Bonet, JP
NAME:
Bonet, Juan Pablo
ACHIEVEMENTS:
Wrote first known book on educating the deaf
NICKNAME/ALIAS:
None
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH:
1569, Torres de Berrellen, Spain
DATE AND PLACE OF DEATH AND AGE AT DEATH:
1629, Torres de Berrellen. Aged 60
DISCIPLINE:
Soldier and philologist
FIELD:
Philology
LANGUAGE:
Spanish
PARENTS:
Unknown
SIBLINGS:
Unknown
SPOUSE:
None
CHILDREN:
None
EDUCATION:
Unknown
MAJOR WORK:
1620 "Teaching Mutes to Speak through the Conquest of Letters and Art"
LIFE AND TIMES:
Bonet was born into an illustrious family and he served on the king's business in France, Savoy, North Africa and Italy. He was in the service of Bernardino Hernandez de Velasco, the captain-general of the Spanish army and the constable of Castile when he met Luis de Velasco, the younger brother of the constable and who was a deaf mute. The de Velasco family had a long history of deafness and Bonet, who was a man of letters, became involved in attempts to help Luis.
Pedro Ponce de Leon, a priest who came from a very old noble Spanish family, had taught five of Luis's great-uncles and aunts to speak. When Ponce de Leon died at a monastery in 1584, it was recorded that he had been greatly esteemed "by the whole world" for teaching the deaf to speak.
The de Velasco family certainly knew of his work and it is most likely that Bonet also knew and that it was de Leon's method which he wrote up. Bonet's book, dated 1620, explains how the deaf could be taught to speak and is the first known book on the education of the deaf. Bonet declares that deaf mutes are mute because they are deaf, and that by the use of sign language sight can replace hearing.
Sign language later became the method used in France by L'Epee* when he pioneered the education of the deaf in the eighteenth century. Bonet explained that sign language can be learned by the use of a manual alphabet - a visible symbol for each speech sound.
The symbol can be formed with the hand or it can be written. Bonet stated that the simplicity of the sound referred to by the symbol was vital to the success of his method, so he simplified sounds with a phonetic alphabet in which the value of the written letter was reduced to its simplest sound (instead of the sound 'bee' for the letter 'b', Bonet gave the sound as just 'b', as in the sound 'b' made when the word 'bag' is spelled out).
He produced twenty-one drawings, each showing a letter from the normal alphabet, with a symbol for the reduced phonetic sound of the letter. His illustrations show the symbol as formed by the hand. The hand-shapes in Bonet's book are still used by the deaf to spell without paper and pencil.
In his book, Bonet described the position of the vocal organs for producing each sound in the manual alphabet, and wrote a chapter on combining the letters to make syllables and words. He also included remarks on the need for patience, proper lighting, and the use of a false tongue made of leather or paper with which to demonstrate correct positions.
ASSESSMENT: His early work led the way to the teaching of the deaf and dumb.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: JP Bonet, early pioneer in teaching the deaf
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Lane, Harlan, When the Mind Hears, A History of the Deaf, Random House, New
York, 1984
Bonet, Juan Pablo, Simplification of the Letters of the Alphabet and Method of Teaching Deaf-Mutes to Speak, with a historical introduction by A Farrar, London, 1890