Customer Reviews

Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind

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Talking Hands is one of the most informative and compelling books on linguistics I've ever read. Margalit Fox is as entertaining a technical writer as David Crystal, Kate Burridge, and K. David Harrison.

In linguistics the "Forbidden Experiment" refers to stories of a king or sage isolating an infant to see what language it speaks "naturally."

Whether the Pharaoh Psammetichus did this or not, it happens every time deaf children find themselves together. Using the same "language instinct" or "bioprogram" that hearing children use to learn (or invent) spoken language for themselves, deaf children name things and create grammar and syntax.

If they're not exposed to an already existing signed language, they will create a pidgin for themselves, just like the spoken pidgins that exist all over the world. The next generations of signers will begin grammaticalizing the pidgin, turning it into a creole. Eventually the signed language will be as fully expressive as any spoken language. And Margalit Fox shows that deaf children have the same window for language acquisition that speaking children have - - up to the ages of between six and ten.

In alternating chapters, Fox tells the story of American Sign Language and the story of a Bedouin village in Israel, Al-Sayyid. Fox went there with four linguists who'd been studying the sign language that grew up spontaneously among both hearing and deaf people. Two of the linguists were Israeli and two American. One American, Carol Padden, is deaf.

Al-Sayyid was founded seven generations before, when the patriarch moved there and married a local woman. He carried a recessive gene for deafness, which is one of the requisites for the development of a "signing village" like Al-Sayyid. Recessive traits can skip generations, which means inherited deafness is unpredictable. Only two of the patriarch's five sons carried the gene, and all of the deaf people in the village are descended from those two men.

With a higher than normal rate of deafness, but without deafness being limited to certain families, the deaf aren't stigmatized. That means hearing people grow up signing to family members who can't hear.

It wasn't until the sixties or seventies that a professor at Gallaudet University, William Stokoe, demonstrated that sign was as functional a language as any spoken one, using handshape, location, and movement to transmit meaning.

For instance, in English the request "May I ask you a question?" requires six words. In ASL it takes one sign and a facial expression (raised eyebrows) used grammatically.

For a long time, "oralist" educators, acting in what they thought was deaf people's own good, supressed sign language in schools like Gallaudet in favor of an unnatural language called Manually Coded English. A generation of signers referred to their native language as "bathroom sign" because that's one of the few places they could use it.

Fox also talks about the Nicaraguan Sign Language that developed in the seventies after the Sandinista government nationalized a private school for the deaf. An influx of deaf children creolized the sign language they found students using (which was sort of a pidgin) and eventually turned it into a fully expressive native sign language. Another example of the "Forbidden Experiment."

One of the linguists Fox went to Al-Sayyid with points out that Al-Sayyid is different from Nicaragua because it is "socially normal." In Nicaragua "[t]here was no organic community." (Did any language since the first irretrievable one in Africa ever evolve without influence from somewhere else? Is it possible to know?)

There are dozens of lessons to learn from the stories the people of Al-Sayyid tell.

The most important lesson may be that 96 percent of the people use a language they don't really have to learn so that the four percent who can't hear can be fully part of their society.

I bought this book after it caught my eye in the window of a local book store. (It cost half as much on Amazon.) Having worked for many years with disabled people who use communications devices, I'm always interested in the different ways humans communicate, and alternative ways to communicate other than speech. This book is a fascinating study of the development of sign languages around the world and how sign language works in comparison to spoken language. It also explains how babies and children learn languages, and how languages develop when groups of people speaking different languages are all thrown together and need to create a language to communicate.

It also provides a fascinating glimpse into a modern Bedoiun village in Israel, which has been settled for 250 years. Because of intermarriage, a high proportion of the village residents are deaf, and all members of the community, use sign language. Because of their isolation, this village has its own sign language which has developed. A group of linguists have been studying the villagers to trace the development of a brand new language, and to see how the human mind is "hard-wired' for language.

