moving our hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people do at present?" Until the 19th century, most of what is known about historical sign languages is limited to the manual alphabets (fingerspelling systems) that were invented to facilitate the transfer of words from a spoken language to a sign language, rather than documentation of the language itself. Debate around the monastic sign-language developed in the Middle Ages has come to regard it as a gestural system rather than a true sign language. The earliest records of contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast region in what is now Texas and northern Mexico note a fully formed sign language already in use by the time of the Europeans' arrival there. These records include the accounts of Cabeza de Vaca in 1527 and Coronado in 1541. Spanish monk Pedro Ponce de León (1520–1584) developed the first manual alphabet. This alphabet was based, in whole or in part, on the simple hand gestures used by monks living in silence. In 1620, Juan Pablo Bonet published ('Reduction of letters and art for teaching mute people to speak') in Madrid. It is considered the first modern treatise of sign language phonetics, setting out a method of oral education for deaf people and a manual alphabet. In Britain, manual alphabets were also in use for a number of purposes, such as secret communication, public speaking, or communication by or with deaf people. In 1648, John Bulwer described "Master Babington", a deaf man proficient in the use of a manual alphabet, " on the of his fingers", whose wife could converse with him easily, even in the dark through the use of tactile signing. In 1680, George Dalgarno published Didascalocophus, or, The deaf and dumb mans tutor, in which he presented his own method of deaf education, including an "arthrological" alphabet, where letters are indicated by pointing to different joints of the fingers and palm of the left hand. Arthrological systems had been in use by hearing people for some time; some have speculated that they can be traced to early Ogham manual alphabets. The vowels of this alphabet have survived in the modern alphabets used in British Sign Language, Auslan and New Zealand Sign Language. The earliest known printed pictures of consonants of the modern two-handed alphabet appeared in 1698 with (Latin for Language [or Tongue] of the