Pereire
PEREIRE [PEREIRA], GIACOBBO RODRIGUEZ (171.5- 1780), one of the inventors of deaf-mute language, a, member of* a Spanish- Jewish family, was born at Estremadura, Spain, on the nth 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 1 749 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.
Note - this article incorporates content from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, (1910-1911)
