Talk:Martha's Vineyard Sign Language

message: This page -- actually, the answers.com clone of it -- is currently being discussed on the sign language linguistics mailing list slling-L. Dr. Bencie Woll, Chair of Sign Language and Deaf Studies and Director of the Deafness, Cognition and Language Research Centre, University College London, writes in that discussion (quoted here by permission):
: Actually, there's no evidence that there was a signing Deaf community in Kent or that any of the people who went to Martha's Vineyard from Kent were deaf. I quote from a paper by Chris Stone and myself which will appear in Sign Language Studies:
:: It should be noted that there is only circumstantial evidence available to substantiate claims about the earlier existence of an Old Kent Sign Language in the Kentish Weald (Groce, 1985).  Groce states that she was 'unable to discover any direct references to deafness in the Weald during the seventeenth century' (pp. 29-30), and adds (p. 30), 'From a passage in Samuel Pepys's diary, it is clear that Downing knew a sign language'.  Groce then conjectures (30), 'It seems likely that as a boy in Maidstone in 1630 he learned the local sign language."  But since all we know for sure is that Downing went to school in Kent, not that there were any deaf people in the Weald of Kent during the 17th century, the belief in an Old Kentish Sign Language is actually unsupported by any direct evidence.
See also the caution in the last paragraph of Old Kent Sign Language, quoting Woll, Sutton-Spence, & Elton (2001):
:Others have cautioned against uncritical reception of this claim, "because no deaf people were part of the original migration from Kent, and nothing is known about any specific variety of signing used in Kent." 
Thnidu 17:51, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  no direct evidence for Old Kentish Sign Language 

message: This, though cited, seems very unlikely. If the distance was too great to yell, then how could someone see the subtle differences between signs? Try it, stand 40 meters away from someone and try to see how many fingers they are holding up.Trefalcon (talk) 16:01, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "....farmers signed to their children across a wide field, where the spoken word would not carry."

message: I have a problem with the overall impression this article leaves on history.  In the lead, it is stated that Martha's Vineyard Sign Language was "once widely used".  It further states: "The language was able to thrive on Martha's Vineyard because of the unusually high percentage of deaf islanders. In 1854, when the island's deaf population peaked, the United States national average was one deaf person in 5728, while on Martha's Vineyard it was one in 155. In the town of Chilmark, which had the highest concentration of deaf people on the island, the average was 1 in 25; in a section of Chilmark called Squibnocket, as much as a quarter of the population of 60 was deaf."
I believe this little known factoid of Vineyard history is a distortion of the event.  I do not dispute that there may have been deaf Vineyarders in the past.  Yet to cite the above figures, then to imply that those figures somehow represent some meaningful fact about Martha's Vineyard stretches one's imagination.  For example, if the population of the nearby Elizabeth island of Naushon had ten residents, one of whom was deaf, this would certainly be a far more significant number than the one cited for Chilmark.  However, how meaningful would that be?  In a nation of millions of people, the national average of "one person in 5728" equates to some sort of meaning.  Yet to compare that ratio to a small, insignifcant island of ten people is an exaggeration.  To me, it is similar to comparing a golfball's tiny craters to that of Crater Lake on the Earth.
Also, I have a problem with the main article's lack of details about the Martha's Vineyard Sign Language.  For instance, what is it?  Describe it.  Was it as simple as a deaf person extending his middle finger to communicate his disgust with people who make no effort to understand his disability, or is the language far more in depth, with many hand signs similar to modern day hand language?
On the whole, I think this article makes too much of a minor thing and fails to provide specifics of why it is notable.
—24.170.242.101 (talk) 21:10, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  overall impression bad 

message: After saving this comment, I will remove the redundant 'reference' for Nora Ellen Groce's book, having formatted the other reference to facilitate access to an online preview. The redundant reference that I will delete contains a red link to a not-yet-existing article on Nora Ellen Groce. It's highly unlikely that anyone will ever create such an article. If anyone happens to think they have sufficient information to create one, they will anyway, whether or not a red link exists. 
Anyone aspiring to facilitate this, either for themselves or others, can do so by creating a 'further reading' section and adding resources until there are sufficient to capitalise upon. 
A comment on the above whinge about the proportion of deaf people on Martha's Vineyard during the period relevant to this article. While I've only just encountered this article, a quick check of Groce's book indicates that the population was higher than the figure of ten used in the straw-man argument above, although the sample size does nevertheless look smallish, perhaps 42 people at one stage. I don't know the year from the viewable text, but I have to assume it was early in the settlement, or referring to a population pocket. 
I see reference to a population of about 350 in Chilmark in the 1840s. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see that Groce was simply trying to create a picture. If her book is essentially factually accurate (Oliver Sacks seemed to give some credence to it, especially after visiting the island soon after reading Groce's book, whilst of the sign-using elders where around), of course the picture is an interesting and notable one. There are a raft of issues of interest, from genetics to sociological ones. The challenge for genuinely interested editors is to expand and elaborate on them. At time of this comment, prior to any serious searches, I'd be rather surprised if there aren't some interesting publications out there on this. Wotnow (talk) 08:16, 21 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Citations and article development

message: In the introduction (paragraph 3), there is the sentence, "The last deaf person born into the island's sign language tradition, Eva West, died in 1950." Later in the article, in "Deaf migration to the mainland", the following is stated: "The last deaf person born into the island's sign language tradition, Katie West, died in 1952."
Which of these is true?
--timothymh (talk) 16:29, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Conflicting information about last speaker and extinction