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This historical account of the development of the manual alphabet in ASL (and of representational systems in other sign languages) traces fingerspelling back to the monks of the seventh century, who devised a system for representing speech without needing to speak. Many years later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their manual alphabet underwent significant adaptation as a result of the contact between the monks and the deaf children they tutored. This article describes the evolution of the manual alphabet from that time to the present day.
THE ALPHABET is so often linked to writing that we need to remember that its achievement has two parts-the written symbols found on a page and also the symbols that represent a cluster of sound units, or phonemes. Once committed to a page, language becomes visible and permanent and can be regarded on a plane apart from the intimate interaction of speakers. David Olson, among others, argues that the act of writing on a page has transformed thought about language because it suspends and turns language into a representation in space, one whose content we can study, review, and reconsider (1994).
The second feature of the alphabet-that it enables us to break down the fluidity of speech into units that we can transfer to a visible medium-is a monumental achievement. This aspect is particularly useful to certain groups of language users-religious and deaf signers, who appear to have little in common, except that both need a tool for converting speech to silent and visible forms. Additionally, the two communities have discovered that the alphabet can alternatively be represented on the body instead of on a page. In Greek and Roman antiquity there are recorded references to the use of the body and hands to represent the alphabet, presumably as a representational alternative to the use of paper.
In the seventh century Saint Bede the Venerable, an Anglo-Saxon Benedictine monk, proposed in his Ecclesiastical History (cited in Plann 1997) a system for representing the alphabet "using the fingers" for the purpose of silent communication among the religious. From the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, inhabitants within the cloistered walls of monasteries often used alphabetic gestures (as well as manual signs) to make face-to-face exchanges while preserving monastic...