#talking hands

Fucking BANGER

The 90s-alt drums, the 80s synth, the bouncy 80s pop singing, the tube noises, the lyrics

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.