FYI
Devva Kasnitz, PhD
Devvaco Consulting, 1614 D St. Eureka, CA 95501-2345 -- devva@earthlink.net
or devvaco@gmail.com
Adj Professor, City University of New YorkSchool of Professional
StudiesDisability Studies
Text: 510-206-5767, She/Her/Hers
From: The Disability-Research Discussion List
DISABILITY-RESEARCH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK On Behalf Of John Lee Clark
Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2022 3:45 AM
To: DISABILITY-RESEARCH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: The New Yorker
Hello everyone! John here:
The New Yorker has just gone live with a feature story about Protactile!
This is easily the highest-prrofile coverage of Protactile to date, and it's
such a blessing that it came about through the diligent and brilliant
offices of Andrew Leland, a hearing blind journalist who took care to meet
some of us, read everything there is on PT, attend a seminar, and to immerse
himself, albeit briefly, in PT spaces.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/deafblind-communities-ma
y-be-creating-a-new-language-of-touch
DeafBlind Communities May Be Creating a New Language of Touch
Protactile began as a movement for autonomy and a system of tactile
communication. Now, some linguists argue, it is becoming a language of its
own.
By Andrew Leland
May 12, 2022
Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; Source photographs from
Getty
When John Lee Clark was five years old, in 1983, he entered a small Deaf
program within a public school near his home in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
Clark was a dreamy kid who dressed in tucked-in button-downs and pressed
slacks. He came from a large Deaf familyhis father and brother are
DeafBlind, his mother and sister are Deaf and sightedand the family had
communicated in American Sign Language (or A.S.L.) for generations. On
Clarks first day of kindergarten, his mother, worried, followed his school
bus in her car. When she surprised him at school to ask if he was O.K.,
Clark said that he was fine but that the bus driver had forgotten how to
speak. His mother laughed and reminded him that the driver didnt know how
to speak: she was hearing! This is a common story among Deaf families,
Clark told me recently. The gradual dawning that all those mutes could
actually talk with one another, but in a very different way.
In third grade, Clark began a bilingual Deaf program. Instruction was in
A.S.L., but students were grouped on the basis of their ability to read
English, a second language that Clark accessed only in print. My literacy
was abysmal, he said. He still has a workbook from that time, in which he
answered questionsWhat is your favorite sport? Who are the members of
your family?with drawings instead of in English. But he was gifted in
A.S.L., and teachers would ask him for help with tricky words. He sometimes
pranked them by inventing ostentatiously elaborate versions. The word
heaven is difficult for A.S.L. learners, involving a precise looping of
the hands; Clark added several gratuitous loops.
At twelve, Clark began attending a residential Deaf school, many of whose
students came from Deaf families. But, around this time, he began to go
blind. Hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. have some combined
hearing and vision loss, but most are older adults and have spent the bulk
of their lives hearing and sighted. A much smaller groupabout ten thousand,
according to some estimatesbecome DeafBlind earlier in life; a leading
genetic cause is Usher syndrome. Clark, his father, and his brother have
Usher, which can cause a person to be born deaf and to gradually go blind.
At fourteen, Clark started to lose track of A.S.L. conversations. I was
this boy who always said, Say again?, who might collide into you, Clark
told me. So pathetic. He began reading in Braille, which his father had
encouraged him to learn as a child, and started walking with a white cane.
In high school, Clark stopped trying to follow A.S.L. visually and began
using tactile reception, feeling words with his hands. This helped, but
miscommunication was common. A.S.L. is a fundamentally visual language. The
dominant-hand gestures for the words stamp and fun, for instance, look
very similar, except that stamp begins near the mouth, whereas fun
starts at the nose. Yes-or-no questions are signified with raised eyebrows,
and sentences can be negated with a shake of the head. When Clark would
reply in A.S.L., hed have no idea how the person was responding, or whether
she was still paying attention at all; he said that it was like talking to
a wall. He attended Gallaudet, a Deaf university in Washington, D.C., with
his future partner, Adrean, a sighted-Deaf artist. It was really when I got
married that I noticed more serious problems, he told me. He would come
home from the store without the items that Adrean had requested, and
misunderstood the timing of their appointments: Itd blow up on me, how
that information in ASL had failed to register.
On September 11, 2001, Clark went to a literature class at the University of
Minnesota, where he was working toward his bachelors degree. When he
arrived, his interpreters made the hand shape for airplane, and ran it
into a raised finger twice. Clark interpreted this as an airplane hitting
two poles, and assumed that he was hearing about a local-news storyperhaps
about a hobbyist in a prop plane hitting telephone wires. It wasnt until he
got home that he learned how much he must have missed: the tear-streaked
faces, the TV footage running on loop. (I heard remarkably similar stories
about 9/11 and other cataclysmic news events from several DeafBlind people.)
