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About the universality of sign language, I recalled reading about the National Theater of the Deaf on tour...I just found the quote! Here's the Oliver Sacks quote: "the hundreds of sign languages that have arisen spontaneously all over the world are as distinct and strongly differentiated as the world's range of spoken languages. There is no one universal sign lnaguage. And yet there may be universals *in* sign languages, which help to make it possible for their users to understand one another far more quickly than users of unrelated spoken languages could understand each other. Thus a monolingual Japanese would be lost in Arkansas, as a monolingual American would be lost in rural Japan. But a deaf American can make contact relatively swiftly with his signing brothers in Japan, Russia, or Peru - he would hardly be lost at all. Signers (especially native signers) are adept at picking up, or at least understanding, other signed languages, in a way which one would never find among speakers (except, perhaps, in the most gifted). Some understanding will usually be established within minutes, accomplished mostly by gesture and mime (in which signers are extraordinarily proficient). By the end of a day, a grammarless pidgin will be established. And within three weeks, perhaps, the sigher will possess a very reasonable knowledge of the other sign language, enough to allow detailed discussion on quite complex issues. There was an impressive example of this in August 1988, when the National Theater of the Deaf visited Tokyo and joined the Japan Theater of the Deaf in a joint production. "The deaf actors in the American and Japaese acting companies were soon chatting," reported David E. Sanger in the New York Times (8/29/88), "and by late afternoon during one recent rehearsal it became clear they were already on each other's wavelengths." from Oliver Sacks' SEEING VOICES: A JOURNEY INTO THE WORLD OF THE DEAF -- Johanna Halbeisen Woodland Elementary School(K-4) Southwick, Mass jhalbei@k12.oit.umass.edu