Weirdos

When I was a small child, I used to play with the girl next door. She didn’t understand anything I tried to tell her, but it didn’t matter. We played together all the time, using simple gestures to communicate. I thought something was wrong with her, but I adapted easily to the limitation. One day when I was about four, I went inside her house. As I stood there, her mother came downstairs. Nothing happened between her and the girl that I could see. Then I saw her mother point at the doll house in the hallway. The girl ran and moved the doll house back into her room, as if she had just been told to do so. I was astounded. I knew it was different, something different. I knew they had communicated, in a form I couldn’t see. But how? I asked my mother about what I had seen. “They are called ‘hearing’”, she explained. “They don’t sign. They are hearing. They are different. We are Deaf. We sign.” I asked if the family next door are the only ones, the only hearing people. My mother shook her head. “No”, she signed, “it is us who are alone”. I was very surprised. I naturally assumed everyone was like me. (Childhood experience recounted by Sam Supella, in: Perlmutter, David M.: “No nearer the soul”, in: Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 4/1986: 515-523)