Talking Hands

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.

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.

I learned a lot about language, both sign and spoken, by reading this book. I especially found the chapter on the brain very interesting as linguists learn how signers perceive signs as language and not just movements through space.