"The Forbidden Experiment"
Aug. 18th, 2007 07:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brdgtSome Kind of Sign
By LEAH HAGER COHEN, The New York Times, August 19, 2007
TALKING HANDS: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind.
By Margalit Fox. (Illustrated. 354 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.)
In the seventh century B.C., the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus conducted an unusual experiment: he plucked a couple of infants from their mothers and turned them over to a shepherd, to be raised in seclusion and in the absence of any spoken word. The idea was that whatever sounds the babies spontaneously emitted would reveal the oldest, the original human language.
This anecdote appears in the second book of Herodotus’ Histories, and although its veracity is disputed, it continues to tantalize linguists, among whom it has become known as the Forbidden Experiment — forbidden because its replication would be ethically untenable; tantalizing because of the rich psycholinguistic data such an experiment would surely yield.
The Forbidden Experiment is the specter that haunts “Talking Hands,” the story of a remote Bedouin village where an indigenous sign language has drawn the attention of a team of linguists, who hope it will provide information about our innate capacity for language and our drive to create it. During the past 70 years, this village of 3,500 people has experienced an unusually high incidence of deafness (about one in 25, 40 times that of the general population). As a result of these numbers, and the fact that until recently the villagers had not been exposed to established signed languages, the one that sprang up there and is now used by both deaf and hearing people holds special value for researchers.
In the summer of 2003, Margalit Fox, a reporter for The New York Times and a trained linguist, was granted permission to accompany the four-person team (two Israelis, two Americans) to the village. In their efforts to preserve both the privacy of the local people and the relative isolation that enabled the creation of an indigenous sign language, the researchers insisted that Fox disguise identifying characteristics of the life and inhabitants of the village, including its name and location. (She calls it Al-Sayyid and says only that it is “tucked into an obscure corner of what is now Israel.”) She also had to refrain from independent interaction with any of the residents. And she was permitted to accompany the team on only one of its regular visits, for a single three-day period.
Complying with such constraints leaves a journalist with rather sparse material, and Al-Sayyid never really comes to life. We are limited chiefly to glimpses of villagers’ houses, clothes and gardens, as well as descriptions of the drink everyone serves, “glasses of scalding tea stuffed with the freshly cut sprigs” of hyssop. In each household the action unfolds along the same, not terribly dramatic lines: the researchers set up their equipment and record subjects signing in response to prepared visual stimuli.
It isn’t Fox’s prose that’s the problem, nor is it her eye for the telling detail. At one point she observes three children coloring with pastels and paper on the floor. “There, with the sands of the Middle East rushing in through the open front door, the girls draw the universal child’s landscape: a huge stylized flower and, beside it, exactly the same size, a green, scallop-edged tree, dotted with apples.” Such passages make a reader wish that Fox had been allowed to spend a full season in the village, interacting directly with its people and freely soaking up their culture and stories. Instead, these sections of the book lack characters we can come to know and care about, as well as any real narrative progression. When Fox likens the village to Brigadoon and Shangri-La, the descriptions are only too apt. Al-Sayyid never takes on more emotional heft, or feels more real, than either of those insubstantial utopias.
But elsewhere Fox refers to Al-Sayyid as a “natural Forbidden Experiment,” and it is here that she more fully engages us. Building her case through meticulous research and methodical explanation, she shows why the language of Al-Sayyid matters and how it might help answer the questions “What is a human language, and how is it made in the mind?”
“Talking Hands” offers a thorough examination of the history, politics and science of signed languages, emphasizing their special bearing on our understanding of humans’ biological imperative to create language. In chapters that alternate with those set in the village, Fox provides an exhaustive, energetic and frequently elegant tour through the world of sign language and sign linguistics. I know of no other book in this field that covers so much ground so comprehensively and with such care.
At times, however, the immense scope of the tour can make it feel somewhat haphazard. We are told of the 18th- and 19th-century signing community on the island of Martha’s Vineyard and of the mid-20th-century Chomsky revolution, which challenged earlier linguistic schools of thought. We learn of the emerging Nicaraguan sign language started by deaf children in the 1980s, and of the differences that distinguish pidgins from creoles from mature language systems.