In 2013, Clark attended a training, in Minneapolis, in Protactile, a new
movement that was encouraging DeafBlind people to reject the stigma, in
American culture, against touch, which often leaves them cut off from the
world around them. According to Protactiles principles, rather than waiting
for an interpreter to tell her about the apples available at the grocery
store, a DeafBlind person should plunge her hands into the produce bins. If
a sighted friend pulls out her phone in the middle of a conversation to
check a weather alert, she should bring her DeafBlind interlocutors hand to
her pocket as well, to understand where the weather forecast is coming from.
Protactile includes a set of practices to make tactile communication more
legible. One of its creators, a DeafBlind woman named Jelica Nuccio, showed
Clark how it worked. They sat facing each other, their legs touching, and
Nuccio rested Clarks hand on her knee, explaining that, as she spoke, he
should tap to indicate that he understood, like noddinga practice called
back-channelling. Nuccio articulated words into Clarks hand, but also
directly onto his arms, back, chest, and lower thighs. In A.S.L., pronouns
are articulated as points in space; you might designate Minneapolis as a
spot in the air near your left shoulder, and Seattle as a spot near your
right, and then those gestures stand in for the cities. Nuccio showed Clark
how to indicate them as points on the body instead: a two-fingered press on
each shoulder.
It didnt feel like a lightning-bolt moment, Clark told me. It was all
too natural. But after the training he noticed changes in his household. He
and Adrean began using a Protactile principle called co-presence: if she
came into a room, she would brush him to let him know that she was there.
Before, theyd sat around the table, and whoever sat next to Clark
interpreted what the rest of the family said. Afterward, they began eating
in informal clusters, allowing for tactile group conversations.
In the years since, Protactile has spread across the country. Today, most
DeafBlind adults have heard of Protactiles call to place touch at the
center of their lives. Clark, who has become a leader in the movement,
compared it to the Deaf Pride movement of the nineteen-eighties, when more
Deaf people began speaking A.S.L. in public, insisting that hearing people
gesture back. A few hundred people use Protactiles communication practices
dailya very small group. Still, several linguists have come to believe
that, among some of its frequent users, Protactile is developing into its
own language, with words and grammatical structures that have diverged from
those of A.S.L. I am totally convinced that this is no tweak of A.S.L.,
Diane Brentari, one of the premier linguists of sign language, who teaches
at the University of Chicago, told me. This is a new language. Clark
believes that Protactile has the potential to upend centuries of DeafBlind
isolation. Its an exciting time to be DeafBlind, he has written. The
single most important development in DeafBlind history is in full swing.
This past December, I met Clark in an old stone building that houses some of
the University of Chicagos linguistics labs. Clark is tall, with a youthful
face. He lives with his partner and their three children, who are hearing
and sighted, in St. Paul. He writes poems that are published regularly in
Poetry magazine; he won a National Magazine Award, in 2020, for a piece on
tactile art, and has both a poetry collection and a book of essays
forthcoming from Norton. When we met, I was struck by the similarity between
his presence in person and the way he comes across over e-mail; in both, he
is affectionately didactic. I had assumed that he would speak through my
interpreter, but he insisted that he address me directly while she watched
and translated, so that I could experience the feel of Protactile.
I have a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, the visual component of
Usher syndrome, which is causing me to slowly go blind. (My hearing is
unaffected.) As Clark and I faced each other, our white canes leaning in a
corner of the room, he kneaded my shoulders, and instantly found my baseball
cap, which I use as a sort of cane for my faceit saves me from slamming my
head into open cabinet doors. Lots of people with Usher syndrome and R.P.
will use these kinds of caps, Clark said. He playfully pulled it off my
head and pressed it to my chest. If you want to up your game in
Protactile, he said, then what youre going to need to do is get rid of
that cap and get your hands busy.
The title of Clarks new poetry collection, How to Communicate, captures
what has always been the central problem for DeafBlind people. DeafBlind
children living in linguistic isolation can spontaneously develop home signs
that their immediate families understand. Laura Bridgman, who lost her sight
and hearing to scarlet fever in eighteen-thirties New Hampshire, had signs
for father (her hand drawn across her cheeks, describing his whiskers) and
spinning wheel (a rotating hand). But, without a wider community, home
signs cant grow into full languages. In 1837, the educator Samuel Gridley
Howe recruited Bridgman to attend what would later be called Perkins, the
first American school for the blind, in Massachusetts. Howe had previously
visited Hartfords American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, an incubator for
what would soon emerge as American Sign Language, but dismissed signing as
little more than pantomime. Instead, he and others at Perkins taught
Bridgman to read and write English, using raised letters, which she quickly
mastered. He relentlessly publicized this achievement, and Bridgman became
an international celebrity.
