Friday, February 04, 2005
This Day:

Not much is known about the underlying processes by which a language is born. Almost all humans can communicate either by speech/sound, writing, or sign/mime. A typical language is composed of words/signs, and a grammar that binds them into a meaningful construct. However, the origins of language are lost, and we do not have much insight into how (or if) a new language would be created by a group of people who were never introduced to languages before.
Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language signer telling a story
ABSL signer telling a story (Courtesy: ScienceDaily.com)
Linguists are gaining new insights into this process by studying a sign language (ABSL, or Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language) created by group of deaf people in a small village in Israel's Negev desert. This community has developed their own distinct grammatical structure. This structure favors a particular word order: Subject-Object-Verb, as in "Man Book Give", unlike in English, where it is Subject-Verb-Object (Man Give Book). This structure is also different from languages spoken in the neighborhood of the village (Arabic or Hebrew). Researchers (Mark Aronoff: Stony Brook University, Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler: University of Haifa and Carol Padden: University of California, San Diego) found that ABSL has a complex grammar, that goes beyond questions about 'now' and 'here' (e.g. come here, go there), but can also deal with questions about 'how' and 'when'. Such complex structures, can tell us a lot about what it means to build a language from scratch, without any prior knowledge of any other language.
The Al-Sayyid village (population: 3500) was founded about 200 years ago, by a group of people with congenital deafness. Inter-marriage in the village has resulted in the birth of 150 deaf people in the last three generations. The deaf people are fully integrated with the non-deaf people in the village, and they all can communicate via this sign language. The language propagates from generation to generation like any other language, thus providing researchers unique insights into the birth and development of a new language.
For the present study, the researchers focused on the second generation of ABSL signers. Further work will document the evolution of the language in the third generation.

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2/04/2005   4 comments Post a Comment

4 Comments:

At February 06, 2005 10:45 AM, Blogger Wayne Smallman said...
I did read some research in the origins of speech, which really is still only guess work. But it did make a lot of sense.

People were show two shapes, one was an amorphous shape while the other was angular. They were then given two totally fictitious names to assign to each shape.

I don't remember the actual word used, but they were something like Bloid and Flax.

In nearly all cases, the word Bloid was assigned to the amorphous shape and Flax to the angular shape.

It's certainly interesting that such 'unspoken' assignments are somehow so obvious to us that we just know what word applies to which shape. That process in itself possibly warrants much more investigation.

This kind of thing certain does seem to explain words such as Axe and Blob which both describe the a shape or an action in a very audible and equally obvious way...
 
At February 07, 2005 2:32 AM, Blogger Sray said...
Interesting... I wonder if they did the research with deaf/dumb people, and just showed them the words. I would guess the choice would be 50-50 in that case.
 
At February 15, 2005 10:20 AM, Blogger Wayne Smallman said...
Found something you might want to read (go to: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4265763.stm)

"Thought might not be dependent on language, according to new research published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences."
 
At February 15, 2005 1:54 PM, Blogger Sray said...
Interesting work.. but I wonder if the syntax of the sentence was responsible? Perhaps the patient could not parse the sentence "the lion hunted the man" properly? To me, the sentence "lion hunt man" looks more similar to "59 - 11". I wonder if such a "Subkect Verb Object" construction could be understood, as compared to the 5 word sentence.
Both language and math are (mostly) processed by the left-brain. But the left brain is not a monolithic structure. 59-11 gives a objective result, 48. "Lion hunted man" requires a subjective understanding of the process, which might require the right brain as well. Therein lies the problem.
 

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