Sign Language.Sign has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have specialists in language study realized that signed languages are unique – a speech of the hand. They offer a new way to probe how the brain generates and understands language, and throw new light on an old scientific controversy: whether language, complete with grammar, is something that we are born with, or whether it is a learned behavior. The current interest in sign language has roots in the pioneering work of one rebel teacher at Gallaudet University n Washington, D.C., the world’s only liberal arts university for deaf people. (http://www.imitatewatch.com/GoodsBrand/Replica-Tissot-Watches-66.html)
When Bill Stokoe went to Gallaudet to teach English, the school enrolled him in a course in signing. But Stokoe noticed something odd: among themselves, students signed differently from his classroom teacher.
Stokoe had been taught a sort of gestural code, each movement of the hands representing a word in English. At the lime, American Sign Language (ASL) was thought to be no more than a form of pidgin English。 But Stokoe believed the “hand talk” his students used looked richer. He wondered: Might deaf people actually have a genuine language? And could that language be unlike any other on Earth? It was 1955, when even leaf people dismissed their signing as “substandard”. Stokoe’s idea was academic teacher.
It is 37 years later. Stokoe now devoting his time to writing and editing books and journals and to producing video materials on ASL and the deaf culture is having lunch at a caf? Near the Gallaudet campus and explaining how he started a revolution. For decades educators fought his idea that signed languages are natural languages like English, French and Japanese. They assumed language must be based on speech, the modulation of sound. But sign language is based on the movement of hands, the modulation of space. ‘What I said.” Stokoe explains, “is that language is not mouth stuff it’s brain stuff.”
Princess Diana Paid a Visit to Angola.It came as something of a surprise when Diana, Princess of Wales, made a trip to Angola in 1997, to support the Red Cross’s campaign for a total ban on all anti-personnel landmines. Within hours of arriving in Angola, television screens around the world were filled with images of her comforting victims injured in explosions caused by landmines. ‘”I knew the statistics,” she said. “But putting a face to those figures brought the reality home to me; like when 1 met Sandra, a 13-year-old girl who had lost her leg, and people like her.”
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The Princess concluded with a simple message:”We must stop landmines”. And she used every opportunity during her visit to repeat this message.
But, back in London, her views were not shared by some members of the British government, which refused to support a ban on these weapons. Angry politicians launched an attack on the Princess in the press. They described her as “very ill-informed” and a “loose cannon.”
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