a book

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29 juillet 2026 · French Sign Language

Sign language is not a bonus chapter

The hardest chapter in the book is also the one that justifies all the others.

I have been asked why LSF appears in a list that includes Chinese and Russian. The question contains its own answer: because it gets asked.

LSF has a grammar, a spatial syntax, poets, formal games, narrative traditions. What it does not have is a shared writing system — and therefore no books. A work on “languages and their literatures” that left it out would be admitting, without saying so, that it confuses literature with printing.

It is also the chapter I cannot write alone. A hearing person writing about LSF from his library produces a text about deaf people, not with them. The chapter will be made with signers, or it will not be made.

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