 So, if somebody asks a question from the audience, then we have another signer here in the very first row. I will relay the message to this person, then you'll be able to respond. And don't worry, we will have a lot of time at the end to be able to address any questions. So take it away, Lois. Today my topic is performer and audience interaction. I also have some other topics I will be addressing, so please bear with me. I will arrive at the title of this presentation, albeit circuitously, but we will get there. Now first I want to show you a letter, a very interesting letter, and what this letter is about. Well, it's actually from the chair of a linguistics department and a very big and well known American University. It's from about six years ago and it's in response to a request to have ASL offered as a credit bearing foreign language offering to students. The chair of the department turned down this request. Now in the past, reasons for this dismissal may have been that ASL isn't a real language but of course we won't say that anymore, we can't say that anymore. How do you respond when somebody says that they will not accept a request such as what was put forth to the chair of this department? Can you see the sentences that are underlined? Now the reason there is some underlining on this letter is because the friend of mine who gave it to me installed this letter actually put it there. We'll just keep mum about that. Down at the very bottom, the very last sentence is great. I think it's kind of funny. But you see these enumerated points there. What I find interesting about this as an English teacher, a professor of lit, is this one point that addresses literature. It's said it does not prepare one to read literature. Okay, ASL clearly has literature. We're all here for four days and what we're specifically doing is looking at ASL literature. One of the problems is that ASL has no writing system, right? That seems to be the difficulty. I would counter that by saying we do actually have a few different writing systems available to us. How many of us here know the Stokey Notation System? Any of you? Seems like there are several who are familiar with it. What about the Sutton Sign Writing System? No one? No one. How about Sign Font? One person it seems and the audience knows that one. Okay, it seems we do have writing systems but we don't utilize them. Why would that be? One possible reason is that some people do report that they would prefer to write in English and not try to show you ASL in a written form. And another complaint, let me fix this here, is that these systems have not yet become flexible enough for ease of use, so they're not user-friendly. Okay, we can say that ASL has no written form, no written system. That seems to be true and therefore that means that ASL is truly an oral language. Now, I use the terms oral not to talk about speech reading or lip reading but I mean a face-to-face approach to using the language with each other. That means there is no written form of that language. So can we all accept that I'm using the word oral and I'll spell O-R-A-L and this does not mean the traditional sense that we tend to use the word oral. Now everybody here can read and write, correct? We are not illiterate, we're not. So are we an oral community? Are we an oral culture? That's the question. Well, now this is some terminology from medieval times. We're talking about one language, community using just one language. Now when you grow up as children you use a particular language in the home. At your first language it's the one you use primarily, there's no other. It has no written form, no writing system. It does have a literature, it'd be considered an oral literature but it's denigrated and has a lower prestige. Now if somebody at this time in medieval times had a second language, that second language would be used for writing. That second language would also have a literature associated with it. It would hold a higher prestige in that culture. It'd be more formal and be considered something for the elite. Are you following me so far? Okay, so now where are we? Some of you probably already know what my position is at Gallaudet University. I'm in the English department and I'm a coordinator of a few different programs there. I also teach a course in old literature, old English, middle English, and classes like that. In fact, my major course of study and interest has always been in the history of the English language. I call that H-E-L. I teach a course called H-E-L, History of English Language Course. In fact, I'm in the middle of teaching it this semester. So what I like to do now is draw a comparison for you between ASL literature and the history of English literature. Okay, bear with me. Sorry, I don't think I have it centered. Okay, now we're going to look at England as a country and the people who live there around the year 900 A.D. Most of the people of course could not read and write except for a select few at the very, very top of this pyramid. And you could say, well, there were no universities at that time, but any learning facility that had any kind of educational component was for the very few at the top of this triangle. Most of the people at this time spoke English, but they were illiterate. They were monolingual. And if anybody in this culture was bilingual, the second language was Latin and there would be something written in Latin only, not in English, which is what everybody spoke. The reason being that English, as we said, was an oral culture at the time. It was something used in the home, but it wasn't used to inscribe anything for any reading or writing, not at this time anyway. So people felt that English wasn't good enough. It wasn't a high enough level language to even attempt to