Word: ameslan
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Hahn keeps her professional distance and differentiates between communication that is characterized by animal instinct and communication that is conceptual and learned from humans. A parrot that asks for a cracker is only mimicking a human or another parrot. But a chimpanzee who can "speak" in Ameslan (American sign language) or Yerkish by striking combinations on a keyboard of color-coded symbols seems to be creating syntax, a property of human language. It is not the voice but the process that is critical...
...subject report that some simian students are eager to join the human club. A female chimp placed a photo of herself in a pile with Eleanor Roosevelt but a snapshot of her own father with the four-legged beasts. A chimp with a degree in Yerkish or Ameslan exhibits the ability to form concepts from his store of word symbols. The Indian who called a gun a "fire stick" or the remote tribe who named an airplane "steam chicken" seems to have employed a conceptual process similar to the chimpanzee who termed a duck a "water bird" or a radish...
...schools for the deaf, especially in Europe, insist that their students learn to lip-read-theoretically, to make their handicap as unnoticeable as possible-Gallaudet favors a "total communications" approach. Signed English, or manual translation of the language, is used in classes as the teachers speak their lectures, while Ameslan, or American Sign Language, a grammatically different and faster sign language, is used by some teachers and is popular among the students out of class. Since many Gallaudet students enroll with vocabulary deficiencies, especially if they are deaf from birth, a preparatory year is added to the normal four-year...
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