Forty years later, Helen Kellers mother read Charles Dickenss account of
meeting with Bridgman, and reached out to Perkins, which sent a recent
graduate, Annie Sullivan, to educate Keller. Sullivan finger-spelled English
words into Kellers hands, hoping that she would slowly pick up the
language, the way infants pick up spoken language. The story of Kellers
breakthrough, as her teacher placed her hand under a stream of water while
finger-spelling W-A-T-E-R into the other, is a canonical scene in American
history. Theres a bronze statue of Keller at the water pump in the U.S.
Capitol, and the moment was immortalized in the 1962 film The Miracle
Worker. The miracle is Sullivans feat of bringing language to a
DeafBlind personsomeone understood to be, as Howe described Bridgman,
consigned to the darkness and silence of the tomb.
Clark has no patience for this sacred image of Kellers DeafBlind epiphany.
There was already a word for water, he said. Keller had developed dozens
of home signs with her family before Sullivan arrived, for words such as
ice cream (pretending to turn the crank of the freezer, then shivering)
and bread (I would imitate the acts of cutting the slices and buttering
them, Keller wrote). What Helen learned to do was to perform a stunt,
Clark has written. Annie was attempting the equivalent of forcing Helen
Keller to utter a pentasyllabic word . . . whenever she wanted water. If
youre thirsty, say ideology or specification or liability.
In Kellers lifetime, other methods of DeafBlind communication arose. In
public, Keller used the Tadoma method, in which she placed a thumb on the
throat of her interlocutor and the rest of her fingers across that persons
lips and jawa kind of tactile lip-reading. There were several variations on
an alphabet glove, printed with English letters so that a sighted person
could tap out a message, but communicating letter by letter was cumbersome
and slow. Today, some DeafBlind people communicate orally, many using
hearing aids or cochlear implants, which usually offer only partial access
to speech. Tactile sign language is also used, but issues with
intelligibility remain. A 1995 study found that DeafBlind people understand
as little as sixty per cent of a sentence conveyed through tactile sign
language. Various systems have been devised to improve tactile
communication. In the nineteen-nineties, Trine Næss, a DeafBlind Norwegian
woman, standardized Haptics, a system of touch signals for common words:
eleven for colors, eight for drinks. For a time, some people were, like,
Do you support Haptics or P.T.? Clark told me. But you really cannot
compare the twoits not a Pepsi-vs.-Coke situation, but Pepsi vs.
Cadillac.
In 2005, Jelica Nuccio took over as the first DeafBlind director of
Seattles DeafBlind Service Center (or D.B.S.C.), which offered social
services to about a hundred people in the region. Thirty years earlier, a
nonprofit called the Seattle Lighthouse for the Blind had established a
program that employed DeafBlind people to do industrial work, and, in the
decades since, the city had become a kind of DeafBlind mecca. Nuccio is
fifty-seven, with long, dark hair and a bright laugh. I was ready to move
to Seattle and start a new chapter, she said.
Nuccio had come to sign language late. As an adolescent, she attended a
school in St. Louis that taught the oralist method, drilling Deaf students
in gruelling exercises to learn how to read lips and produce speech. The
nuns said if you signed, you were stupid, she said. If you point at
something in sign, you look like an animal. She learned A.S.L. only in
college, at the Rochester Institute of Technology, after her Deaf classmates
mocked her speech by using a derogatory word for oralism in A.S.L., two
horizontal forearms coming together like giant lips flapping: blah blah
blah. In 1996, as Nuccio was becoming increasingly blind, she went to the
Helen Keller National Center, a training facility on Long Island. But she
felt that it was run like a prison. In the cafeteria, they immediately
started shovelling food at me, she said. They werent even communicating
with me. I was in a feeding trough. I was, like, I have degrees, people!
(A spokesperson for the center told me that, for fifty-five years,
thousands of DeafBlind individuals have benefitted from HKNCs programs
and added that its staff is knowledgeable, helpful and kind.)
