Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind by Margalit Fox

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This is a very well-written, thought-provoking book more

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" colonialism. Just as Native American children were often prohibited from speaking their own language, so the deaf have often been prevented from cultivating their own language. What's more, sign language in general wasn't appreciated as a fully nuanced language in its own right until recently. Now linguists have begun to understand what both fully developed and evolving indigenous sign languages around the world have to teach us all. The ideas in these pages have broad implications. Margalite Fox presents them in lively, engrossing style.
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