Edward Klima, 77; linguist and sign language specialist

EDWARD S. KLIMA (University of California-San Diego)

NEW YORK - Edward S. Klima, an eminent linguist and one of the first scholars to pay serious attention to sign languages, and in so doing helped them win long-denied recognition as languages in their own right, died Sept. 25 in the La Jolla section of San Diego. He was 77 and had lived in La Jolla for many years.

The cause was complications of brain surgery, his family said.

At his death, Dr. Klima was emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. He was also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego and the associate director of the institute's laboratory for cognitive neuroscience.

Much of Dr. Klima's work was done in collaboration with his wife, Ursula Bellugi, a professor at Salk and the laboratory's longtime director. They were known in particular for their long, painstaking unraveling of the grammatical structure of American Sign Language, and for using what they found to illuminate the workings of all language, signed and spoken, in the brain.

Dr. Klima and Bellugi received the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Contributions in 1992.

Before the couple began their research in 1970, everything known about the human language instinct came from the study of spoken languages. Their book "The Signs of Language" was a landmark. Written with 10 associates, it was the first comprehensive study of the grammar and psychology of signed languages.

More recently, Dr. Klima collaborated with his wife on extensive studies of Williams syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that combines mental retardation with heightened language ability.

When Dr. Klima and Bellugi began work on American Sign Language, few considered sign languages to be real languages. Used by a quarter-million to a half-million deaf people in the United States and Canada, it was widely disparaged as a rude pantomime, devoid of grammar, or a broken version of English, rerouted to the hands. Deaf people were made to feel ashamed of it. Teachers of the deaf tried to suppress it, forcing pupils to speak and read lips instead, no mean feat if one cannot hear.

Working with deaf informants, Dr. Klima and Bellugi established conclusively that the world's signed languages - and there are more than a hundred of them - are very much real languages, as complex, abstract and systematic as spoken ones. In American Sign Language, they found a lexicon bursting with nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns; orderly grammar and syntax quite different from those of English; indigenous poetry; and even regional and ethnic dialects.

Edward Stephan Klima was born in Cleveland. He earned a bachelor's degree in linguistics from Dartmouth in 1953, followed by master's and doctoral degrees in the field from Harvard in 1955 and 1965.

By the time Dr. Klima earned his PhD, linguistics had undergone a seismic upheaval. In 1957, a young scholar named Noam Chomsky had revolutionized the field. Language, Chomsky asserted, was not simply learned social behavior, as scholars had long believed. Instead, it was the product of an inborn faculty - an instinct - unique to our species. Overnight, linguists had a new mandate: to describe this innate linguistic blueprint.

Hired by Chomsky in 1957, Dr. Klima taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the faculty at the University of California, San Diego in 1967.

Besides his wife, Dr. Klima leaves two sons, Rob, of San Diego, and David, of Florence, Italy, and four grandchildren.