Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the MindImagine 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. |
What people are saying - Write a review
Reviews aren't verified, but Google checks for and removes fake content when it's identified
LibraryThing Review
User Review - EowynA - LibraryThingHalf of this book is the story of a group of linguists during a three-day field-studies visit to the village of Al-Sayyid. The village is interesting to linguists because a lot of deaf people were ... Read full review
TALKING HANDS
User Review - KirkusA New York Times reporter considers the case (and the significance) of a unique sign language that has emerged among the many congenitally deaf denizens of an isolated Bedouin village in northern ... Read full review
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
In the Village of the Deaf | 5 |
What Is This Wonderful Language? | 15 |
The Road to AlSayyid | 38 |
The SignLanguage Instinct | 46 |
Starry Night | 74 |
The Atoms of Sign | 86 |
The House of Blue Roses | 111 |
Hyssop | 148 |
The Web of Words | 155 |
The House Built from the Second Story Down | 170 |
Grammar in Midair | 178 |
Hassans House | 206 |
A Sign in Mind | 218 |
The House of Twenty Children | 238 |
In a Wet Place | 272 |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
agreeing verbs Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign American Sign Language Aminah aphasia asked ASL sign Bedouin Bellugi write bioprogram brain British Sign British Sign Language Broca’s Carol Carol Padden child Chomsky classifiers cognitive colleagues complex creoles deaf children deaf signers Dyirbal encode English errors field find finished first fist five flat floor fluent French Sign Language Fromkin Gallaudet gestures girl Goldin-Meadow grammatical Groce guage guists hand handshape Harlan Lane Hassan hearing Hebrew homesigners human language Ibid index finger inflection influence Irit Israeli Sign Israeli Sign Language Klima and Bellugi language of Al-Sayyid Mark Mark Aronoff Martha’s Vineyard means Nicaraguan Nicaraguan Sign Language nouns object Omar palm pantomime pidgin pronouns researchers Sandler says sentence sign lan sign-language linguists spatial speakers specific speech spoken language Stokoe Stokoe’s stroke structure Supalla Susan Fischer things tion University verb agreement verbs Wendy William Stokoe word order