(He occasionally is mentioned in papers, although as best as I can tell many D/deaf historians think he's a crank. I suspect it's because while the idea of Ogham being a way of recording a method of fingerspelling is plausible, a lot of people are turned off by, well, his rather old-fashioned (for today) language.)
In the context of when he was writing though, sign languages weren't thought of as being real languages (that didn't come about until the 60s, maybe?), and at the time he was writing, there was a trend in some circles to educate deaf students by fingerspelling everything, and discouraging the use of any other signs. So that is in part why he might consider fingerspelling to be more important than the use of a sign language. But I might be wrong.
But thank-you for sharing, I've been wondering for a while just what Macalister had written. =)
no subject
(He occasionally is mentioned in papers, although as best as I can tell many D/deaf historians think he's a crank. I suspect it's because while the idea of Ogham being a way of recording a method of fingerspelling is plausible, a lot of people are turned off by, well, his rather old-fashioned (for today) language.)
In the context of when he was writing though, sign languages weren't thought of as being real languages (that didn't come about until the 60s, maybe?), and at the time he was writing, there was a trend in some circles to educate deaf students by fingerspelling everything, and discouraging the use of any other signs. So that is in part why he might consider fingerspelling to be more important than the use of a sign language. But I might be wrong.
But thank-you for sharing, I've been wondering for a while just what Macalister had written. =)