Nuccio was disappointed by what she found at the D.B.S.C. Sighted employees
and interpreters dominated life there. Blindness is enormously stigmatized
in Deaf culture, and many of the DeafBlind people at the D.B.S.C., whom
Nuccio called the tunnel-vision people, clung to their dwindling eyesight,
continuing to use visual A.S.L. even as it grew difficult. The tactile
people ate in a separate group at lunch and were treated with pity and
condescension. DeafBlind people often use interpreters to interact with the
hearing-sighted world, but, in Seattle, they used them in DeafBlind groups,
too: each client would speak to her own interpreter, who would repeat the
message to other interpreters, who would then relay it to their clients. I
didnt understand why they would call Seattle the DeafBlind mecca when it
was run that way, Nuccio said. Yes, there are a lot of DeafBlind people
here. But so what? Why is that a mecca?
Nuccio hired aj granda, who is DeafBlind and had worked on and off for the
D.B.S.C. The pair recalled that the interpreter program at a nearby
community college had posted a sign on the wall that said ASL Zone: when
you entered the room, you agreed to abide by the rules of Deaf space by
turning off your voice. They decided to make the D.B.S.C. a
DeafBlind-friendly zone, modelled on the same principle. But what were the
rules of DeafBlind space?
The first rule that they established came to be called air space is dead
space. DeafBlind people at the D.B.S.C. were continually left out of A.S.L.
conversations among sighted people. Now, whether you were DeafBlind or not,
all communication needed to happen in the realm of touch. Granda told me
that their conversations with Nuccio had become so adapted to tactile
reception that sighted friends could no longer follow them. To make tactile
words even more expressive, the pair gradually expanded the canvas of touch
to include the back, arms, lower thighs, and upper chest. Back-channelling
emerged to capture what A.S.L. speakers communicate through facial
expressionsa limp hand laid on the knee could signify exhaustion, and a
tense grip might indicate terror. Everything was kind of clunky, and
everyone was awkward with how we were using each others bodies, Nuccio
said. ASL was in the mix, and it was a mess. It was a great, messy start.
Nuccio and granda called their method Protactile, and, within a few years,
they were holding trainings. But, for the most part, the sight-reliant
people were set in their ways. They often arrived, found a chair, and sat
down, waiting for their interpreters. I said, If you need to know where
anything is, you can ask a DeafBlind person, Nuccio said. She would take
their hands, and together theyd touch the drinks and the snacks. Nuccio and
granda encountered tremendous resistance among employees and clients at the
D.B.S.C. DeafBlind people are oppressed by Deaf people in the Deaf
community, granda said. People who are oppressed tend to oppress others.
Nuccio ended up firing much of her staff, including many of her friends. But
she and granda believed that they were developing a new political framework
to achieve DeafBlind autonomy.
The pair hadnt set out to alter the linguistics of A.S.L., but, as
DeafBlind people in Seattle took Protactiles methods home, words began to
change in their hands. Granda said, they realized ASL was no longer their
language. The A.S.L. word yes, for instance, is a fist bobbing in space,
like a nodding head. But by touch it felt wrong. We knew what it meant
because we knew the ASL word, but it was weird, Clark told me. A head
rubbing itself against a wall? It did not make natural sense in contact
space. The A.S.L. word no, a two-fingered pinch, was similarly
off-putting. It felt like an ostrich trying to pluck some hair off your
head, Clark said. We never had a meeting to invent any new words. Life
went on, and we had to say yes and no a thousand times every day! In time,
the community replaced these A.S.L. words with words that felt more
tactilely intuitive: yes became an affirmative patting, and no felt like
a hand swiftly erasing a message from a whiteboard. Those P.T. words are so
simple, duh-worthy, so elegant. And they have absolutely no relation to ASL
or the ASL words yes and no, Clark said. Not a shred in common.
The A.S.L. word vehicle is made with a hand turned on its side so that the
thumb is like a driver piloting a craft through the air. By touch, all you
can feel is a pinky grazing your leg. Over time, the Protactile word became
a flat palm driving across the lower thigh. And speakers developed ways of
elaborating on these new words. Instead of describing the size of a vehicle
in terms of how big it looks, Nuccio and granda wrote, the tactile word can
describe a vehicle in terms of how heavy it is, or how much friction it
generates on the roadthe features more relevant to touch. To signify a
large vehicle, the speaker presses a flat palm down hard on the receivers
leg. For a compact car, shed use a lighter touch.
Some worried that Protactiles intense tactile immersion could feel
inappropriate, including to DeafBlind survivors of sexual or domestic
violence, an objection that its creators have had to grapple with. Granda
has taught Protactile to numerous DeafBlind people whose prior traumas made
them resistant to touch. We care about survivors and want to make sure that
those people feel safe, granda said. But they argued that anyone can feel
comfortable and safe in Protactile. There is a natural form of appropriate
consent built into the language that, with constant conversations, actually
can bring about healing, they said.
