http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/science/01lang.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

NY TIMES


February 1, 2005
A New Language Arises, and Scientists Watch It Evolve
By NICHOLAS WADE

Linguists studying a signing system that spontaneously developed in an
isolated Bedouin village say they have captured a new language being
generated from scratch. They believe its features may reflect the innate
neural circuitry that governs the brain's faculty for language.
The language, known as Al Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, is used in a
village of some 3,500 people in the Negev desert of Israel. They are
descendants of a single founder, who arrived 200 years ago from Egypt and
married a local woman. Two of the couple's five sons were deaf, as are
about 150 members of the community today.
The clan has long been known to geneticists, but only now have linguists
studied its sign language. A team led by Dr. Wendy Sandler of the
University of Haifa says in The Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences today that the Bedouin sign language developed spontaneously and
without outside influence. It is not related to Israeli or Jordanian sign
languages, and its word order differs from that of the spoken languages of
the region.
Linguists have long disputed whether language is transmitted just through
culture, as part of the brain's general learning ability or is internally
generated with the help of genetically specified neural circuits that
prescribe the elements of grammar. Since children learn to speak from
those around them, there is no obvious way of separating what is learned
from what is innate except by observing a new language being developed
from scratch, something that happens very rarely.
Two special opportunities to study a new language and identify its innate
elements have recently come to light. One is Nicaraguan sign language, a
signing system developed spontaneously by children at a school for the
deaf founded in 1977 in Nicaragua. The other is the Bedouin sign language
being described today. Sign languages can possess all the properties of
spoken language, including grammar, and differ only in the channel through
which meaning is conveyed.
Two features of the Bedouin sign language that look as if they come from
some innate grammatical machinery are a distinction between subject and
object, and the preference for a specific word order, said Dr. Mark
Aronoff of Stony Brook University, an author of today's report. The word
order is subject-object-verb, the most common in other languages. Dr.
Aronoff said that the emergence of a preferred order was the critical
feature, and that it was too early to tell if subject-object-verb is the
particular order favored by the brain's neural circuitry.
Linguists hope to learn more about the brain's language machinery by
identifying the features that the Bedouin and Nicaraguan sign languages
hold in common.
Dr. Ann Senghas, who has studied Nicaraguan sign language for 15 years,
said she agreed with Dr. Aronoff that the subject-object distinction and
word order could be innate features.
Dr. Senghas, who is at Barnard College in New York, said the preferred
word order in Nicaraguan sign language kept changing with each cohort of
children. The language has now acquired the signed equivalents of case
endings, the changes used in languages like Latin to show if a word is the
subject or object of a sentence. Word order can be less rigorous in
languages that use case endings.
The Bedouin sign language, which has not yet acquired case endings, is
also under development. The third generation is signing twice as fast as
the first and is using longer sentences, said Dr. Carol Padden of the
University of California, San Diego, another author of the new report.
Dr. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, said the Bedouin sign
language was "unquestionably an important finding." Together with the work
on Nicaraguan sign language and other studies, he said, it "suggests that
the human mind has the motive and means to create an expressive
grammatical language without requiring many generations of fine tuning,
trial and error, and accumulation of cultural traditions."
The absence of case endings, or inflection, in the clan's language was not
surprising, Dr. Pinker said, because this form of change, known as
morphology to linguists, often takes many generations to develop. Both
morphology and syntax, the ordering of words in phrases, may use
"fundamentally the same mental machinery, which operates inside a word in
the case of morphology and inside a phrase in the case of syntax," he
said.
Some researchers have speculated that language evolved first in the form
of a system of gestures, with sound taking over only later as the
preferred channel of communication. Evidence that gesture is still deeply
embedded in language can be seen in the fact that people gesticulate even
when on the phone.
Does the vigor and spontaneity of Bedouin and Nicaraguan sign languages
support the idea that a gesture-based language evolved first? Dr. Senghas
said the two languages "are not evidence about what came first" but
confirm that gesture is an integral part of language.
The clan sign language, which started only 70 years ago, is unusual in
being understood by the whole community, not just the deaf, since hearing
people use it to communicate with their deaf relatives. The signs have
already become symbolic: the sign for "man" is the twirl of a finger to
indicate a moustache, although men no longer wear them.
The Bedouin village is not geographically remote - it is near a large
McDonald's - but is socially isolated from other Bedouin who look down on
its origins. There are now more contacts with the outside world, and the
deaf children are being exposed to Israeli sign language in school. The
Bedouin sign language may not withstand modernization and marriage outside
the community. "This is a pretty short flowering," Dr. Aronoff said.