| Prior to the development of gestural languages which followed the structure of English, many members of the deaf community had difficulty learning, understanding, and reading English. In addition, many hearing parents of deaf children had problems teaching communication skills to their children as both the parent and the child were new to the language and syntax of American Sign Language. In 1969 a group composed of friends, family, teachers, and members of the deaf community met in southern California to compose a method to represent English in a gestural language. From this meeting arose three published languages: Seeing Essential English (SEE1), Linguistics of Visual English (LOVE), and Signing Exact English (SEE2). Many of the signs for these languages were borrowed from ASL, however a good proportion of vocabulary is unique to each of these languages. Signing Exact English is probably the most common Signed English language today. |
