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. |
Dentro del libro
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... sentence , the who - did- what - to - whom of syntax . Actors must be linked with the correspon- ding actions ; descriptive words with the things they modify ; pronouns with the nouns they refer back to . Spoken languages do this in a ...
... sentence , for instance , and the corresponding question . Spoken languages do this in a variety of ways . One is to shuffle the order of the words in the sentence . In En- glish , a declarative sentence like " Father is home " has a ...
... sentence is reversed as well . Languages with richer systems of grammatical inflection can exploit freer word orders . In Latin , the sentence Puer puellam videt ( " The boy sees the girl " ) retains its meaning even when the words are ...
Contenido
Introduction | 1 |
In the Village of the Deaf | 5 |
What Is This Wonderful Language? | 15 |
Derechos de autor | |
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