Abstract
The poster focuses on the emergence of Czech Sign Language. Various attempts to create family trees of sign language families can be found in academic papers and on the Internet. Not all of them are based on the study of historical materials, comparative historical studies, lexicostatistical methods, etc. Czech sign language is classified in different groups, not always correctly. In my research, I have tried to create a scheme of the emergence of Czech sign language based on the study of texts and dictionaries from the 19th century.
Czech sign language was formed in the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb in Prague, founded in 1786, as one of the first in Europe, based on a decision of Emperor Joseph II, similar to the Vienna Institute founded in 1779. These two institutes were in close relationship to each other, as were the sign languages used there. The influence of French sign language was rather indirect, filtered through Vienna. But we can consider it from a kind of shared ancestor.
The manual methods of teaching were close to each other, and in addition German was the language of instruction in the Prague Institute until 1836. The initial inputs for the development of the Czech sign language were therefore the signs used in Vienna (which can be seen, for example, in Franz Hermann Czech's book, the homesigns of deaf pupils (called natural sign speech in contemporary literature), German and the gradually emerging newly created original signs - based on the conventions among the hearing or deaf teachers and deaf pupils (as can be seen in Johann Mücke's glossary from 1834) - written description of 273 signs.
The great boom of Czech sign language falls in the period of the third director of the Prague Institute, Wenzel Frost (1841-1865) - in the middle of the 19th century, the author of the original Prague teaching method. These signs were then brought back to Vienna through various important personalities (in his 1851 book, Anton Jarisch, who learned the basics of sign language at the Leitmeritz seminary and during a six-month study visit with Frost).
Czech Sign Language has a long history and is probably one of the oldest European sign languages. As a result of belonging to the same territorial unit - Austrian Empire, as well as using similar strategies and methods of educational traditions, Czech Sign Language's historical roots and origin are closely linked to the sign language used in the Austrian countries, in particular in Vienna. However, it gradually developed as an independent language, which spread to other Czech schools for the deaf and subsequently influenced other sign languages. It seems that while education in Prague was at the beginning directly or indirectly partly influenced by the French, Viennese or German methods of using signs, the Bohemian educators eventually found their own way, which had a positive influence especially on the natural formation of Czech Sign Language. Czech sign language was much less influenced by spoken languages (German and Czech), and contained very few calques (loan translations) or signs using the finger alphabet.
Although the language is relatively well-attested in historical documents from the first half of the 19th century-for example, in several glossaries and dictionaries, arguably also the first pictorial ones (Mücke, 1834; Czech, 1836; Jarisch, 1851)-the language is not as well-documented in the second half of the 19th century. Nevertheless, based on the texts of the time, we can create at least a partial image of the origin and development of Czech Sign Language.
Obviously, we do not know exactly what the entire communication system looked like, but we know roughly how it manifested outwardly and what principles the signs were formed on. The authors immediately reflected on the fact that the perception of the outside world is transmitted into the form of signs, especially the perception of movement, shape, appearance, size, activity, habitat, colour, way of use, way of production or location in space. Many of the signs captured in books are still used today in the same or slightly altered form.