Clerics who helped create sign language
For millennia, wrote Inés Antón Dayas at National Geographic, those “with hearing impairments encountered marginalisation” because it was believed that they were incapable of mastering language. Under Roman law, for instance, the deaf weren’t allowed to sign a will.
That changed with the invention of formal sign language for the hearing-impaired. The inventor, Pedro Ponce de León, a 16th-century Spanish Benedictine monk, was inspired by the sign-language the monks used to communicate during periods of silence.
