We interrupt our program of rank political partisanship to bring you a flash of scientific insight on the development of human language:
How is a language born? What are its essential elements? Linguists are gaining new insights into these age-old conundrums from a language created in a small village in Israel’s Negev Desert.
The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), which serves as an alternative language of a community of about 3,500 deaf and hearing people, has developed a distinct grammatical structure early in its evolution, researchers report, and the structure favors a particular word order: verbs after objects.
Al-Sayyid is an interesting community because it has so many deaf people – 150 out of 3500 – that everybody can sign, and the sign language they’ve developed isn’t like any other sign langugage in the world or like their spoken language. How this happened remains a mystery.