Rogan Shannon

I wanted to relate this post a little bit to sim-com. Sim-com is a bad idea. (My previous post/video.) In this post I will talk a little bit about a person who really valued ASL and encouraged and supported the continued use of ASL. This person is George W. Veditz. He was a huge leader and advocate in the Deaf community. His sign name is shown in the video, and you can see it in the thumbnail above. He was born hearing, and turned deaf at the age of 8. Veditz then transferred to Maryland School of the Deaf. After that, he went to Gallaudet in the years 1880-1884. After graduating Gallaudet, Veditz taught at the Maryland School of the Deaf, then later transferred to the Colorado School of the Deaf. Time passed, then he became the 7th president of the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) from 1904 to 1910. He was one of the biggest and most visible advocates for ASL. He was also the one who realized that at the time, the new technology – film – was a way to cherish and preserve our signs. And show the world, so they can see our signs. Because of that, NAD established the Motion Picture Project. They raised $5,000 to buy equipment for filming. From 1910-1921, they filmed different kinds of signs, different ways, to preserve for a historical record. In the year 1913, Veditz made a very famous video called “The Preservation of Sign Language.” It’s fourteen minutes long, with no captions. But I will link that video here. And that video has a transcript in the description, so read that if you don’t know sign. It’s very interesting to watch, I suggest you watch it! Yes, it’s long, and he’s not signing that fast but it’s fascinating to see how they signed things in the old way. Fast forward to 2010, the Library of Congress announced that they will put that video on the National Film Registry. That’s pretty cool, something to do with ASL being put on a national registry! I want to pull a quote from that famous video, this is the most quoted part of this 14 minute long video.

As long as we have deaf people on the earth, we will have signs. And as long as we have our films, we can preserve our beautiful signs in their old purity. It is my hope that we all will love and guard our beautiful sign language as the noblest gift God has given to deaf people. -George Veditz

I hope you learned something new from that, or were reminded of something that’s very important to Deaf culture: sign language. And that the idea of preserving sign language has been around for a very long time. I’ll see you next time!