What a deaf child needs to see: Advantages of a natural sign language over a sign system

How and why did Siegmund Prillwitz succeed in getting DGS [German Sign Language] recognized without extensive traveling from congress to congress, like so many colleagues in our field? This question intrigued me (N.H.) in the years after our first meeting in 1984 in Hamburg, when I didn’t see him in the following series of sign language conferences in Europe and the United States. Indeed, he was among the first sign language researchers in northwestern Europe—open, eager, and enthusiastic to discover the structure of DGS and promote the acceptance of “his” sign language in his orally-oriented country. In 2001, visiting the Institut fur Deutsche Gebardensprache, I finally settled on the answer to my question. Siegmund didn’t have to travel: His talent was to send people out from Hamburg and to attract people to Hamburg to discuss work and ideas about many sign languages. He succeeded in this with the support of his ostfriesische Gastfreundlichkeit: Kaffee, Kuchen, Gemutlichkeit. By doing so, he kept every visitor caught by his sense of Deaf art, history, and culture—broadening the visitor’s vision. Indeed, Siegmund doesn’t have to travel extensively. He sends his ideas out as exports, just as the Port of Hamburg distributes valuable products across the world.