Deaf-mutes are not uncommon in the human community. According to statistics, 0.4 percent of the total population of the Earth suffers from such a defect. Much less common are only dumb people who hear and understand speech, but are not able 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 related factors
It is medically wrong to ask why people are born dumb. To put it precisely, all children are mute - they do not know how to talk. And almost every living newborn makes sounds. Speech is a secondary skill that develops as a result of information received through hearing. And if a child is born deaf, then as a result of its absence, over time, he becomes completely numb, that is, he ceases to make even meaningless sounds. Thus, dumb people are not born dumb, but become dumb. But deafness can be congenital. Moreover, even if it cannot be cured, and the hearing aid is not able to compensate for deafness, a person’s speech is stillcan be taught - there are special techniques.
Mute people: reasons for not being able to speak
We have already come to the conclusion that dumbness is always acquired. Moreover, it can overtake a person at any age. And it can be caused by different factors. Mute people lose their ability to speak under the following circumstances.
- Brain damage. It can be traumatic or physiological. Most often, dumbness is caused by a blow to the head that falls in a certain area, brain cancer or a hemorrhage into it. Patients with autism are often deprived of speech, despite the fact that everyone hears.
- Defects in organs responsible for speech. These can be injuries of the ligaments or their deformation due to some kind of disease. A variant 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 psychomotor disorder that causes a person to stop talking. It is caused by severe stressful situations or a concussion. At the same time, dumb people understand the speech addressed to them and react to it, but they themselves are not able to overcome the silence. At the same time, dumbness can be selective - for example, it can only concern men, while a person speaks freely with women. It is treated with disinhibitory techniques.
If the opportunity to speak is completely lost and restorednot subject, a person can be helped in communication by writing and the language of the dumb. True, only specially trained people can understand the latter.
Means of communication for non-speakers
The language of the dumb is not at all the same as the gesticulation that people try to communicate with foreigners. In this case, gestural speech is poor and narrowly functional, while those deprived of the ability to speak need a rich lexicon capable of conveying both artistic images and mathematical terms.
The first sign language originated in the 18th century: Germany and France opened deaf pedagogical centers. Non-verbal speech was based on natural gestures that spontaneously arose in local communities of the deaf.
In Russia, the first center was established in 1806, in the city of Pavlovsk. It used the experience of French deaf teachers; the 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 specific to most languages and requires translation in much the same way as verbal speech. Attempts to create a world-wide version failed - just like Esperanto did not take root.
Dactyl alphabet
From the finger designation of letters, the development of sign language began. The first developments in this regard date back to the 16th century. Now dactyl is not considered a language. It is used as a sign alphabet, for transcription of unfamiliar words, proper names, prepositions, interjections, andother things.
Silence is not a sentence
And even more severe injuries and conditions cannot become an obstacle to a full and rich existence. An example of such vital activity is the Englishman Stephen Hawking, a well-known astrophysicist and theoretical physicist. In the prime of his creative and physical powers, the scientist began to show a specific type of sclerosis, which caused paralysis. And after a tracheostomy, which became necessary due to severe pneumonia, he also became mute. Only the fingers on the right hand remain mobile. With them, he controls a specially designed chair and a laptop, which became his voice. In the end, he was completely paralyzed, and controls the equipment with the movement of the facial muscle - the only one that retained mobility. Such restrictions did not plunge the physicist into depression: he is a professor at Cambridge (in a position once occupied by Newton), in 2007 he flew in zero gravity on a special plane, and in 2016 he became a co-author of a project to send research vehicles to the star Alpha Centauri.
