Deaf people thus only recently got involved with linguistic researchers and research, and the new found linguistic respect was most satisfying. But nothing prepared me for that encounter on a quiet Monday, when a Marcus Chinnery, who could only describe himself as "government", paid me a professional call as a linguistics professor.
He was aware I was deaf and started signing from the word go in a fluent if jerky ASL, as a foreigner who has grasped the essential vocab and structure, but can't remove a strong accent.
It was with studied circumlocution that he described Bickerton's work on creolisation and his own studies of sign language syntax. He had trouble with the emotional openness of sign language; he didn't know where to begin.
"It's OK," I said. "Just tell me."
"Europan cephalopods." He had to spell this out manually.
"I see," I said slowly. "And you think that we can help you?"
"I need you. Let me put it this way:
"I've built a simulation that has subtracted all of sign-language that is Earth-specific, and rebuilt it from grammatical function words.
"Then consider the Europan signing apparatus, two signing tentacles, elongated end-suckers;
"Europan body language with luminescent photophores, colourful chromatophores, iridescent iridophores, and papillae, to express varying emotion, and external bioluminescence as the main viable light source.
"Now this approach has yielded small results, but now we need signers to extract more signal from the noise for our model to work on.
"And you, Dr Larimer, are very much the best qualified person to help us."
"Please call me Jane. And please let me think," I said, reorienting myself in knowledge of the newly discovered Europans - who were all, it appeared, completely deaf -
"For the Europans," said Marcus, "sound and touch have been merged into a single sense." And as I was thinking of signing tentacles, he produced a wall projection from his laptop.
"Joe Public hasn't seen these yet," he said with a smirk, "Hush-hush, what? This camera was lucky, got hidden in a place with lots of signing."
---
There's no substitute for face to face contact, however, and watching Eleutherius make the Europan greeting sign for the first time, I was temporarily stunned before replying in kind, and he showed surprise in turn. A defining moment in scaling the glacis between Europan and human.