The fact that I have now read all of the linguistic books written by Margalit Fox is a little sad. She is a complete master. In Talking Hands, Fox manages to ingratiate herself into a sign language linguistic group studying Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). Her depictions of Bedouin life in Al-Sayyid are, in and of themselves, worthy of a book. But Fox chooses to use alternate chapters to explore the history of signed languages and sign language linguistics. Her writing is never obtuse, but she manages to go more deeply into the subject than I thought possible in a book for the layreader. I had always known that ASL is a "true language" and "not English," through working with Deaf activists, but I never really had insight into what that meant. Fox exhaustively presents the evidence that ASL is a language (and ABSL and ISL and dozens of other sign languages) and then expands into exploring the consistent phenotypes between sign languages (they all have three types of verbs: agreeing verbs, moving verbs and plain verbs! They all have symmetry in their movements if both hands are used. They all constrain hand shapes.)

She then takes the whole thing a step further to explain what the study of sign languages in general, and village signs in specific, mean to our understanding about language. She talks about Chomsky and the discovery of language as an innate human skill, that will inevitably develop. She talks about the maturation of language over time (did you know that different languages have variable numbers of colors identifiable? And that, for instance, if there are three color words they will always mean white, black and red?)

Fox is scientifically thorough and thoroughly entertaining. I learned so much from this book and enjoyed every minute. ( )

An absolutely fascinating book on linguistics — I learned so much! There’s so much I want to say that it’s difficult to condense it all into a short summary, but I’ll do my best…

At the center of the study of linguistics are several big questions: How do humans create language from scratch? What are the bare essentials that every language has in common? What can that tell us about the way our minds work? Short of locking two babies in a room and observing what kind of language they develop as they grow up (known as the Forbidden Experiment for obvious reasons), we’ll never truly know the answers to these questions. But there have been naturally-arising situations and communities throughout the world, throughout history, that mimic the parameters of the Forbidden Experiment, and the few that linguists have been able to study have been gold mines of linguistic data.

One such community is Al-Sayyid, a remote desert town in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness due to a hereditary condition. Isolated as they were, outside of the influence of Israeli Sign Language, they created their own sign language which has been “spoken” by both the deaf and hearing members of the village for several generations. Journalist Margalit Fox accompanies a small team of sign language linguists to this miraculous town as they study the residents’ unique language.

The book alternates between an account of Fox’s observations of the village residents and the team’s methods of data collection, and a more general history of linguistics, of sign language and deafness, and of sign language linguistics in specific, including some fascinating discoveries made thanks to studies that have been conducted relatively recently. I may be overusing the word ‘fascinating’ here, but I can’t think of any better word — it really is incredibly fascinating! I learned so much about a topic I’ve never really thought about before and my mind was blown at least once per chapter! ( )

This is a fantastically accessible book for anyone interested in the history of American Sign Language, signed languages, and to a lesser extent, languages in general.

Personally, I was primarily interested in the history of ASL and it's struggle to be accepted as a "real" language. So I was pleased that the author did an excellent job of balancing the history of ASL with the relatively recent discovery of an isolated signed language in a remote Bedouin village. Additionally, she was able to use the ASL history sections to demonstrate why the linguists were so excited to observe and document the spontaneously created Bedouin sign language. This also underscored nicely the implications that, that nascent language holds for the understanding of human language acquisition in general.

The only quibbles I had about the book were mostly minor. The author choose to bypass the whole Deaf vs deaf distinction decided to use "deaf" throughout. She reasoned that since the Bedouin community is largely a signing village (regardless of audiological status) they really don't have a distinct "Deaf culture"; true enough. However, that's not accurate in the US where there is a really is a Deaf culture. Nonetheless she continued to use "deaf" throughout.

Second, as a hearing ASL user I've read many glosses of ASL -> English. But the style used in the book was a little strange that lead to re-reading those spots 3-4 times. Like I said, minor quibbles.

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This book was fascinating. I'm always going to be interested in reading about linguistics, and I like Fox's voice. The history and background of ASL was really interesting, especially the brain studies that were done on ASL signers who had strokes - if you weren't convinced that sign language is real language, those should definitely convince you! If a signer has the "language center" of the brain damaged, they lose the ability to sign but not the ability to pantomime! That's so weird. There's a lot of cool information in this book about the linguistics of sign languages and their formation, and I liked reading about the linguists methods of studying language. ( )

There's a village in Israel where there are so many deaf people that everybody uses sign language. Because the language started there rather than being brought in by other deaf people, linguists are studying the people who speak it to understand how humans accumulate language.

This is a fascinating book about this village, language, and the history of linguistics and of sign. She alternates chapters about the work videotaping and studying the villagers with facts about how sign came to be seen as an actual language rather than simple mime. ( )