By the mid-twenty-tens, Protactile had evolved from a set of communication
practices into a national movement. Granda and Nuccio made Braille bumper
stickers, released videos, and travelled the country giving workshops and
hosting P.T. happy hours, where locals could learn the basics. Nuccio and
granda eventually drifted apart, and granda has spent time working at the
Seattle Lighthouse and teaching Protactile at Seabeck, an annual DeafBlind
retreat near the city. In 2014, Nuccio established an organization dedicated
to Protactile training called Tactile Communications. Around the same time,
Clark joined the Protactile movement, and has led trainings that have
reached hundreds of people.
This past December, a half-dozen of Protactiles most fluent speakers met up
at the University of Chicago. They had come at the invitation of Terra
Edwards, a linguistic anthropologist who is studying Protactile with her
colleague Brentari, the sign-language linguist. By visual standards, the lab
had a drab, provisional air: it was empty aside from a haphazard scattering
of metal folding chairs and a table pushed against the wall. But, in
DeafBlind space, this was a comfortable arrangement, ideal for generating
ad-hoc clusters of tactile conversations, with no armrests or conference
tables to separate peoples bodies. Nearly all of the DeafBlind people were
in stocking feet. With shoes, everything feels the same, Hayley Broadway,
who had flown in from Austin, said. I dont feel the ground. I cant feel
if its dirty or if its rough. Earlier that year, Broadway had married her
husband, who is also DeafBlind, in a Protactile ceremony. They walked down
the aisle in an intertwined cluster of friends. For the exchange of vows,
the officiant spoke in Protactile to both Broadway and her husband, forming
a three-way conversation. Everyone at the wedding was barefoot, and the
couple served sushi. We just wanted finger food, she said, something you
can eat with one hand while you could stay in communication with the other.
Clark walked into the room wearing a burgundy shirt. He had a co-navigator
with him, who joined him in interactions with the hearing-sighted world of
airline attendants, cabdrivers, and cashiers. But the co-navigator trailed
behind as Clark strode into the room, reaching out to explore his
environment. He found Nuccio, spoke his Protactile name onto her backtwo
quick downward strokesand they hugged. My interpreter put her hands on
their backs, signalling her presence. This was, I realized, what it meant to
be communicating in contact space: I was sitting a few feet away, but my
observation was covert; it was only when I laid my hands on the group that I
was actually present with them.
Clark now speaks to his partner and children in Protactile. Jaz Herbers, who
retired after fifteen years working in I.T. because of his changing vision,
saw early videos explaining Protactile in 2013. I was, like, Thats it!
he told me. Thats the answer to my life now. Today, he leads Protactile
trainings around the country. Rhonda Voight-Campbell, a forty-nine-year-old
instructor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, attended a residential
training in Protactile after she became increasingly blind, and felt the
full possibilities of conversation return. I ate at the dinner table with
several DeafBlind peers in the dark, she said. Hands and feet patting,
groping, and stomping. Oscar Chacon, who works part time in Edwardss lab,
told me that it annoys him when hearing-sighted people, upon learning about
Protactile, say they find it inspiring. Were human beings, he said,
using language the way humans use language.
Since the Protactile conversations that I observed all passed in a flutter
of movements that I didnt understand, Clark took a moment to demonstrate a
wordoppression. He took two hands and pressed them down onto mine. I
tried to repeat it back: Is this oppression? P.T. isnt a code where two
hands pressing down equals oppression. It could also be something like
this, he said, and dragged his hand slowly down my arm. This person is
oppressed, he said, and gripped my chest, crushing something invisible
there. He cycled through a range of other movements. My interpreter became
uncharacteristically overwhelmed. I cant think of enough English words to
equal what hes giving you, she said. At first, I interpreted Clarks
demonstration as suggesting that Protactile lacked precision. But each
variety of oppression that Clark had shown mewhich my interpreter scrambled
to translate as repression, suppression, and so onintuitively connoted
oppression: they were all forms of dragging, weighting, gripping. Its
just that they had no direct correspondence with English.
Unlike with spoken language, which can be transcribed or taped, or visual
sign language, which can be filmed, there is still no way to make a tactile
recording. This means that the only way to communicate in Protactile is in
person. At one point, graduate students demonstrated new devices that could
send taps and presses from a distancea kind of primitive haptic FaceTime.
