2154: Monastic Sign Language Nov 7, 2020

Several different Christian monastic groups take vows of silence, but these people need to communicate, and as a result, so-called monastic sign languages arose. Some, like the Franciscan and Benedictine monks' vows were only bound to certain places or times of day, so only limited vocabularies were developed, perhaps also used as memory aid when also speaking. The Cistercian and Trappist sects however took vows of complete silence, and so developed more thorough systems, but unlike modern sign-languages, these were still bound to the spoken language such that Cistern monks from France use mostly French syntax, and those in the US use mostly English syntax for instance, so because of this they are often not considered languages but lexicons. Some systems began in around the 10th century, and are still practiced today in the case of the case of Cistercian and Trappist sign.