Imagine a village where everyone "speaks" sign language. Just such a village -- an isolated Bedouin community in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness -- is at the heart of Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind. There, an indigenous sign language has sprung up, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. It is a language no outsider has been able to decode, until now.
A New York Times reporter trained as a linguist, Margalit Fox is the only Western journalist to have set foot in this remarkable village. In Talking Hands, she follows an international team of scientists that is unraveling this mysterious language.
Because the sign language of the village has arisen completely on its own, outside the influence of any other language, it is a living demonstration of the "language instinct," man's inborn capacity to create language. If the researchers can decode this language, they will have helped isolate ingredients essential to all human language, signed and spoken. But as Talking Hands grippingly shows, their work in the village is also a race against time, because the unique language of the village may already be endangered.
Talking Hands offers a fascinating introduction to the signed languages of the world -- languages as beautiful, vital and emphatically human as any other -- explaining why they are now furnishing cognitive scientists with long-sought keys to understanding how language works in the mind.
Written in lyrical, accessible prose, Talking Hands will captivate anyone interested in language, the human mind and journeys to exotic places.
The New York Times - Leah Hager Cohen
I know of no other book in this field that covers so much ground so comprehensively and with such care.
The Wall Street Journal
We are well past the point in history where it is possible for a new spoken language to develop without the influence of other languages. What is so fascinating about Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), as the village's sign language is officially called, is that it was born with no apparent influence from any language at all. ... For now, at least, a unique sign language integrates everyone into a single community, whether they can hear or not.
Nature
Elegantly written. ... A masterly and accessible overview of sign languages and research into them over the past half century.
Publishers Weekly
[A] fascinating tour of deaf communication, clearly explaining difficult concepts, and effortlessly introducing readers to a silent world where communication is anything but slow and awkward.
Oliver Sacks, M.D.
Fox's book will be fascinating to anyone interested in the nature of human language or indeed in cognitive neuroscience.
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 century. Right
up to the early 20th
century, sign language was
considered inferior to
spoken language and, today,
the deaf communities in many
countries still battle to
have their language...
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(635 words).
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Oliver Sacks, M.D.
