Danny Law

1 Introduction At the Third National Convention of the Deaf, held in 1889 in Washington, DC, William Weeks gave a presentation in sign called “The Purity of the Sign Language.” Weeks (1890, 57–58), who was then a teacher at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut lamented that “[m]any of the good old signs [had] been chopped and clipped” such that “[t]heir identity is hardly perceptible.” According to Weeks, as the signs used by Laurent Clerc and others in the early history...