Fox never met a tangent she didn’t like, and she can be quite delightful when reporting on more esoteric facts: witness the study on “folk linguistics,” in which people from around the United States rate other regions based on the “pleasantness” of their language. (Don’t ask how New York City fares.) Witness, too, the section on Dyirbal, an Australian aboriginal language in which nouns are organized into “four linguistic categories whose representative members include: (1) men, kangaroos, fishing line, the moon, storms, rainbows and boomerangs; (2) women, dogs, fireflies, water, fire, stars and the hairy mary grub; (3) ferns, honey, cigarettes, wine and cake; (4) meat, bees, the wind, mud, grass, stones and language itself.” The author’s evident pleasure in this list, which amounts to a found poem, is palpable.
Yet such winsome flights aren’t the central concern of this thoughtfully structured and intellectually rigorous book. (So rigorous, in fact, that nonlinguists may occasionally find themselves hard-pressed to keep up. Passages like “a grammatical process known as ablaut can convey linguistic information simply by changing a vowel in the word, without adding an affix,” can be slow going for the uninitiated.) For the most part, though, Fox’s writing is clear and cogent, informed by the quiet passion of a natural teacher for her subject. She is particularly good at explaining why the mimetic qualities of sign languages (the fact that they sometimes resemble pantomime) do not consign them to being lesser languages than spoken ones. And she is swift to point out that Al-Sayyid is far from the only place such a pristine language may exist. “Researchers believe there are even more signing villages than we know of, waiting to be discovered in distant pockets of the world.” By holding signed and spoken languages up to the same light, teasing apart their similarities and differences, Fox suggests, we can learn much about how deeply the language instinct informs who we are as a species.
Leah Hager Cohen is the author of “Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World.” Her most recent book is “House Lights,” a novel.
By LEAH HAGER COHEN, The New York Times, August 19, 2007
TALKING HANDS: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind.
By Margalit Fox. (Illustrated. 354 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.)
In the seventh century B.C., the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus conducted an unusual experiment: he plucked a couple of infants from their mothers and turned them over to a shepherd, to be raised in seclusion and in the absence of any spoken word. The idea was that whatever sounds the babies spontaneously emitted would reveal the oldest, the original human language.
This anecdote appears in the second book of Herodotus’ Histories, and although its veracity is disputed, it continues to tantalize linguists, among whom it has become known as the Forbidden Experiment — forbidden because its replication would be ethically untenable; tantalizing because of the rich psycholinguistic data such an experiment would surely yield.
The Forbidden Experiment is the specter that haunts “Talking Hands,” the story of a remote Bedouin village where an indigenous sign language has drawn the attention of a team of linguists, who hope it will provide information about our innate capacity for language and our drive to create it. During the past 70 years, this village of 3,500 people has experienced an unusually high incidence of deafness (about one in 25, 40 times that of the general population). As a result of these numbers, and the fact that until recently the villagers had not been exposed to established signed languages, the one that sprang up there and is now used by both deaf and hearing people holds special value for researchers.
In the summer of 2003, Margalit Fox, a reporter for The New York Times and a trained linguist, was granted permission to accompany the four-person team (two Israelis, two Americans) to the village. In their efforts to preserve both the privacy of the local people and the relative isolation that enabled the creation of an indigenous sign language, the researchers insisted that Fox disguise identifying characteristics of the life and inhabitants of the village, including its name and location. (She calls it Al-Sayyid and says only that it is “tucked into an obscure corner of what is now Israel.”) She also had to refrain from independent interaction with any of the residents. And she was permitted to accompany the team on only one of its regular visits, for a single three-day period.
Complying with such constraints leaves a journalist with rather sparse material, and Al-Sayyid never really comes to life. We are limited chiefly to glimpses of villagers’ houses, clothes and gardens, as well as descriptions of the drink everyone serves, “glasses of scalding tea stuffed with the freshly cut sprigs” of hyssop. In each household the action unfolds along the same, not terribly dramatic lines: the researchers set up their equipment and record subjects signing in response to prepared visual stimuli.