But the DeafBlind group was unimpressed by the technology, which could
transmit only slow, single taps on a limited patch of the body, and had none
of the rich array of squeezes and presses that Protactile deploys. Today,
many DeafBlind people stay in touch using a Braille display, which has dots
that pop up and down to render text from a computer or phone. (Im learning
to use one, too.) Navigating cluttered Web pages can be nightmarish in
Braille, but the DeafBlind world thrives in the plain-text realm of e-mail
Listservs. In lieu of LOL, Protactile e-mailers type LOY, for Laughing
on You, invoking the Protactile mode of laughter, a spidery tickle. Clark
teaches college-level seminars entirely by e-mail. He once wrote, Before PT
came along, I had my most fun, found the most joy, experienced life the most
on listservs.
Clark has considered applying for teaching positions at universities, but
told me that he wishes that they hired environmentsgroups of DeafBlind
colleagues following the rules of contact spacerather than individuals. In
Chicago, I noticed that the DeafBlind people carried their Protactile
conversation with them like a miniature weather system as they made their
way through the campus. They remained in contact with one another and
explored their environment, touching walls, trees, and the raised letters on
signs, sharing their impressions. At lunch, they occupied a large communal
table at a café on campus. Clark felt his way to one side and ended up with
his hands on the back of a hearing-sighted woman at another table. She
tapped back on the communal table, trying to signal where he should go, and
then continued her conversation with her lunch partner. When Clark made it
back to his seat, he announced, I found two mutes!
In 2006, just as the Protactile movement was beginning, Terra Edwards, then
a graduate student, was at Seabeck, the annual retreat near Seattle.
Outside, she saw a DeafBlind person forcefully correcting her interpreter.
This was highly abnormal, Edwards said. I could tell that was a shift in
the authority structure. But Edwards was also interested in the correction
itself. The interpreter had pointed at something in the air, and the
DeafBlind person, with some degree of angst and irritation, told her to
instead draw a diagram on her palm. People had pretty strong opinions about
whether or not you were doing it right, Edwards said. To me, that
suggested that there was some kind of system at play.
Edwards (and, eventually, Brentari) spent the following years filming some
of Protactiles most fluent speakers telling stories and describing objects,
and found an increasingly conventionalized system, with an emerging lexicon
of its own, organized by new phonological rules. When Edwards shared these
rules with DeafBlind people, they knew exactly what she meant, even if
theyd never had a reason to spell it out, just as English speakers are able
to follow complex grammatical rules without having any idea what an
indefinite clause is. By 2014, Edwards believed that, among those who had
immersed themselves in Protactile, the practice was evolving into its own
language. Other linguists I spoke to agreed. Molly Flaherty, a developmental
psychologist and sign-language linguist at Davidson College, told me, How
amazing is it that language is something thats flexible enough to work in
yet another modality?
In the nineteen-fifties, the linguist Noam Chomsky identified what he came
to call the poverty of the stimulus, the idea that language learners
receive vanishingly few clues for how linguistic systems work. Ann Senghas,
a cognitive scientist at Barnard, told me, Someone gives you a pie, and you
have to figure out how to make it. Chomsky concluded that our brains are
endowed from birth with aspects of grammar, allowing us to reproduce
language without formal instruction. More recent theories hold that we are
simply incredibly good at unconscious statistical analysis of linguistic
patterns. Whatever the case, the human brain is a superb language-decoding
machine.
In the absence of a shared language, people will create new ones. In the
seventeenth century, French colonizers brought enslaved Africans to what
would eventually be called Haiti. These Africans brought their
languagesIgbo, Fongbe, Bantu, and many otherswith them. As they
communicated, their language converged, drawing from the varieties of French
that were spoken on the island, and incorporating elements of West African
grammars. In the course of the eighteenth century, a new language, today
known as Haitian Creole, or Kreyòl, emerged. Michel DeGraff, a linguist at
M.I.T., told me, of early speakers of Haitian Creole, Theyre not sitting
down and taking language classes. Theyre learning and innovating on the
go.
Starting in the seventies, when several new schools for young Deaf children
were established in Nicaragua, students arrived with their own sets of home
signs. But, within a few years, their signs began to evolve. Senghas told me
that the process was like going through hundreds of years of language
change in just a decade. The word for rice began as a pinching motion,
showing the grains size, followed by a flicking gesture that mimicked the
process of removing stones from the rice before cooking it, and another
demonstrating how its eaten. In the eighties, the word simplified to just
the flicking motion, its most distinctive element. Its not even the most
salient thing about rice, Senghas said. But a system survives because its
learnable.
