Questões de Inglês - Voz Ativa e Passiva | Passive and Active Voice para Concurso

How monks helped invent sign language

      For millennia people with hearing impairments encountered marginalization because it was believed that language could only be learned by hearing the spoken word. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, asserted that “Men that are deaf are in all cases also dumb.” Under Roman law people who were born deaf were denied the right to sign a will as they were “presumed to understand nothing; because it is not possible that they have been able to learn to read or write.”

      Pushback against such ideas began in the 16th-century, with the creation of the first formal sign language for the hearing impaired, by Pedro Ponce de León, a Spanish Benedictine monk. His idea to use sign language was not a completely new one. Native Americans used hand gestures to communicate with other tribes and to facilitate trade with Europeans. Benedictine monks had used them to convey messages during their daily periods of silence. Inspired by the latter practice, Ponce de León adapted the gestures used in his monastery to create a method for teaching the deaf to communicate, paving the way for systems now used all over the world.

      Building on Ponce de León’s work, another Spanish cleric and linguist, Juan Pablo Bonet, proposed that deaf people learn to pronounce words and progressively construct meaningful phrases. Bonet’s approach combined oralism – using sounds to communicate – with sign language. The system had its challenges, especially when learning the words for abstract terms, or intangible forms such as conjunctions like “for,” “nor,” or “yet.”

      In 1755 the French Catholic priest Charles-Michel de l’Épée established a more comprehensive method for educating the deaf, which culminated in the founding of the first public school for deaf children, in Paris. Students came to the institute from all over France, bringing signs they had used to communicate with at home. Insistent that sign language needed to be a complete language, his system was complex enough to express prepositions, conjunctions, and other grammatical elements.

      Épée’s standardized sign language quickly spread across Europe and to the United States. In 1814 Thomas Gallaudet went to France to learn Épée’s language system. Three years later, Gallaudet established the American School for the Deaf in his hometown in Connecticut. Students from across the United States attended, and they brought signs they used to communicate with at home.American Sign Language became a combination of these signs and those from French Sign Language.

      Thanks to the development of formal sign languages, people with hearing impairment can access spoken language in all its variety. The world’s many modern signing systems have different rules for pronunciation, word order, and grammar. New visual languages can even express regional accents to reflect the complexity and richness of local speech.

(Ines Anton Rayas. www.nationalgeographic.com. 28.05.2019. Adaptado)

TEXT II

What to Know About the Controversy Surrounding the Movie Green Book

Depending on who you ask, Green Book is either the pinnacle of movie magic or a whitewashing sham. 

The film, which took home the prize for Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards, as well as honors for Mahershala Ali as Best Supporting Actor and Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie and Peter Farrelly for Best Original Screenplay, depicts the burgeoning friendship between a black classical pianist and his ItalianAmerican driver as they travel the 1960s segregated South on a concert tour. But while Green Book was an awards frontrunner all season, its road to Oscar night was riddled with missteps and controversies over its authenticity and racial politics. 

Green Book is about the relationship between two real-life people: Donald Shirley and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga. Shirley was born in 1927 and grew up in a well-off black family in Florida, where he emerged as a classical piano prodigy: he possessed virtuosic technique and a firm grasp of both classical and pop repertoire. He went on to perform regularly at Carnegie Hall— right below his regal apartment—and work with many prestigious orchestras, like the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. But at a time when prominent black classical musicians were few and far between due to racist power structures, he never secured a spot in the upper echelons of the classical world. (African Americans still only make up 1.8 percent of musicians playing in orchestras nationwide, according to a recent study.) 

Vallelonga was born in 1930 to working-class Italian parents and grew up in the Bronx. As an adult he worked as a bouncer, a maître d’ and a chauffeur, and he was hired in 1962 to drive Shirley on a concert tour through the Jim Crow South. The mismatched pair spent one and a half years together on the road — though it’s condensed to just a couple of months in the film — wriggling out of perilous situations and learning about each other’s worlds. Vallelonga would later become an actor and land a recurring role on The Sopranos. 

In the 1980s, Vallelonga’s son, Nick, approached his father and Shirley about making a movie about their friendship. For reasons that are now contested, Shirley rebuffed these requests at the time. […]

(Source: from http://time.com/5527806/green-book-movie-controversy/)