put into a written form. This is a little bit later in history, 300 years later in our chronology, 1200 AD. Now we're going to add French into the picture. Most people still spoke one language. They were monolingual, they spoke English, and they were illiterate. But now there were a few people who started small schools or undertook oral education, what we would call. So they taught subjects, but it was by memorization because there still wasn't a written form of the language. Also at that time, French was introduced to some English speakers, especially at the very top of this pyramid. And Latin, of course, is still high on the list of languages that were treasured for writing. It was the only one at the time, okay? Now I've got something fun for us, finally applies to us in the room. This is for all deaf people in the US today. And I use a capital D to denote the deaf people I'm speaking of, capital D for deaf. And this means that people who exclusively use ASL. Now we already said there's no writing systems, so in our own language of ASL we are illiterate. But we can read and write English. So we are bilingual. We use ASL for, what is it you're telling me? Oh, let me fix this. Is that better? Okay, thank you. So we use ASL at home and we use English for reading and writing and for what you might call university studies. Let's go back to old English again to the time of 900 AD that we started with. As for literature at this time, well if you look at this big blank part of the pyramid, this is the oral population and anything they created as literature is completely lost. We don't know what it looked like. We do have a very few manuscripts which survive from this time, just a very, very few. And we can only make assumptions about what the greater part of the literature was like at the time. However, in terms of Latin, which was all written, we have a lot of primary evidence and sources in Latin. We have some letters also that were from that time and there's discussion in these letters about trying to write the English language. People are debating whether they could try it or not and they postulated that they could perhaps use the Latin alphabet and then transcribe English with that, but it seemed awkward. It didn't quite fit and people felt that if you wanted to use Latin as the writing system, you'd have to make a lot of adjustments. Because of the oral nature of English discourse, it didn't translate well with Latin inscription. Now for performer and audience interaction, we do know a little bit about what that looked like at the time, a little bit. First of all, these events always included a lot of drinking and a lot of getting drunk, always, because that was actually the goal of these gatherings. People got together to drink and tell stories and sing songs, so that was a given. The second thing we know is that it always included the practice of turn-taking amongst the audience members and the performer. Sometimes there'd be a professional singer who would travel from town to town or village to village and they were the professional at the event. This person would start off with perhaps a poem or a song and then things would just take off as people around the room would join in. They'd be accompanied by a harp and then everybody would throw in their two cents. And of course they were all mightily drunk. The audiences always were responsive to these performances. If the audience just sat there and didn't respond at all, then something was going terribly wrong. The audiences had absolutely no patience with a boring performer or a poem or a song. They would not stomach it. If something was boring, they would pelt the performer with eggs or they would just boo them right out of there. Now when you compare this to the Latin literature at the time, it was completely different. So of course if the literature is in Latin, it's written and that means any performance means a person standing in front of the room and just reading, just reciting what they're reading off the page. The audience would just be sitting there and of course they had to just respectfully take in the message. These audiences were primarily made up of monks in a monastery at the time. And there were strict rules about maintaining silence at all times. So somebody would read a Latin story or piece of literature and everybody sat stone face and quiet. The stories in Latin were religious in nature. They were about the saints and they were boring as can be. And we have many, many examples that exist today of these stories which I can attest to you were very boring. The literature for the English speakers were very exciting. They were about sex and war and heroes and blood. And they were very interesting and the audience loved them of course because I said they wouldn't tolerate anything that was boring in their midst. Now in Middle English times, it's the similar situation to what I just described about the earlier time. Now you have the addition of the French language being a third offering and of course this was still for the Uber elite, the higher echelons of society at that time. French was used for poetry and for performance. Most of these performance or the speaking of French wasn't going on in bars and usually it wasn't taking place in monasteries either. These sorts of performances were in the houses of the nobles or the other rich people in the area. There would be musicians and most of the time they were professional musicians. Wealthy families even hired their own private musicians. Or if there was a traveling troupe or troubadour going through they would pay this person to play for them. There was no turn taking, no audience participation. One was expected of course to sit and listen to the performance and not participate. The literature at