Beduin sign language points to foundations of grammar
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Israeli and American linguists who have studied users of Al-Sayyid
Beduin Sign Language (ABSL) say the 70-year-old language, which
developed free of any outside influences, provides insight into basic
questions about the way human language develops.
The analysis is being published Tuesday on-line in the American
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
ABSL, created in a small village in the Negev, serves as an
alternative language of a community of about 3,500 deaf and hearing
people. According to the researchers, ABSL developed a distinct
grammatical structure early in its evolution that favors the placing
of verbs after objects.
Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler from the University of Haifa, Mark Aronoff
from Stony Brook University in New York and Carol Padden from the
University of California at San Diego watched native signers tell
stories and describe actions and found that the language goes beyond a
list of words for actions, objects, people and characteristics to
establish systematic relations among those elements. Sentences in ABSL
follow a Subject-Object-Verb order, e.g., "woman apple give," rather
than the Subject-Verb-Object order found in English – or, more
significantly, in other languages in the region.
"ABSL is transmitted within families across generations, and children
learn it without explicit instruction. It is the best analogue we have
for studying how any new language is born and grows," said Carol
Padden, a professor of communication at the University of California
at San Diego.
"The grammatical structure of the Beduin sign language shows no
influence from either the dialect of Arabic spoken by hearing members
of the community or the predominant sign language in the surrounding
area, Israeli Sign Language," said Padden. "Because ABSL developed
independently, it may reflect fundamental properties of language in
general and provide insight into basic questions about the way in
which human language develops from the very beginning."
Remarkably, the fixed word order of ABSL emerged within a generation
after the inception of the language."Our findings support the idea
that word order is one of the first features of a language, and that
it appears very early," Padden said.
The research also supports the notion that languages can and do evolve
quickly."When we first came to al-Sayyid, I expected to see a lot of
gesture and miming, but I was impressed immediately by how
sophisticated the language was. This is not an ad hoc,
spur-of-the-moment communication. It is a complex language capable of
relating information beyond the here and now," she continued.
The al-Sayyid village was founded about 200 years ago and today
numbers some 3,500 members. Approximately 150 individuals with
congenital deafness, all of them descendants of two of the founders'
sons, have been born into the community in the past three generations.
Consanguinity (close relatives marrying within the village) is the
norm, and inbreeding has caused deafness, which is caused by a
recessive gene, to be well distributed throughout the population.
As a result, the researchers say, many of the signers in the community
are hearing, a highly unusual situation for a sign language but one
that can be predicted in a tightly-knit group which fully integrates
its deaf members. "It is a language of the entire community, both
hearing and deaf," said Padden.
Bobby D. Bryant
> Israeli and American linguists who have studied users of Al-Sayyid
> Beduin Sign Language (ABSL) say the 70-year-old language, which
> developed free of any outside influences
In these cases, how do we rigourously establish "free of any outside
influences"?
For example, do we know with certainty that none of the participants
knew how to read?
--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
Joachim Pense
In the Al-Jazeera TV news often there is a window with a sign language
interpreter. Does the sign language he uses have any relations to the ABSL
you mention here?
Joachim