What is her name?

A Ugandan butterfly. 

As I have said before, I have some good friends here in Pader, Uganda, who are profoundly deaf.

Some while ago I was with one of my deaf friends in a clinic. She has a lovely personality, almost always sunny, is a skilful and hard working farmer, can braid hair in many different styles, is always smartly dressed, expresses herself with freedom in sign but has almost no formal education.

She needed to see a doctor and wanted someone to interpret for her. Her treatment needed daily attendance for 3 more days so the next day she came and found me. This time she came with her mother and baby sister and off we went to the clinic. I asked her the name of her sister. Her answer rocked me. 'I don't know'.

Various thoughts raced through my brain. 'But you're 18 and responsible, how can you not know your own sister's name?' and 'How come you have never asked?'

Then I began to think more clearly. My friend can 'write her own name' in sign alphabet and on paper but she is very far from being able to write or read fluently. She names herself by her sign name, two fingers together stroked across her forehead. But of course she knows perfectly well who her baby sister is and could doubtless pick her from a crowd of 10,000. Names that we are so used to are labels that we put on people. We use them for all sorts of things from birth certificates to love songs. But they are names in spoken language.

Now the deaf can and do learn to read and write but with varying degrees of success. Which is not surprising when you consider that (most) writing is spoken word coded on to paper (or screen). If you do not know how the spoken word sounds then reading the code gets a lot more challenging. To tell you the truth I have not yet worked out the mental process they use to understand the written code, because they can't 'say it' in their heads like we do (unless post lingually deaf, see below).

Going back to my friend, why should she know the 'hearing name' of her baby sister? When the baby gets older she will probably give her a sign name and that will be I.D enough. If my friend really needs to know (maybe take responsibility for the baby) she will learn the spoken name in written form. But she will never hear it spoken and never speak it herself.

Above, I said that most writing is coded speech. However it struck me that pictographic writing, as used in various forms in and around China, may have parallels to sign language in that it does not spell out a spoken word but conveys a meaning or idea in itself. In our thorough education systems we learn spelling among other esoteric disciplines. But words are not just things that you spell, they are units of meaning that we compile into ideas or descriptions that are conveyed to another person. So it is with sign language. Complex ideas and narratives can be conveyed using the hands, body and face to make words and phrases, strung together into language. That is both a beauty and problem of sign language. It cannot easily be rendered into a written form without translating it through a spoken language on to the page.

What has that to do with a butterfly? If you look carefully at the picture, you may find it.

• For completeness I should say that those who are born deaf (or acquired deafness very young) really have very little idea what speech is meant to be; they have never heard it or they became deaf before language had any meaning for them. These are termed Pre-Lingually Deaf.
• There are plenty of deaf people here in Uganda and throughout the world who became deaf as children, mainly through childhood illnesses. Then there are a lesser number who become deaf as teens or adults through sickness, accident, assault and such like. All these are termed Post-Lingually Deaf. Obviously, the post lingually deaf have a distinct advantage when it comes to lip-reading, vocalising, even reading and writing, because to varying extents they remember what speech feels like to hear and to speak.