Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind Review

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Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind ReviewTalking Hands is one of the most informative and compelling books on linguistics I've ever read. Margalit Fox is as entertaining a technical writer as David Crystal, Kate Burridge, and K. David Harrison.
In linguistics the "Forbidden Experiment" refers to stories of a king or sage isolating an infant to see what language it speaks "naturally."
Whether the Pharaoh Psammetichus did this or not, it happens every time deaf children find themselves together. Using the same "language instinct" or "bioprogram" that hearing children use to learn (or invent) spoken language for themselves, deaf children name things and create grammar and syntax.
If they're not exposed to an already existing signed language, they will create a pidgin for themselves, just like the spoken pidgins that exist all over the world. The next generations of signers will begin grammaticalizing the pidgin, turning it into a creole. Eventually the signed language will be as fully expressive as any spoken language. And Margalit Fox shows that deaf children have the same window for language acquisition that speaking children have - - up to the ages of between six and ten.
In alternating chapters, Fox tells the story of American Sign Language and the story of a Bedouin village in Israel, Al-Sayyid. Fox went there with four linguists who'd been studying the sign language that grew up spontaneously among both hearing and deaf people. Two of the linguists were Israeli and two American. One American, Carol Padden, is deaf.
Al-Sayyid was founded seven generations before, when the patriarch moved there and married a local woman. He carried a recessive gene for deafness, which is one of the requisites for the development of a "signing village" like Al-Sayyid. Recessive traits can skip generations, which means inherited deafness is unpredictable. Only two of the patriarch's five sons carried the gene, and all of the deaf people in the village are descended from those two men.
With a higher than normal rate of deafness, but without deafness being limited to certain families, the deaf aren't stigmatized. That means hearing people grow up signing to family members who can't hear.
It wasn't until the sixties or seventies that a professor at Gallaudet University, William Stokoe, demonstrated that sign was as functional a language as any spoken one, using handshape, location, and movement to transmit meaning.
For instance, in English the request "May I ask you a question?" requires six words. In ASL it takes one sign and a facial expression (raised eyebrows) used grammatically.
For a long time, "oralist" educators, acting in what they thought was deaf people's own good, supressed sign language in schools like Gallaudet in favor of an unnatural language called Manually Coded English. A generation of signers referred to their native language as "bathroom sign" because that's one of the few places they could use it.
Fox also talks about the Nicaraguan Sign Language that developed in the seventies after the Sandinista government nationalized a private school for the deaf. An influx of deaf children creolized the sign language they found students using (which was sort of a pidgin) and eventually turned it into a fully expressive native sign language. Another example of the "Forbidden Experiment."
One of the linguists Fox went to Al-Sayyid with points out that Al-Sayyid is different from Nicaragua because it is "socially normal." In Nicaragua "[t]here was no organic community." (Did any language since the first irretrievable one in Africa ever evolve without influence from somewhere else? Is it possible to know?)
There are dozens of lessons to learn from the stories the people of Al-Sayyid tell.
The most important lesson may be that 96 percent of the people use a language they don't really have to learn so that the four percent who can't hear can be fully part of their society.Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind Overview

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