American Sign Language (ASL) has been around for a long time. It's roots predate America as we know it. Early in the nineteenth century, the father of a little deaf girl named Alice Cogswell managed to pursuade a young minister to leave his home in Hartford, Conneticut, to travel to Europe in order to study methods of educating deaf children. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet traveled to England, but for various reasons was not successful in obtaining the opportunities he sought, and soon found himself in a school for deaf children in Paris, France. Gallaudet stayed for a year or so, studying with successors of French clergyman and teacher of deaf children named Charles Michel Abbe de L'Epee. About three quarters of a century prior to Gallaudet's visit, the good Abbe had begun to use a new pedagical tool, the sign language already in use among his pupils. To use this "newtool, the Abbe de L'Pee modified the language of French deaf people to more closely reflect French grammar, including, no doubt, inventing some new signs. It is unclear from records we have how much this French sign language retained most of its naturally evolved form. Gallaudet returned to the United States with a deaf teacher from the school in Paris, one Laurent Clerc, and the sign language they brought back to Hartford and used in the classrooms of their American School for the Deaf, was a system using the maturally evolved language of the French deaf modified by de L'Epee and modified again by Gallaudet and Clerc to represent the grammar of English. We might expect French and American sign languages to be mutually intelligible, then, but this is not the case. Languages, as we said above, change our early colonial ancestors, so American Sign Language differs from the system imported by Gallaudet in 1816.
      We can only surmise through sketchy historical records that some form of sign language already existed among deaf people in the U.S, and that this sign language had its influence on the system imported from France. Another significant event that influenced ASL's development again had its roots in France. In 1830, a Frenchman named Vaise, who had been working at the school in Paris, visited the New York School for the deaf. Upon observing the modified English form of sign language which had spread from Hartford to New York, Vaise indicated to the powers that being that this type of formalized sign language was no longer used in the Paris school. Instead the school now used the "natural" sign language of deaf people (seemingly the original naturally evolved sign language de L'Pee had observed in Paris). Soon the New York School and others had adopted this "new" system of signing.