A while ago I read Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks. Dr Sacks writes excellent books about neurological matters that are never less than thrilling. This one was about sign language.

This book completely changed the way I saw deafness. Previously, I’d seen it as primarily a loss of function, and sign language as a limited form of communication. But nothing could be further from the truth! (Or more patronising towards deaf people: I heartily apologise).

In fact, sign language is a fascinating, vibrant language in its own right, with its own unique “visual grammar”. It’s expressive, flexible, and fascinating, and it’s also easier to learn than phonic languages: babies less than a year old can be taught simple sign language years before they are fully able to speak, and adult speakers of one sign language can quickly learn another sufficiently well enough to be able to hold conversations in it within a few weeks.

What impressed me most about sign language was the way it was totally “other”. While it uses exactly the same part of the brain as phonic languages (which is amazing in itself, since it uses completely different sensory systems and different memory structures) its depth and character can’t quite be fully understood by hearing people.

Perhaps the only analogue we have is typing. I’ve been doing a lot of it recently, and it occurred to me that it’s exactly like speaking, only instead of making a string of sounds, you’re making a string of movements, just like in Sign.

Even mistakes made in spelling point toward this. I don’t mean not being able to spell words like “antidisestablishmentarianism”, or hitting the wrong key through inaccuracy, I mean getting characters the wrong way round. For example, I am forever putting “outocme” instead of “outcome”, and I think this might be likened to a sort of speech-impediment.

It’s an idea that interests me. I’ve always been interested in languages, and how they relate to the way people think, and before now I’ve only ever thought about language in one way: phonically. When I read something, I ‘hear’ it in my head, but when a deaf person reads something, they see it signed in their head, and that fascinates me.

When I think something through, I think of it in a mixture of [audible] words, images and an odd fusion of the two — a bit like the “feel” of a word before it’s fully formed in the mind. When a deaf person does the same thing, they will see signs rather than hear words.

I find the whole thing fascinating, if only because it’s a way of looking at language that I’ve never thought about before.