing the written alphabet of an oral language, but often a central part of natural sign languages.
• Makaton

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