Edwards and Brentari believe that Protactile is in the very early stages of
such an evolution. They found that much of Protactiles archival lexicon
comes from A.S.L., but the rules governing how these words are articulated
have changed significantly. Edwards and Brentari have studied gestures that
make up Protactile wordsthe equivalent of phonological units like puh,
buh, shuhand catalogued them: you can trace, grip-wiggle, slap, and so
on. There are rules for how these movements can be combined. A single-finger
tap followed by a two-finger tap never happens in Protactile, as it can be
difficult to distinguish the two, whereas a single-finger tap could easily
be followed by a two-finger press. These rules emerged intuitively, without
conscious codification. But when theyre broken it doesnt feel right, just
as if an English speaker tried to combine a P and a B sound without a
vowel separating them.
The linguists also observed new words being created. In A.S.L., king is
made by taking the manual alphabets K and sliding it down ones chest,
like a royal sash. But the K was hard to recognize by touch. A new version
emerged during a Protactile training in 2018. Everyone noticed that Jaz
Herbers, the former I.T. specialist, had particular preferences. For
instance, he positioned himself closest to the air-conditioner on a hot day,
and bought a king-size bag of M&Ms. Other DeafBlind people began jokingly
giving him a tactile crown. By the end of the training, hed received his
Protactile name: a one-fingered circle followed by a downward movement that
evoked the crown and its weight. A few years later, Edwards noticed a group
of DeafBlind people talking about getting a fast-food lunch, using the
A.S.L. word burger followed by Herberss P.T. name. Soon, any time anyone
said king, thats the word they were using, Edwards said. If Protactile
continues to spread, theres a chance that future speakers will trace the
etymology of king back to Herbers, much as English speakers today owe the
name for a lunch of meat between slices of bread to John Montagu, the fourth
Earl of Sandwich.
Edwards and Brentari found that Protactile was doing things that other
languages couldnt. Protactile is full of a kind of tactile onomatopoeia, in
which a hand resembles the feel of the thing its describing. In what the
linguists call proprioceptive constructions, the speaker recruits the
receivers body to complete the word, say, by turning her hand into a tree
(five fingers as branches) or a lollipop (fist as candy). At one point, I
asked Nuccio where she was from, and she told me to make my hand into a
fist, which represented the globe. You and I are in America, over here,
she said, touching my first knuckle. And this is the ocean. She traced a
finger to my wrist to find the country where she was born, Croatia. She
accomplished all of this in a series of movements that Edwards said followed
consistent grammatical rules. At another point, Nuccio described how
difficult her life had been when shed worked as a technician in a genetics
lab as she went blind. She had me point my finger up, and told me that it
was now the flame of the Bunsen burner that shed used in her lab. She
demonstrated how to adjust the flame on one of my knuckles, and how delicate
the apparatus was. I was astonished by the precision of this tactile
illustration, which felt, in the moment, more vivid than any verbal
description could have.
Some linguists remain skeptical that Protactile has yet emerged as an
independent language. I think its fascinating whats happening, Wendy
Sandler, a sign-language linguist at the University of Haifa, told me. But
I have a lot of questions about how its going to develop. She said that
many of the functions of A.S.L.for example, the way that parts of sentences
are separated spatially on the bodystill hadnt made it into Protactiles
system. Most P.T. users in the U.S. already know ASL very well and can
mentally fill in the gaps, Sandler said. But these gaps do not yet seem
to be filled in by P.T. itself. Another linguist told me that she believed
that Protactile is more like a dialect of A.S.L., similar to how there are
many dialects of American English. There is no single test for whether a
form of communication has emerged as a language, and the debate is ongoing.
Senghas compared A.S.L.s influence on Protactile to the presence of French
or Latin in English. Its got its seeds in A.S.L. in many ways, but its a
different language, she said. If theres no English, theres no Morse
code. Whereas, with Protactile, if theres no A.S.L., theres still P.T.
On their last night in Chicago, the Protactile group gathered at a locals
house for a party. I was one of a handful of hearing people there, and one
of only a few who didnt know Protactile. My interpreter wanted to visit
with a friend, and as soon as she left the room I felt like Clarks
kindergarten bus driver: Id forgotten how to speak. In the kitchen, the
host was blasting bass-heavy eighties hits, and I felt the vibrations in my
chest, which is how many Deaf people listen to music. Elsewhere, it was
quieter. I sat on the couch in a room packed with a dozen people all engaged
in a silent but lively conversation that I couldnt understand.