My only criticism, is that the author occasionally takes many pages to make a fairly obvious point, like when she explains that deaf singers will occasionally have "slips of the hand" where they will use one sign rather than a similar one. A simple point, but she goes on in great detail (too much) for pages. My advice, when you get to parts like this, just skim them, until she moves on. She's often made the point early on and is just belaboring it.

But, I still highly recommend this book! For any one with an interest in how humans communicate, it is an interesting and educational read.

Do not be misled by this boring title, the book is amazingly well written and presents complex subject matter in a way that is interesting and illuminating. It weaves together the story of a modern group of users of a remote Bedouin sign language with a well-researched distillation of the history of language, cognitive development, sign language and sociolinguistics. It is both technical and user-friendly, scholarly and accessible for anyone who is remotely interested in sign language. As an ASL interpreter, I found it filled in many gaps in my own knowledge and I recommend it to anyone who wants to get all the pertinent up-to-date research and theory on sign language from one reliable source without having to buy a bunch of expensive textbooks. I have recommended it to my friends and bought a 2nd copy just to loan out. It's THAT GOOD. READ IT.

Though marketed as an insider look at an isolated sign-language-speaking Middle-Eastern village, this book is much more a history of sign language. The author's foremost interest is in PROVING that sign language is, in fact, an actual language, rather than a series of mimetic gestures. Though extremely interesting, at times Fox is a bit repetitive; I felt I was reading a disseration rather than a journalistic endeavor. In the end, the book's "payoff" - the concluding description of the field work done in the Middle Eastern village - is only four pages long. Don't read this book to learn specifically about the community featured on the cover; read it to learn about sign language: its history and its unique linguistic features. Overall, worthwhile and engaging reading.

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.

This is a fascinating book. I am not a linguist but love language and this book was insightful and stimulating in so many ways; it clarified and reminded me of my somewhat rusty English grammer while providing insights into the innate need for language in humans. Alternating the linguistic chapters with the fascinating data gathering scenes from this remote Bedouin village in Israel added another dimension which kept me reading into the night.

A lingistics book that is deeply tied with anthropology and even some neurology. Best understood by those with some interest in sign language or in anthropological research into isolated language cultures. How would you research a culture that has kept their language completely uninflected from other language influences? You can't use your own language to interview them, because then you are introducing your language as a new linguistic influence. The researchers used pictures, and asked the natives to use their own language to explain what they were seeing.

I personally found many things totally fascinating, and marked half a dozen pages for reference. But when I tried to share my excitement with others who had no interest in linguistics, I couldn't interest them. Sign language interpreters love it!

Mrs. Fox makes some exciting inquiries into the development of human language by studying an isolated bedouin community, who happens to have developed it's own visual language or signed language. While interesting for those who seek to understand the Deaf community it is invariably a book on linguistics. American Sign Language and Israeli Sign Language are used in contrast to this unique bedouin sign language.
On a personal level it amazes me to see how versatile humans are. Even without sound we can create language.

This is a terrific book. You'll learn much about Deaf culture, history and linguistics in general. I wish I had had this book in my first year in American Sign Language. It's a great tool to have. The lanugage of Sign is every bit as complex and nuanced as any spoken language. "Talking Hands" is a fabulous journey into the linguistics and culture of Sign.

...if you're at all interested in linguistics, the evolution of language, cognitive science, the philosophy of language, ethnography, anthropology, deaf studies...TH is a fascinating book on a little known corner of the human experience: communities in which sign languages spontaneously emerge, and one particular such community in rural Israel. MF gives a wonderful sketch of the history of modern sign languages and a very thorough overview of current linguistic and cognitive science approaches to the analysis and understanding of sign language in general. There is enormous food for thought in this relatively slim book. That it's so well written and well structured (with chapters alternating between the ethnographic and the historic/scientific) only made it the more gratifying to read. STRONG STRONG recommendation!