Book review: “Signs grammar”

     Whoever has studied communication, knows the key aspects useful to realize that. Sender, message, and recipient can communicate through a shared code. And the organ that makes possible the information transfer is the channel. This element conditions the communication. It can be verbal or physical (optical, acoustic, electric...).

     The communication process has different levels of analysis:

- langage: it’s a set of cognitive processes derived from a psychic activity that is determined by  social life that regulates learning, acquisition and actual use of any language;

- langue: is the social product that is the result of social conventions used to communicate. It’s a system that articulates meanings;

- parole: it’s the concrete linguistic execution. But not for everyone. Not for the deaf-mute (deaf and dumb). Not for the deaf community, deaf people which have lost one of the senses. However, we shouldn’t consider it a defect, but rather an open passage on the possibility to develop and popularize a new language: the Italian Sign Language (LIS).

     The L.I.S. isn’t valid only for the insiders, but for all people who wish to learn this new code ferrying information through a new channel that is visual-gestural. Going back to the Greek and Latin etymology, we can discover the deeper meaning of communication i.e. the participation and the sharing.

     Furthermore, in an opening social context that is striving to new perspectives, can be useful or just interesting learning signs language that is a language for all effects.

     The book allows to get in touch not only with a new language, but also with an entire cultural system freeing ourselves from the everyday life of hearing people.

     Recall that ... the pioneer of the deaf language is the american linguist William Stokoe who published the first dictionary in the ’60s.

     This work presented, in the opening, historical outline about the evolution of observations on the deafness condition and of educational models adopted. 

     Author Orazio Romeo, Signs Grammar, Zanichelli, Bologna 1997, p. 160.