The party was supposed to feature a tactile game called a P.T. Hat Slam. The
game never materialized, but the host had cleared out a bedroom and laid out
his extensive hat collection for the guests to admire. Clark offered to give
me a tour, without my interpreters help. As he guided my hands over the
hats, I thought that I detected the presence of language: notice how this
hat can fold out; watch out for the spikes on the gladiator helmet. I had no
way of knowing how much was Protactile and how much was just basic gestural
communication; that line is still thinner in Protactile than in established
languages. Later, Clark criticized my performance during his tactile hat
tour. You didnt know how to really feel! he told me. Maybe you were
looking at them with your eyes. You didnt go beyond my hand to touch, to
explore. Thats one skill that has to be taught.
Protactile continues to grow. Nuccio and Clark recently received a
two-million-dollar grant to expand a Protactile interpreter-training
program. There are weeklong retreats on cruise ships and at Florida resorts
(Breezin P.T. Weekend), and experiments in Protactile theatre: in 2018, a
Gallaudet professor staged a Protactile version of Romeo and Juliet. A
handful of Europeans have studied Protactile and taken its techniques back
to France and the Netherlands. But some linguists wonder whether Protactile
will ever fully develop into its own language. Protactile lacks a dense,
in-person DeafBlind community, like the residential Deaf schools that
incubated the development of A.S.L. I was surprised to learn that several
active members of the Protactile movement live with Deaf spouses and
children who resist using Protactile with them.
Most DeafBlind people in the U.S. who have encountered Protactile understand
it as a broadly pro-tactile philosophy, but havent adopted it as a new
language. George Stern, a writer in West Texas, told me, In a lot of my
activities, whether its ballet dancing or practicing salsa, or cooking, I
incorporate touch. When Stern had a hearing-blind girlfriend, he taught her
a series of tactile signalsfingers walking across the back, for exampleto
coördinate passing each other in their narrow kitchen. But, to Stern, who
usually uses hearing aids and communicates orally, the linguistic component
of Protactile still feels rarefied and out of reach. Im glad that there
are people developing P.T. as a language where they are, he said. But how
is it going to function where I am? I dont live in a DeafBlind community. I
live in a primarily hearing-sighted world, in an American culture thats
generally averse to touch. Chris Woodfill, the associate executive director
of the Helen Keller National Center, told me that, though he focussed on
learning tactile modes of communication as his own vision declined, many of
his clients communicate orally, using hearing aids and other assistive
listening devices. An increasing number have received cochlear implants as
childrena practice that remains controversial in the Deaf communityand
never learned visual sign language. As a result, he noted, the center
doesnt push tactile communication on its clients: We lay out the menu, and
its à la carte.
Language development is most productive when its passed through a new
generation, whose infant learners refashion a language as they learn it. But
most people with Usher syndrome dont become blind until early adulthood, so
few would be children when they learned Protactile. Many young children who
are DeafBlind have other disabilities, such as charge or congenital rubella
syndrome, which can cause cognitive delays that affect communication. And
many have hearing-sighted parents who dont know A.S.L. themselves, let
alone Protactile. They understand that the tactile world is important to a
DeafBlind kid, Deanna Gagne, a researcher who is studying language
acquisition in DeafBlind children, told me. They just dont know how to
implement it. During the pandemic, Edwards, Brentari, and Gagne received an
emergency grant from the National Science Foundation to introduce Protactile
to DeafBlind children isolated in their homes. Nuccio played with one
DeafBlind boy for about five months. At first, he was reluctant to have his
hands touched, but, over time, communication improved: Nuccio ran a toy car
up and down his arm, and then used the P.T. word car and made the same
motion, trying to connect the word with the object. Later, the boy made the
same word on her arm.
The richest Protactile environments are still the ones inhabited by the
movements leaders. At Nuccios training center, which she calls P.T. House,
visual A.S.L. is forbidden and her dogs respond only to tactile commands.
And, in their apartment in St. Paul, Clarks family has turned the archival
A.S.L. vocabulary way, way down, to encourage invention. The result has
been an efflorescence of new words. During his bedtime ritual with his
children, Clark has forced himself to discard the A.S.L. phrases he grew up
with, and to come up with Protactile ones instead. To say good night, he
places his hands on a childs shoulders, and brings them together in the
center of the childs chest. I thought I was gesturing, but somehow still
conveying the sentiments, he said. My ASL mind hadnt recognized those as
actual words. Recently, he told a Protactile Theory seminar that he
conducts over e-mail about these new words. He acknowledged that they may
forever remain home signs. But they might seep out into the community, as
Clark converses with the hundreds of people he touches every year. At any
rate, he concluded, if you want to get rid of ASL words for good night,
I love you, and sweet dreams, I have drafts for you!
End of message This Disability-Research
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