that time was interesting actually. It's pretty good literature from what I've seen. So now here we are. Is ASL literature an oral literature? What do we see here? What have we seen this weekend? To me it looks like it is oral literature. What do you think? Because for a performer and audience interaction if you look at that dynamic it would seem to fit the bill, right? We saw a fascinating example of this yesterday. When Jim Cohn was here he read his presentation and the audience, how did you respond? You were bored out of your minds, right? Seriously. Nobody sat very formally and patiently and tried to just suck it up. Everybody expressed their boredom quite visually. You all did, myself included. We all behaved just as an oral audience would. And I find that very interesting. I think what happened, oh you have a comment? So people would participate in the performance and the performer would accept that interruption even if it wasn't something that was supposed to happen or that was planned. Well the performer was always open to that turn taking process and they were open to being interrupted. Even Bernard Bragg, yeah you're saying open to being interrupted, thank you. But what else is it about ASL? Turn taking and the performers don't tend to be professional performers, right? I mean other than Bernard Bragg who's a professional performer and I'm mixed right here. But I'm thinking about other people who perform. Here in the audience we work as professors or work in some other profession. Most performers in ASL and ASL literature aren't paid to be performers. And so they're not professional. There's use of turn taking in our dynamic. And there is a lot of audience and performer interaction. So back in the day when we look at English literature it was oral. It had low prestige because it was just a spoken language with no writing system. The elite, the educated people avoided English because they didn't feel it was good enough for what they intended to do with language especially in a written form. It was not considered good enough for science or educational settings or religious settings. It was never accepted by any educational facilities. Do you know the first time that English is accepted for to be included in any kind of curriculum or English department in a college? 1898, not until 1898. It seems that most universities or educational systems heavily rely on the fact that there must be a writing system inherent in the language. In my opinion, that's what the universities are looking for and that's the key. If there is a writing system to transcribe this language then they'll accept it as a bonafide entry into their offerings. It seems the concepts about literature change over time. So here are a few predictions that I can offer. ASL literature will become more widely accepted at the university level if we continue to promote ASL literature and as a language that makes us literate. And also videotapes may be the key. They may be the answer. I don't know. I'm a low-tech person myself. It seems that may be the case. Or I don't know. I mean perhaps we can develop some other sort of writing system for ASL. Here's the big question I want to ask you. Will educators or university systems accept ASL as a viable class for course-bearing credit? Will it always stay within the realm of oral literature? What do you think? I see a lot of people shaking their heads, yes, nodding, okay. Well I hope so. I hope so. Thank you. Are there any questions? Yes. Welcome. Come to the stage. I'm going to sign for myself. Is that okay with you, Matthew? Okay. So actually I have a bit of information to share with you in regards to what you were saying before about the writing systems and forms of ASL, sign writing. I don't know if you're aware but there seem to be two systems of writing for ASL today in our country. The first one is called the Sutton Sign Writing System of Movement, Sutton Sign Movement. Any of you read or heard about that? And this has been in development for years and years. Oh yes, there you have it, Sutton Sign Writing you call it. It's something that is derived from IBM computers actually. And the second one, well Stokey's the first one of course, but the second one I want to address is SignFont. Now how many of you are familiar with SignFont, one or two as well as myself? Most of you don't know about it. Okay. Now that has already been developed. It already has been. I've seen it. I've been involved. There are several people who are involved in the beginning. They didn't call me until the very, very end when it was already developed and I took a look at it. And so it had already been formulated. It's a really wonderful system. And the reason I'm telling you it's so wonderful is because of an experiment that I was part of. There's Dr. Jank. I don't have the right spelling of this gentleman's name. But anyway, he said across from me and he said, please sign a poem. So I signed a poem called Death that you saw me perform last night. And as I signed this, he notated everything that I was doing. He wrote down every sign, every movement, every facial expression I made, everything was incorporated into his notation. And when we were done, he showed me the paper and I said, really, this is me. This is my performance. And he said, yes. I turned it back on him and I said, sign this back to me then. And he sat there and he signed the poem to me exactly as I had performed it to him, perfectly. Now, what does that tell us? Still, when you look at the paper, it's just incomprehensible, very difficult to decipher. But I mean, I imagine when we started reading English when we were kids, it was incredibly difficult to decipher back then, too. But of course, with time and practice, we master it and we become literate. So I don't know. I