It would be very surprising if ASL really was “a sort of gestured version of English,” as some have claimed. Historically, ASL developed from the French Sign Language used in a Paris school founded in the eighteenth century. Early in the nineteenth century, a teacher from this school, named Laurent Clerc, was brought to the United States by an American minister called Thomas Gallaudet who was trying to establish a school for deaf children. Clerc not only taught deaf children, he also trained other teachers. During the nineteenth century, this imported version of sign language, incorporating features of indigenous natural sign languages used by the American deaf, evolved into what became known as ASL. Such origins help to explain why users of ASL and users of BSL (in Britain) do not share a common sign language.