Dorothy Casterline, who as a younger researcher at Gallaudet University within the early Nineteen Sixties helped write the primary complete dictionary of American Sign Language, a e-book that revolutionized the research of Deaf tradition, died on Aug. 8 in Irmo, S.C. She was 95.
Pamela Decker Wright, a professor at Gallaudet, the one college designed for the deaf or arduous of listening to within the United States, mentioned Mrs. Casterline died, in a hospital, from problems of a fall.
As an undergraduate English main at Gallaudet, in Washington, within the late Nineteen Fifties, Mrs. Casterline, who had misplaced her listening to at 13, caught the eye of a professor named William Stokoe. In addition to instructing literature, Dr. Stokoe was investigating the grammar and syntax of signal language, which on the time was thought-about nothing greater than a gestural by-product of spoken English.
Dr. Stokoe believed that there was far more to it. His purpose, which he realized in 1965 with Mrs. Casterline and one other professor, Carl Croneberg, as co-authors, was to compile the primary systematic dictionary of what they got here to name American Sign Language.
“The book was Bill’s idea, but Carl and Dorothy did most of the work,” Professor Wright mentioned.
Dr. Stokoe had the imaginative and prescient, however he additionally had an issue: Not solely was he listening to, however he had by no means studied signal language earlier than arriving at Gallaudet in 1955.
Mrs. Casterline was certainly one of his star college students, who “wrote essays better than nine-tenths of the hearing students whose papers I had read for a dozen years elsewhere,” he wrote within the journal Sign Language Studies in 1993.
She was additionally one thing of an outsider, even among the many deaf college students at Gallaudet. Having been born in Hawaii to Japanese American dad and mom, she was among the many first college students of shade on the college — and, Professor Wright mentioned, almost definitely the primary particular person of shade to affix the school.
She graduated with honors in 1958. She then joined the English school as an teacher and labored as a researcher with Dr. Stokoe’s Linguistics Research Laboratory, alongside Mr. Croneberg, who was additionally deaf. (Dr. Stokoe died in 2000. Mr. Croneberg died in 2022.)
With a grant from the National Science Foundation, the trio filmed hundreds of hours of interviews with folks from all walks of life: youngsters and school college students, women and men, Northerners and Southerners.
It was the duty of Mrs. Casterline, who had tremendous, exact handwriting, to transcribe the interviews after which use a specialised typewriter to compile and annotate them. She labored late into the evening and on weekends, generally together with her new child son in a single arm.
The consequence was an enormous assortment of indicators, which, they argued in “A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles” (1965), constituted not a variant of English however a language unto itself, with its personal guidelines. The dictionary organized its entries by hand formations, not by the alphabetical order of their English equivalents.
It was not instantly welcome, both within the Deaf group or amongst linguists typically. The concept that signal language was merely a visible, gestural adjunct to spoken language was too ingrained.
“We’ve always had — and continue to still have — pictures to illustrate how a sign is made, so we’re conditioned to think of American Sign Language as a picture language,” Mrs. Casterline instructed Jane Maher, the creator of “Seeing Language in Sign: The Work of William C. Stokoe” (1996). “Seeing these strange symbols for the first time can be daunting.”
But by the Nineteen Eighties, the dictionary had develop into a cornerstone of a sturdy rising cultural id.
“I feel that if the book hadn’t been published,” Professor Wright mentioned, “I am not sure where we would be now.”
Dorothy Chiyoko Sueoka was born in Honolulu on April 27, 1928. Her father, Toshie Sueoka, was a stonemason and ironworker, and her mom, Takiyo (Yanagikara) Sueoka, was a housemaid.
Dorothy, who was referred to as Dot, misplaced her listening to in seventh grade, although she by no means knew why. She accomplished highschool at what’s now the Hawaii School for the Deaf and Blind. While there, she efficiently lobbied the Honolulu police to stop barring deaf residents from driving vehicles.
She spent three years after highschool working to save cash to attend Gallaudet; on the time, solely college students who lived within the 48 states might obtain monetary help. She enrolled in 1955 and graduated three years later.
She married James Casterline, who died in 2012. She is survived by three grandchildren. Her sons, Jonathan and Rex, died earlier than her.
After engaged on the dictionary, Mrs. Casterline left Gallaudet to boost her household. She additionally labored for a corporation that added captions to traditional films.
Years later, she remained happy with her work with Dr. Stokoe and Mr. Croneberg.
She helped write the dictionary, she instructed Ms. Maher, “to show that deaf people can be studied as linguistic and cultural communities, and not only as unfortunate victims with similar physical and sensory pathologies.”
Source: www.nytimes.com