Manually Coded Languages (MCLs) can also be referred to as Signed Oral Languages (SOLs). They are an attempt to transpose the syntax and morphological structures of oral languages into a gestural-visual form. By many people it is perceived as a surrogate form of signed languages. In other words, the desirable alternative to a seemingly a-grammatical and a-syntactic natural signed language.
Sign languages actually have their spatial structures, with its own specific syntactic structure. Unlike them, MCLs have not evolved naturally, they are the invention of hearing speakers and this is reflected in their grammar, which closely follows that of oral languages, in their written form. In the past, it has been detrimentally used in the education of the Deaf and also by some early sign language interpreters who believed in the superiority, as it were, of oral languages. Back then, sign languages had not acquired their own dignity as natural languages yet.
Sometimes, MCLs are also referred to as Grammatical Sign Languages (GSLs) as is the case in Taiwan, where it is known as wenfa shouyu (文法手語), although the proper term would be Signed Chinese (Myers and Tai 2005).
MCLs have been opposed by many people, namely by the so-called oralists and by those who fought to see sign languages rights recognized. The first category, namely oralists, is made up of people who believe that the education of deaf students should be carried out through oral language with the help of lip reading techniques, speech, and mimicking the mouth shapes, as in cued speech. The oralists have been very active since Épée's time. The second category is made up of all those, scholars, researchers, interpreters, who have been fighting for sign languages to enjoy a similar status to oral languages, and to share the same linguistic dignity.
As a matter of fact, instructors often use MCLs incompletely and inconsistently
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in classrooms, and as a result, the student will suffer from an incorrect use of written English, or Chinese for that matter, and also incapacity to sign his or her own native sign language properly (Kluwin 1981; Marmor and Pettito 1979).
Following are some examples of incorrect Chinese, at point not even understandable, found in the writing of a native Taiwanese signer who has been raised by his instructors with the use of wenfa shouyu. We can say that it belongs to wenfa shouyu because the structure is not natural in Chinese but it does not even belong to Taiwan Sign Language.
超級愈來愈好玩一次，藍天感覺好舒適,超級非常游泳池的瘋狂。今天冰淇 淋盤非常好香好吃很棒..， 為什麼看的時候很年輕，當然要去地方景風更好美，
認識介紹對我這麼好，幽默的聊天交流，蓋亂還不錯的感覺,請辛苦帶我真的感 謝其他，要離開回台灣，只有韓國留的回憶，希望自己非常快樂! 我也不要看 愛中，快看很昏倒。
One point should be very clear. MCLs are not auxiliary sign languages, i.e.
complete representations of an oral language; they are merely used to represent the written form of the language.
Going back in time, the first to develop a gestural-visual system to represent the written form of a written language was the Freanch Abbé de l'Épée, in the 18th century. It goes without saying that the Deaf community back then had their own natural sign language, which in linguistics is known as Old French Sign Language;
however for Épée, it was a primitive, not fully fledged system of communication. He wanted to teach them the noble concepts of religion and philosophy, and he thought the best way to do that was to convey those concepts, pertaining to the written language, through a gestural-visual channel, so that they could all understand. He
called these signs, signes méthodiques, translated as Methodical Signs.
MCLs paved the way for the proliferation of other signed oral languages later on.
The degrading thing is that even interpreters used these unnatural forms of sign language in the 18th, 19th and even part of the 20th century to communicate with the Deaf community (Woodward and Allen 1988).
In conclusion, MCLs, also known as SOLs, attempt at representing, word-for-word, the written form of any given oral language, thus they need to develop, and create, an enormous amount of new signs, especially for all those grammatical signifiers that would be rendered differently in natural sign languages.
Most of the times, the core lexicon is taken from already existing signs, and then ad hoc grammatical signs are added for words and word endings that don't exist in the natural sign language.
Lacking the naturality of any sign language, MCLs require special ability in finger spelling and lip reading, which is also a complement of the newly-created lexicon and which will be further explored in the next paragraph.
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