Abstract
The roots of Czech Sign Language, one of the oldest European sign languages, are closely associated with the establishment of the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb in Prague in 1786. Since then, some information on visual-manual communication of the deaf has emerged in the literature focused on deaf education.
The authors of these texts were predominantly educators working in institutes for deaf children; most of them commonly encountered sign language and often had some knowledge of it. Although these texts are non-linguistic, they serve as a rich source of information about the origin and development of sign language - the mother tongue of the deaf.
The deaf were seen as predestined to create a nearly universal language based on natural gestures when interacting with their hearing surroundings. This simple homesign was further developed in schools.
Based on the convention established between teachers and pupils, the sign language was constantly evolving and transforming, new signs were emerging, and signs for concrete as well as abstract concepts were created. Thus, Czech Sign Language emerged and was passed on to future generations of pupils of the deaf institutes. 19th century texts provide information about how the signs were formed and what they looked like.
In the present text, we focus on texts and especially dictionaries from the first half of the 19th century. Probably the oldest and most extensive historical source of Czech signs is the glossary with written sign descriptions published in 1834 by Johann Mücke.Other important sources include books by Czech natives Franz Hermann Czech (1836) and Hieronymus Anton Jarisch (1851), containing pictures, as well as written descriptions of signs.
The texts mentioned above are written in German. Czech texts do not begin to appear until the second half of the 19th century.
All texts give us a naive reflection of the origin and development of sign language. However, the facts found in them were forgotten during the 20th century, when Czech Sign Language was suppressed.
The texts have been long neglected by Czech educators and, later, linguists. Here, we report on our research in school archives and libraries and mention the most important of them and bring a short synthesis of their contents.