It isn’t Fox’s prose that’s the problem, nor is it her eye for the telling detail. At one point she observes three children coloring with pastels and paper on the floor. “There, with the sands of the Middle East rushing in through the open front door, the girls draw the universal child’s landscape: a huge stylized flower and, beside it, exactly the same size, a green, scallop-edged tree, dotted with apples.” Such passages make a reader wish that Fox had been allowed to spend a full season in the village, interacting directly with its people and freely soaking up their culture and stories. Instead, these sections of the book lack characters we can come to know and care about, as well as any real narrative progression. When Fox likens the village to Brigadoon and Shangri-La, the descriptions are only too apt. Al-Sayyid never takes on more emotional heft, or feels more real, than either of those insubstantial utopias.
But elsewhere Fox refers to Al-Sayyid as a “natural Forbidden Experiment,” and it is here that she more fully engages us. Building her case through meticulous research and methodical explanation, she shows why the language of Al-Sayyid matters and how it might help answer the questions “What is a human language, and how is it made in the mind?”
“Talking Hands” offers a thorough examination of the history, politics and science of signed languages, emphasizing their special bearing on our understanding of humans’ biological imperative to create language. In chapters that alternate with those set in the village, Fox provides an exhaustive, energetic and frequently elegant tour through the world of sign language and sign linguistics. I know of no other book in this field that covers so much ground so comprehensively and with such care.
At times, however, the immense scope of the tour can make it feel somewhat haphazard. We are told of the 18th- and 19th-century signing community on the island of Martha’s Vineyard and of the mid-20th-century Chomsky revolution, which challenged earlier linguistic schools of thought. We learn of the emerging Nicaraguan sign language started by deaf children in the 1980s, and of the differences that distinguish pidgins from creoles from mature language systems.
Fox never met a tangent she didn’t like, and she can be quite delightful when reporting on more esoteric facts: witness the study on “folk linguistics,” in which people from around the United States rate other regions based on the “pleasantness” of their language. (Don’t ask how New York City fares.) Witness, too, the section on Dyirbal, an Australian aboriginal language in which nouns are organized into “four linguistic categories whose representative members include: (1) men, kangaroos, fishing line, the moon, storms, rainbows and boomerangs; (2) women, dogs, fireflies, water, fire, stars and the hairy mary grub; (3) ferns, honey, cigarettes, wine and cake; (4) meat, bees, the wind, mud, grass, stones and language itself.” The author’s evident pleasure in this list, which amounts to a found poem, is palpable.
Yet such winsome flights aren’t the central concern of this thoughtfully structured and intellectually rigorous book. (So rigorous, in fact, that nonlinguists may occasionally find themselves hard-pressed to keep up. Passages like “a grammatical process known as ablaut can convey linguistic information simply by changing a vowel in the word, without adding an affix,” can be slow going for the uninitiated.) For the most part, though, Fox’s writing is clear and cogent, informed by the quiet passion of a natural teacher for her subject. She is particularly good at explaining why the mimetic qualities of sign languages (the fact that they sometimes resemble pantomime) do not consign them to being lesser languages than spoken ones. And she is swift to point out that Al-Sayyid is far from the only place such a pristine language may exist. “Researchers believe there are even more signing villages than we know of, waiting to be discovered in distant pockets of the world.” By holding signed and spoken languages up to the same light, teasing apart their similarities and differences, Fox suggests, we can learn much about how deeply the language instinct informs who we are as a species.
Leah Hager Cohen is the author of “Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World.” Her most recent book is “House Lights,” a novel.
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Date: 2007-08-19 02:19 pm (UTC)Complying with such constraints leaves a journalist with rather sparse material, and Al-Sayyid never really comes to life. We are limited chiefly to glimpses of villagers’ houses, clothes and gardens, as well as descriptions of the drink everyone serves, “glasses of scalding tea stuffed with the freshly cut sprigs” of hyssop. In each household the action unfolds along the same, not terribly dramatic lines: the researchers set up their equipment and record subjects signing in response to prepared visual stimuli.
It says much about how journalists approach analysis, and why they tend to miss the importance of daily life. Social history tends to get swept under the rug.