Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind

This is a very well-written, thought-provoking book that will interest not only members of the deaf community and their families, but anyone who has wondered how languages evolve, what constitutes a language, and what language tells us about how human brains are wired. The book alternates between personal chapters that describe the author's trip to a Middle Eastern community where everyone is conversant in sign language - and more general essay chapters that tell something of the history and philosophy of sign language in particular, and the nature of language in general. The group of researchers that the author attached herself to traveled once again to the remote Middle Eastern village (whose identity is disguised to preserve its integrity) where a relatively high percentage of the population is deaf and where, as a consequence, everyone has, for several generations, been accustomed to using an indigenously developed sign language. Although the team only visited the village for a few consecutive days on this trip - they made extensive videos tapes for later study. Fox absorbs a lot in those few days herself. She gives the reader a wonderful feel for life in this otherwise typical Bedouin community. There is the spare straggle of whitewashed dwellings - the olive and fig trees - the goats - the eager participation of hosts of children - the western T-shirts - the ubiquitous offerings of cups of tea packed with fresh mint. Interspersed with these travelogue observations are chapters that ask and answer many really perceptive questions about the nature of language itself. The study of communities such as this one where sign-language has arisen spontaneously - has in many ways revolutionized the field of linguistics. It has yielded information on how and where language is processed in the brain - on what aspects of human language are culturally determined and what aspects we are hard-wired to develop. More specifically though, these studies have contributed to the revolution that has occurred in recent decades in the way members of the deaf community are perceived and taught. For a long time, well-meaning educators such as Thomas Gallaudet and Alexander Graham Bell thought they would do the deaf the greatest favor by teaching them to lip-read and to speak. When deaf students were allowed to use sign language to communicate, their teachers often insisted they use a formally developed sign language that was a literal gestural equivalent of English (or other spoken languages). The students were stymied by having to operate in this stilted mode. They could only be themselves among themselves - away from regular classroom enforcements. There they would often revert to using their own spontaneously developed sign language, better suited to fluid expression in 3-dimensional space rather than the strict parade grounds of sequential sound. In short, this book shows how the deaf labored for decades and even centuries under a sort of "benevolent" colonia

This is a terrific book. You'll learn much about Deaf culture, history and linguistics in general. I wish I had had this book in my first year in American Sign Language. It's a great tool to have. The lanugage of Sign is every bit as complex and nuanced as any spoken language. "Talking Hands" is a fabulous journey into the linguistics and culture of Sign.

This is a fascinating book. I am not a linguist but love language and this book was insightful and stimulating in so many ways; it clarified and reminded me of my somewhat rusty English grammer while providing insights into the innate need for language in humans. Alternating the linguistic chapters with the fascinating data gathering scenes from this remote Bedouin village in Israel added another dimension which kept me reading into the night.

Do not be misled by this boring title, the book is amazingly well written and presents complex subject matter in a way that is interesting and illuminating. It weaves together the story of a modern group of users of a remote Bedouin sign language with a well-researched distillation of the history of language, cognitive development, sign language and sociolinguistics. It is both technical and user-friendly, scholarly and accessible for anyone who is remotely interested in sign language. As an ASL interpreter, I found it filled in many gaps in my own knowledge and I recommend it to anyone who wants to get all the pertinent up-to-date research and theory on sign language from one reliable source without having to buy a bunch of expensive textbooks. I have recommended it to my friends and bought a 2nd copy just to loan out. It's THAT GOOD. READ IT.

Talking 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 se