Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the MindSimon & Schuster, 2007 - 354 páginas Imagine a village where everyone "speaks" sign language. Just such a village -- an isolated Bedouin community in Israel with an unusually high rate of deafness -- is at the heart of "Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind." There, an indigenous sign language has sprung up, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. It is a language no outsider has been able to decode, until now. A "New York Times" reporter trained as a linguist, Margalit Fox is the only Western journalist to have set foot in this remarkable village. In "Talking Hands, " she follows an international team of scientists that is unraveling this mysterious language. Because the sign language of the village has arisen completely on its own, outside the influence of any other language, it is a living demonstration of the "language instinct," man's inborn capacity to create language. If the researchers can decode this language, they will have helped isolate ingredients essential to all human language, signed and spoken. But as "Talking Hands" grippingly shows, their work in the village is also a race against time, because the unique language of the village may already be endangered. "Talking Hands" offers a fascinating introduction to the signed languages of the world -- languages as beautiful, vital and emphatically human as any other -- explaining why they are now furnishing cognitive scientists with long-sought keys to understanding how language works in the mind. Written in lyrical, accessible prose, "Talking Hands" will captivate anyone interested in language, the human mind and journeys to exotic places. |
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... century witnessed the start of a public campaign to eradicate sign language , a continuing chapter in American history that in its sweep- ing paternalism reads a great deal like a colonial narrative . By the middle of the century , some ...
... century , human language was a window on the mind . These ideas found little favor in the structuralist era of the early twentieth century . As Marx writes : The study of cultures flourished with the development of anthropology ...
... centuries . ASL has been around for barely two hundred years ; its historical par- ent , French Sign Language , is not much more than a century or two older . The earliest written references to a signed language in Britain date from the ...
Índice
Introduction | 1 |
In the Village of the Deaf | 5 |
What Is This Wonderful Language? | 15 |
Direitos de autor | |
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Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind Margalit Fox Pré-visualização limitada - 2008 |