■Pointing

I think most people were told not to point at other people when they were young. As a child, I often pointed at people and my relatives slapped down my hand. My Deaf parents never said anything about pointing so I learnt from this experience that I must not point directly in the presence of hearing people.

However, pointing is an integral part of sign language, functioning as pronoun or end-of-sentence pronoun.

Quite a few Deaf people have the experience of being hit without warning by a hearing stranger. It may happen more often to men. You are joking in sign language with Deaf friends and get punched all of a sudden. The assailant must have thought that you were laughing at him (or her) when seeing you pointing.

The mishap can develop into a criminal case, so cautious Deaf people try to avoid pointing at hearing people.

When you sign with hearing people, it sometimes happens that they suddenly turn their eyes away. You turn to see what happened and you discover that they were just looking in at the direction you pointed. In fact, you were not showing them anything but you pointed to express a pronoun or end-of-sentence pronoun.

Hearing people tend to use pointing less frequently than the Deaf when they sign. In particular, they often omit the end-of-sentence pronoun, which makes conversations difficult to follow, as you cannot know which is the subject and which is the object in their sentences.

Pointing helps to distinguish subjects from objects. For example, a 4 year-old Deaf child can differentiate between the subject and the object by pointing.
(PT=pronoun expressed by pointing)
(-pt=end-of-sentence pronoun. It is expressed phonologically linked to the previous word and it agrees with the subject of the sentence.).

A: PT1 PT3 love -pt1
B: Really?
A: Yes. PT3 PT1 love-pt3. Don't you? (Asks C)
C: ...

In the above conversation, PT1 is I and PT3 is He. We can see here that a 4 year-old child knows how to differentiate between a subject and an object by agreeing with the end-of-sentence pronoun and subject.

This conversation could be translated as follows:

A: I love C
B: Really?
A: Yes. And C loves me. Don't you?
C: ...

This is an actual conversation that took place in Tatsunoko Gakuen, a Deaf free school they are attending (the above conversation is also recorded on video). We see that Deaf children have the same kind of conversation as hearing children; I still find she is a precocious little girl though...

* Translated from the e-magazine of May 9, 2007 (# 083)