Posted on 06/24/2018 3:46:44 PM PDT by Hojczyk
A 15-year-old girl is being praised for her hands-on approach to helping a blind and deaf passenger traveling alone on an Alaska Airlines flight last week.
Clara Daly and her mom, Jane, were traveling home from Boston, Mass., to Los Angeles when their flight was canceled. They were rebooked on another flight, where the pair encountered Tim Cook, a blind and deaf man traveling home to Portland, Ore.
Cook had been visiting his sister in Boston.
Scribner said once Cook boarded the flight, other passengers tried their best to make his journey more comfortable -
“The man, who had given up his seat, did his best to assist with things like opening coffee creamer and pouring it in his coffee,” Scribner said.
However, the flight attendants needed someone who could communicate with Cook during the flight.
A flight attendant asked over the PA system in the plane if any passengers knew American Sign Language (ASL) to ring their call button.
Daly, who had been studying ASL for a year, rang her button.
“I sat with Tim a few times on the flight and toward the end for about 30 minutes,” Daly said, Alaska Airlines reported. “He just wanted to talk.”
“I went to [Cook] a total of three times, once to get him water, another to tell him the time, and the last hour of the flight to just talk to him,” Daly told FOX59.
“We talked about our family in Massachusetts and he asked me about my plans for my future,” she said.
Daly sign-spelled the words into his hand so he could understand.
The crew was delighted by Daly’s actions.
“Clara was amazing,” an Alaska flight attendant said. “You could tell Tim was very excited to have someone he could speak to and she was such an angel.”
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Nice story.
It is a nice story, but how does a BLIND and DEAF person communicate with sign language? Doesn’t such a means of communications require sight? I am not trying to be rude …
Via touch. Both participants use their hands. (Read the story.)
Signs can be done in the person’s hand or hands. In this case, the article indicated that the girl fingerspelled the words into his hand. Makes for a laborious conversation, but gets the job done. (ASL was my foreign language in college, and ironically enough, I have a brother who is blind!)
And, the 15 year old learned ASL because she is dyslexic.
I have argued for years why there isn't a GLOBAL SIGN LANGUAGE so that everyone COULD communicate with anyone on the planet if they knew it. WHY is there AMERICAN sign language?
He was spelling into her hand. Kind of like writing notes.
That’s how they taught Helen Keller.
There’s also Exact English, which is different from ASL.
But why wouldn’t there be “foreign” sign languages? The whole “hearing” world doesn’t speak the same language; why would the whole deaf/hard-of-hearing world? Globalism? No thanks.
After reading about the five kids to taunted a man while he drowned, we needed a story like this.
Thanks.
You’re kidding, right??? OMG!...it’s SIGN LANGUAGE! Of course we don’t SPEAK the same WORDS, but ACTIONS could be formed as universal.....sorry if “Global” triggered you....geesh...omg....what has happened here.
Did you ever watch The Miracle Worker? Signs into the hand.
First, this is a lovely incident of truly good action and all concerned should be applauded for their actions.
Having said this, your comments, while well intentioned, are ignorant of history. Deafness and the need to communicate with those afflicted has been with us since the start of humanity. Every society / language group has developed their version of the communication because at least ONE PARTICIPANT is speaking / signing in their language. Thus the historical development is with language specific signing languages. It has only been in recent times that there has been an interest in developing a more universal sign vocabulary.
There is a system for “signing” the words into the palm of the impaired person. Apparently the young lady was quite good at it.
Dr. John McWhorter, the well-known linguistics professor, tells a very interesting anecdote about a home for the deaf in Central America. (I don’t remember which country.) The residents had no instruction - they were simply housed and fed - but they independently developed their own version of sign language that was unique to that one facility.
She’s a keeper. I wish my son would bring home a girl as nice as this, although I have nothing but positive things to say about his current girlfriend. He’ll probably dump her for a floozy.
Because often the sign includes a letter from the word. For example, “water” is signed by making a W with your three middle fingers and bouncing it against your chin. That wouldn’t work in other languages - think “aqua”.
But it doesn’t HAVE to be in a universal sign language!!
90% of human communication is still non-verbal.
Even our closest relatives, the great apes can sign and human hand gestures where probably the primary means of human language long before spoken speech came along.
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