Deaf people are not uncommon in the human community. According to statistics, 0.4 percent of the world's population suffers from such a defect. Much less common are dumb people who hear and understand speech, but who are unable to answer. And this phenomenon is much more interesting than the lack of both the ability to hear and the ability to speak.
Deafness and its associated factors
From a medical point of view, it is wrong to wonder why people are born dumb. To be precise, all the children are dumb - they cannot talk. And almost every living newborn makes sounds. Speech is a secondary skill that develops as a result of information obtained through hearing. And if a child is born deaf, then as a result of her absence, over time, he becomes completely numb, that is, he stops making even unreasonable sounds. Thus, dumb people are not born as such, but become them. But deafness can be congenital. Moreover, even if it cannot be cured, and the hearing aid is not able to compensate for deafness, you can still teach a person to speak - there are special techniques.
Dumb people: the reasons for the inability to speak
We have already come to the conclusion that dumbness is always acquired. Moreover, it can overtake a person at any age. And various factors can cause it. Dumb people lose the ability to speak in the following circumstances.
- Brain damage. It can be traumatic or physiological. Most often, dumbness is caused by a blow to the head that occurs in a certain area, brain cancer or hemorrhage in it. Autism patients are often speechless, despite the fact that everyone hears.
- Defects in organs responsible for speech. It can be ligament injuries or their deformation due to some kind of disease. The option of language paralysis is real - just remember Sylvester Stallone, whose tongue is partially paralyzed, but speech was very slurred until the actor began to intensively develop it. It is probably not worth mentioning the deprivation of this organ - such an outcome is very unlikely.
- Mutism. A disorder of the psychomotor type, as a result of which a person stops talking. It is caused by severe stressful situations or concussion. Dumb people at the same time understand the speech addressed to them and react to it, but they themselves are not able to overcome silence. In this case, dumbness can be selective - for example, concern only men, while a person speaks freely with women. It is treated with brake methods.
If the opportunity to speak is completely lost and cannot be restored, the person can be helped in communication by the letter and language of the dumb. True, the latter can only be understood by specially trained people.
Communication tool for non-speakers
The language of the dumb is not at all the same as the gestures that people with foreigners try to explain. In this case, sign language is poor and narrowly functional, while deprived of the opportunity to speak, you need a rich vocabulary that can convey both artistic images and mathematical terms.
The first sign language appeared in the 18th century: Germany and France opened sign language centers. The basis of non-verbal speech was natural gestures that spontaneously arose in small-town communities of the deaf.
In Russia, the first center was established in 1806 in the city of Pavlovsk. It used the experience of French sign teachers; Moscow school, opened half a century later, was guided by the achievements of the Germans. As a result, modern Russian deaf education is a symbiosis of these two schools.
The language of the dumb is individual for most languages and requires translation in much the same way as verbal speech. Attempts to create an all-terrestrial version failed - just as Esperanto did not take root.
Dactyl ABC
The sign language development began with the development of sign language. The first developments in this regard date back to the 16th century. Now dactyl is not classified as a language. It is used as a gesture alphabet for transcribing unfamiliar words, proper names, prepositions, interjections, and more.
Silence is not a sentence
And even more serious injuries and conditions cannot become an obstacle to a full and saturated existence. An example of such life activity is the Englishman Stephen Hawking, a famous astrophysicist and theoretical physicist. In the prime of his creative and physical strengths, the scientist began to manifest a specific kind of sclerosis, which caused paralysis. And after a tracheostomy, which became necessary due to severe pneumonia, he also became dumb. Only fingers on the right hand remain mobile. With them, he controls a specially designed chair and laptop, which became his voice. In the end, he was completely paralyzed, and controls the equipment with the movement of the facial muscles - the only one that remained mobile. Such restrictions did not depress the physicist: he professed at Cambridge (for a position that was once occupied by Newton), in 2007 he flew zero gravity on a special plane, and in 2016 he became a co-author of a project to send research vehicles to the Alpha Centauri star .