Talking Hands

A journalist brings her linguistic background to this travel research story of a group of language scientists setting out to capture an emerging sign language. The story is sandwiched between chapters that recap the history of sign language, in particular American Sign Language.

Until the '70s, sign language in America was considered to be more pantomime and gesture than actual language and thus inferior because how then would the deaf come to know such concepts as God. This distinction was what fueled the cause of the oralist who insisted that the deaf be taught to speak and that sign language be suppressed. Then a hearing professor who had come to teach Chaucer at the Gallaudet University became interested in the sign language in use outside of the classroom and determined that it had the linguistic components of a language. This is determined by a series of criteria including word order, the use of classifiers and other features that make it a symbolic code rather than representational pantomime. He reminds me of Dr. Evelyn Hooker, the psychiatrist who convinced the world that homosexuality was not a pathology and should be stricken from the list of mental illnesses. That was in the '70s too.

And when instruments came along that could show what part of the brain was firing when what activity was happening, it showed that the language centers were being activated when sign language was used as opposed to pantomime. Studies of stroke victims clinched it.

The book also includes background on linguistics and how language evolves with the help of children who have the capacity to easily create language. This is quite fascinating because it shows how innate language is in humans and how the need to communicate concepts is so ingrained in us. More powerful, one might surmise than the urge to hit each other and steal stuff. And as powerful as the urge to mate say.

Also learned what it was that Noam Chomsky contributed to the study of linguistics. He basically turned it upside down by kicking out the behaviorists who insisted that language had to be taught word by word, when it was clear that children had the ability to conceptualize and invent language, given some basic exposure. And deaf children did the same with sign, or they would invent it which brings the story back to the Bedouin village in the middle of the dessert with a population of deaf people that invented their own sign language.