Old French Sign Language
Categories: Language stubs | Sign languages
Old French Sign Language was the language of the Deaf community in Paris in the 18th century. Our earliest records of the language are in the work of the Abbé de l'Epée, who developed a sign system, borrowing many signs from Old French Sign Language of the 1750s. He estimated that there was a community of 200 deaf people using sign language. Epee didn't attempt to describe grammar of the language as they would have used it, but rather tried to develop his own manual system ("langage de signes méthodiques") in which signs were built up in a kind of morphemic structure, strongly influenced by the French language and Latin.
From the dictionaries [1] of these "systematised signs" that Abbé Charles-Michel de l'Epée and his successor Abbé Roche-Ambroise Sicard published, we can see that many of the signs described have direct descendents in sign languages today. Epee's method of deaf education was to spread far and wide, and as a result Old French Sign Language (via Epée) has come to influence many contemporary deaf sign languages.
A contempory of the Abbe de l'Epée who was himself deaf, Pierre Desloges, did partially describe Old French Sign Language, in what was possibly the first book ever to be published by a deaf person [2] (1779). We know that the language did make use of the possibilites of a spatial grammar. One of the grammatical features noted by Desloges was the use of directional verbs, such as the verb TO WANT.
From the few descriptions that exist, modern linguists are unable to build up a complete picture of Old French Sign Language, but ongoing research continues to uncover more pieces of the puzzle. It is not known how the language was acquired, or how long the language had been developing before Epee established his school. However, evidence suggests that whenever a large enough population of deaf people exists, a sign language will spontaneously arise (see Nicaraguan Sign Language). As Paris had been the largest city in Europe for hundreds of years until the 17th century (and with 565,000 inhabitants in 1750), French Sign Language is a good candidate for one of the oldest sign languages in Europe.
French Sign Language is a direct descendant of Old French Sign Language. It also influenced the development of Quebec Sign Language, American Sign Language, Dutch Sign Language, Flemish Sign Language, Belgian-French Sign Language and a number of others.
Old French Sign Language is not related to Old French, which was spoken from roughly 1000 to 1300AD.