Miss-Delectable
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PHP:
Within an isolated desert community in southern Israel, a researcher and his colleagues have documented the spontaneous birth of a new language, the first one believed to have emerged entirely on its own.
Created by a small group of deaf villagers within the past 70 years, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language may offer linguists a rare window into how the mind builds languages from scratch.
"Why is this so fascinating? It's because this is the first documented case of a language that's arisen pretty much without any external influence," said Mark Aronoff, a Stony Brook University linguist who co-wrote the study, appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. advertisement
Within the Bedouin village of about 3,500, ABSL is the main form of communication for about 150 deaf inhabitants. An additional 150 villagers use the sign language daily to communicate with deaf friends and family.
Remarkably, the sign language's fairly strict grammatical structure solidified within one generation of use.
"What's most striking about it is that it's almost completely different from the spoken language of the village, which is a dialect of Arabic," Aronoff said. Unlike the typical subject-verb-object order of spoken Arabic, Hebrew and English, as in "John saw the dog," ABSL signers use a subject-object-verb order more reminiscent of Japanese, as in "John dog saw."
The study, led by Wendy Sadler at the University of Haifa, found that inhabitants use the language to tell elaborate stories and discuss topics as diverse as social security benefits and construction.http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0205language05.html