don't know what happened with this system. It seemed the government had granted $500,000 for its development. It was indeed created. And then they shelved it. And that's where it's remained. So I mean, I'm here to share with you what this was in my experience with it. And I wonder, someday somebody might dust this puppy off the shelf and take it out again and try to revive it. Seems like it might be a really exciting way for us to get our ideas and our language out there more and more so that people can see what the literature is in ASL. That's something that might help in the future to answer your question. So of these three systems, it seems they're all based on English, and none of them is based on ASL semantics. And what I'd like is a new model, a new creation of a sign system, a sign writing system that deals with ASL semantics, not English. We need something new. We need something based on what we use. Those three are indeed interesting systems. I agree. And it doesn't seem like they've really taken off or that people are using them widely. So I think a new model or a new conception of how to go about it is what's necessary. Yes, they are based on English semantics. You're all right about that. So the only other problem is that you would have to buy a special computer to be able to do any of these. I know that I can't use any of these in the computer that I have now. Yes, you actually are right about that. For something to have a new sign writing system, you'd have to create something different. It's sort of like either Chinese or Japanese or has to be a whole new sort of font or a whole new thing incorporated into the computer keyboard to be able to utilize it effectively. So that seems to be a lot of challenges for different systems and different alphabets. Even Latin has difficulties with that, not compatible with computers. So what year or when was it that English was acceptable as a written system? When did that happen? When was an English writing system developed? Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe you misunderstood. What I had said, what I talked about was the year that universities first accepted English as an actual college credit course. But you're asking about the writing system? Oh, let's see. The writing system, well, they co-opted the Latin alphabet and tried to create a writing system out of it. Probably that began around the year 500. But it wasn't successful immediately because, of course, English has a different phonetic system than Latin does. There's a completely different phonological system being used between the two languages. And so there needed to be adaptations with the alphabet and they developed different sorts of tweaks to it to be able to formulate English words with a Latin alphabet. For example, the letter K, they created the letter K. You asked if ASL will continue as an oral form of literature. And I think it actually will. I think so. Because if you look at English and ASL, of course, English has a written form and that's inscribed. And sign is manual and visual. And so it's always going to be manual and visual. That's never going to change. So of course it will always remain oral in its form of literature. I don't know if you're aware, but St. Paul made some comments about spoken language. And he didn't trust written language. He said that spoken language has a breath and that you don't see that in written language. Plato also raised concerns about this. He was worried about the written language. He said once you put language down, you put something in writing, then what happens? You can't control it. You can't control it. And it just goes down in history without any control. And so there were always worries about spoken language actually being codified to written. And they made predictions that it would never work. An oral language could never make that shift to a written language. Anything else? I think it's more reasonable in the future to assume that videos will be able to help. But the problem with videos is that they're not accepted now as the form of literature. And one reason they're not is because you're not able to toggle back and forth and search through the videos to find certain places. The way you can in a book. You have to sit and wait and you can't queue things up to the exact places that you can. The way you can with English or something that's written down. So if you're looking at a particular publication or whatever, you're not able to find something unless it's on something like a CD. So they're talking about putting things on CDs. There's music on CDs. And of course you can queue up things like that. But if you had books or other ways that you could put them on a format that you were able to do that. It's difficult because you can't queue up things on the hands. The hands don't stay stagnant, they're always moving. So you need some sort of system where you'd be able to find the information equal to the way you can when it's in print. I think that's one difficulty that we have. Well, I find that comment really interesting because you know, when the Egyptians first developed their writing system a long, long time ago they used scrolls. So everything written would be on a scroll. And that was very difficult to be able to find something that was further back in the scroll than when you were reading at the time. Any information you wanted that was further back you'd have to unroll the whole thing. And it was a continuous scroll of paper. So then with the invention of books it was much more easy. Now you can page through and others page numbers. And that's very helpful to writers and readers. So I agree that it was some way that you could index videotapes. That would be very helpful because then you could find specific places. Time's up.