“Léo, l’enfant sourd”: gli antroponimi in un fumetto ‘sordo’

Abstract

Comics convey a culture of images; this characteristic makes them approachable to the minds of deaf people, who have a visual culture and use a visual language (sign language). Léo, l’enfant sourd is a French comic strip. Its theme is the daily life of deaf people: Léo is a deaf child who experiences a continuous series of adventures caused by his deafness; all the episodes are presented in a humorous way. This comic strip, created by Yves Lapalu (a deaf cartoonist), is bilingual: in addition to the comic speech bubble with the text, the hands of the characters reproduce the signs in LSF (French Sign Language). This paper aims at analyzing the anthroponyms in this comic strip, by observing the methodological choices of the author, who sometimes uses sign language and draws the sign, and sometimes uses the written text. Lapalu also changes the name of the main character, Léo: at the beginning his name is Jack; in the same way, the «name sign» (the sign used to refer to a certain person inside a deaf community) changes many times during his life; so this literary proceeding is in line with a real dynamic. The choice of all the names is well thought out in order to be ironic or to recall the history of deaf people, etc. Through the analysis of the names, this work aims at observing deaf culture, presenting it from the point of view of a child.