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BookBrowse Reviews Talking Hands: Talking Hands will captivate anyone interested in language, the human mind and journeys to exotic places

Talking Hands
What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind
by Margalit Fox
Paperback, Aug 2008,
368 pages.
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On a page after the Table of Contents, without any other text, Fox includes the following quote, from Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations*, "To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life."

Entering my twentieth year as one who works with people with developmental disabilities I can personally attest to the truth of this quote. Although not professionally trained in sign language, over the years I have learned to distinguish and use signs that are appropriate to the situation (just as children growing up in the hearing world learn that there are some words that they use among their friends and others to their parents). Because of my background, I initially approached Talking Hands as a reference book that would improve my own job performance. I am ashamed to admit that I opened the book with a degree of pomposity,...
Beyond the Book
Did you know?
  • Sign languages are not created for the deaf, and are not visual renditions of oral languages. They have complex grammars of their own, can be used to discuss any topic, from the simple and concrete to the lofty and abstract, and evolve spontaneously wherever deaf people are gathered together for a period of time.
  • Deaf people, and thus signed languages, must have existed through the course of history but the first historical records are from the mid 18th...
This review was originally published in September 2007, and has been updated for the August 2008 paperback release. Click here to go to this issue.
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