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Giacobbo Rodriguez Pereire

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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PEREIRE [PEREIRA], GIACOBBO Rodriguez (1 715- 1780), one of the inventors of deaf-mute language, a member of a Spanish-Jewish family, was born at Estremadura, Spain, on the 11th of April 1715. At the age of eighteen he entered a business at Bordeaux. Here he fell in love with a young girl who had been dumb from birth, and henceforth devoted himself to discover a method of imparting speech to deaf-mutes. His first subject was Aaron Baumann, a co-religionist, whom he taught to enunciate the letters of the alphabet, and to articulate certain ordinary phrases. He next devised a sign alphabet for the use of one hand only, and in 1749 he brought his second pupil before the Paris Academy of Sciences, the members of which were astonished at the results he had accomplished. In 1759 Pereire was made a member of the Royal Society of London. He died at Paris on the 15th of September 1780.