Talk:Martha's Vineyard Sign Language

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Dizzybee23.

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origins of MVSL
I made some corrections to this page to show that the MVSL originated in the "weald" of County Kent and not "Weald, England". There is no such town as would be suggested by that punctuation. The "weald" is a geographic term to denote a woodland. Weald's are known throughout England and this one was in the Country Kent.

I also gave more specific details about the evolution of MVSL. It was originally Kent Sign Language that evolved into a distinct language in the village of Chilmark on Martha's Vineyard. Later it combined with French signs to form MVSL. There's a great deal more that can be added to this page. The major reference that is freely available is Nora Ellen Groce's "Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language", but a great deal is to be found in Edward Fay's research and also that of Alexander Graham Bell's papers. Also, Harlan Lane's "When The Mind Hears" has some excellent discussion. This is of interest to me because I am descended from one of the families whom Groce identifies as being a source of hereditary deafness in Martha's Vineyard.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ray Foster (talk) 18:06, 18 December 2004 (UTC).

no direct evidence for Old Kentish Sign Language
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)

I have modified the article to make the hypothetical status of OKSL explicit.

Thnidu 18:03, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

"....farmers signed to their children across a wide field, where the spoken word would not carry."
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)

overall impression bad
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. &mdash;24.170.242.101 (talk) 21:10, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Citations and article development
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)

Conflicting information about last speaker and extinction
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)

Capitalization
I have reverted the ridiculous capitalization of the word 'deaf' throughout the article. I had the misfortune today of learning that the deaf activist class demands that 'deaf' be capitalized when used in reference to deaf culture(/s) rather than to the character trait. This is not how English works. Deaf people are not an ethnic group. At least if the proposed convention were to capitalize the names of particular deaf cultures within geographic areas named with proper nouns, such as 'American Deaf culture' or 'Japanese Deaf culture', it would be defensible. Capitalizing the word in reference to the fictitious global 'Deaf culture' and 'Deaf community' is simply, unambiguously grammatically incorrect. It's asinine.

I would like to remind any angry wokeists (but I repeat myself) who might read this comment that elite activists rarely are truly representative of the communities for which they claim to speak. The mainstream Western activist class is much wealthier, more educated, political, leftist, and (dare I say) privileged than Westerners as a whole. Consider before you embrace activists' demands on the grounds that you must be uncritical boosters of the political programs of 'marginalized communities' that you will not learn what most members of said 'communities' want by listening to what your favorite new class pencil pushers have to say. To take what should be an obvious example, few black Americans generally share the views of Black Lives Matter activists. Very few want to abolish the police, stigmatize the nuclear family, or implement socialism; the Black Lives Matter organization and the movement's leading activists explicitly advocate for all those deranged ideas.

The user who capitalized 'deaf' in this article didn't even bother to listen well to the activists whose demands he attempted to foist on readers of this article. He capitalized every instance of the word, which as stated above, is not what his thought leaders want. To anyone reading this who is outraged by my supposed ableism and is about to revert my reversion and reply to my comment with a long rant about the dangers of fascism, eugenics, and capitalist oppression of the differently abled, I have only two requests:

1) Go through the article carefully and capitalize 'deaf' only where required by the activists' convention, not in every instance. 2) My grandmother is and my grandfather was profoundly deaf. My mother and her brother grew up with ASL as a first language. Bear that in mind. Blocky1OOO (talk) 20:24, 4 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Rockatanskette and Blocky1OOO - it'd be great if this is resolved in talk, instead of edit reverts. Also, please remember to be civil - that's one of the basic rules here. And calling someone else's edits "asinine" and venting about unrelated topics is not.
 * As for the argument itself WP:PEOPLELANG is the guidance to follow here. This means that names of cultural groups are capitalised. That said, in this particular instance the word "deaf" seems to refer to the particular diagnosis ("people who cannot hear") and not to a (presumed?) Deaf community of Martha's Vineyard. Averell (talk) 11:50, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I specifically said that capitalizing the word in naming a particular geographically limited deaf culture is defensible. The convention deaf activists apparently demand is not, because it plainly contradicts the conventions of the English language. I said their demand was asinine, and I stand by it. I maintain that deferring to professional activists' supposed moral authority is ridiculous, and not only when their demands are foolish. I added a pertinent and extremely well-known example of activists not actually speaking for the groups they claim to represent to illustrate my point. I resent having to defend myself against the specious accusations of bigotry and rhetorical violence that typically follow objection to leftist activists' absurd demands, hence my last two paragraphs.
 * I frankly see no possible justification for reverting my edit in full. Even if Wikipedia decides to cater to activist demands to capitalize the word 'deaf' when it refers to deaf culture, most instances of the word in this article will need to be reverted to lower case yet again. Anyway, the default convention on Wikipedia should be the longstanding one of names of medical conditions and cultural subcultures not being capitalized in the English language. If an editor wants to flout that convention in an article or site-wide based on an emotional argument about the power of capitalization to legitimate marginalized communities, he should make his case on the talk page. The editor who capitalized 'deaf' left no comment on the talk page before [incorrectly] applying his novel linguistic convention; why should I have to wait for talk page feedback that may never come before reverting his erroneous edit?
 * I left my comment in part so that a future editor who sees 'deaf' in lowercase in this article and feels compelled to capitalize it might respond and explain his justification. I made my case for not changing conventions. If someone sees my comments here and wants to argue in favor of capitalization, I'll continue this discussion then. Blocky1OOO (talk) 04:05, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Again, friendly reminder to assume good faith and be civil. I linked the Wikipedia convention above, this is the guidance to follow - no matter if someone likes it or not. And just for the record, I did side with the argument for lowercase in this particular case. I pinged both authors, because it is preferable to resolve things on the talk page rather than through edit wars. Averell (talk) 12:59, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Am I missing something? The page says nothing about whether ‘deaf’ should ever be considered part of the name of a cultural group needing to be capitalized. Are there any groups analogous to the global ‘deaf community’ whose names are capitalized on Wikipedia? I’m not sure there are even analogues to regional or even most local ‘communities’. I think there are very few deaf communities that qualify as cultures rather than subcultures integrated within their respective local cultures. I don’t think the name of a culture that is usually joined rather than inherited should be capitalized — it is a subculture, not a culture. Blocky1OOO (talk) 06:59, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Ah, sorry. I assumed you were the one who reverted my edit. That makes a lot more sense. Blocky1OOO (talk) 07:02, 19 December 2022 (UTC)