#mvsl

[svartikotturinn]

Just imagine if IT ever tried to scare linguists.

‘I have existed for æons upon æons…’ ‘Whoa whoa whoa hold up. Do you speak PIE?’ ‘…What?’ ‘Well if you’ve existed for so long please tell us you speak it’ ‘Uh yeah I obviously had to learn it eventually to—’ ‘Oh thank you seriously please tell us if this reconstruction is right—(clears throat, utters incomprehensible strings of plosives and laryngeals)’ ‘I think you’re missing the poi—’ ‘HOLD UP. What about extinct Native American langauages? Dude you have no idea how long we’ve wanted to get good data on those—’ ‘…“Dude”?’ ‘Oh! Oh! Plains Indian Sign Language. Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language. You have no idea how badly we need data on those—’ ‘…Sigh… These idiots are worse than historians’

[vanshira]

TIL there’s a special variety of sign language unique to Martha’s Vineyard, developed by one of the earliest deaf communities in the US. In the original population of Martha’s Vineyard, while it was still mostly inhabited by fishermen and farmers, there was a common recessive gene that caused deafness, with the end result that most hearing people had at least one deaf relative, two deaf parents almost always had only deaf children, and everyone, hearing or deaf, wound up using MVSL (even between hearing people). Unfortunately, it’s basically extinct now, but it was one of the major predecessors to ASL - when the American School for the Deaf was founded, many of its first students were deaf children from Martha’s Vineyard.

[eightfourone]

on a more fun note

Martha's Vineyard, like the island, had its own SIGN LANGUAGE that was influential on the construction of ASL

and like there was such a high concentration of deaf people that almost everyone had some knowledge of MVSL !!!

and!!!! ASL was codified by the American School for the Deaf ! (which is what i didnt know and was looking for)

but like that is so amazing. an entire community developing a language and becoming essentially bilingual