Blog 7 Seeing The Voice

The lecture by Drs. Rust and Rose was very interesting. Being an ASL student at McDaniel, I already have a fairly good idea about the ASL culture and history, but it was nice having a deeper look into the story telling aspect of the language. It is so amazing to me how little people in the US understand about the culture and the negative connotations they associate with the deaf community and it is very unfortunate. As Dr. Rust explained to the class there were some famous people such as Aristotle that said that Deaf people were dumb and didn’t deserve to breathe because they had nothing in their brains, but this is because people did not take time to understand their language. It was interesting to hear about Dr. Rust’s background and about his family. He told us that his Father refused to use ASL outside of his own home because he didn’t want people to think that he was dumb. I feel like that it is very sad that a person would have to feel that way about the language that they speak. Now that people are better understanding the language and culture, deaf people are more confident in using sign and signers now sign higher and use their whole body unlike in the past when they would try to hide it. It is also interesting to see how technology has helped the deaf culture advance and how it makes things much more accessible to the deaf. ASL is a visual language and can show so much feeling and expression, unlike English. Many hearing people think that ASL is just broken English, but they are very different in structure. Watching the few stories that Ricky signed to the class you can see how you can get so much more meaning and emotion out of the story than the tales told in English. A story told in ASL has so much in it that a 2-3 min story in sign would take at least ten pages for a person to tell in English. The lecture enriched my understanding of folktales by showing us yet another culture that uses these tales to spread history of their culture to different people. Dr. Rust told us that many of the tales told in ASL actually are told to make fun on the dominant culture or the speaking. Seeing of these types of tales was interesting because all of us in class are used to just hearing tales from speaking people and not in ASL.