Talking HandsMargalit Fox
Simon & Schuster, $23.65

Fascination with the language instinct is so strong that no matter how many times one may have come across Helen Keller’s story, there is a certain point when one gets goosebumps. It’s the point when Keller, a deaf-blind child running wild with not a way known to her to communicate with the world, learns the sign for water. How she cognitively connects cool water with a sign taught by a teacher is a moment brimming with mystery and awe. Such moments are the holy grail for linguists. Their still fledgling discipline finds in these moments the boldest clues yet for insights into how the human mind works and organises itself.

Margalit Fox, a New York-based journalist with a master’s degree in linguistics, tells the story of a Bedouin village in Israel that has become the subject of a study by linguistics to answer the most cutting-edge questions about human mind. The identity of the village and its inhabitants has been protected to prevent them from becoming curiosities for tourists, but the account is absorbing.

She calls the village Al-Sayyid. It is the best instance of what's called a signing village, where the majority of residents can communicate by sign language. “Of Al-Sayyid’s 3,500 residents about one in twenty-five is deaf — 4 per cent of the population. For deafness a rate of 4 per cent is a staggering figure: in Israel, as in the United States, the incidence of deafness in the general population is about 0.1 per cent, one in a thousand.”

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