the.com/deafness
Deafness is a different way of experiencing the world, not a lesser one.
means The partial or total inability to hear, ranging from mild hearing loss to hearing nothing at all.
from Deaf traces back to Old English 'dēaf,' part of a wider Germanic family (related to Old Norse 'daufr,' German 'taub') that originally carried a broader sense of dullness — in the senses, and even in the mind, as in 'dull-witted.' The '-ness' is the common Old English suffix for turning a quality into a noun, so 'deafness' simply names the state of being dēaf — the dulled or blocked channel of hearing.
- not silence
- many Deaf people describe their world as rich, not empty
- sign languages
- full languages with grammar, unrelated to spoken ones
- capital D
- Deaf with capital D means cultural identity, not just audiology
- spectrum
- ranges from mild to profound, rarely total silence