Reference no: EM133307017

Assignment: Use the information below to answer the questions only. Explain the answers.

The Martha's Vineyard Deaf Community:

The young couple is animated in their silent conversation here at the Chilmark Public Library. Their hands move gracefully, sometimes in rhythm with their mouths, which make no sound. The woman claps one hand sharply against the other as she forms a particular word, and the man frowns. He pulls out a book about the history of Martha's Vineyard, skims a page as she looks with him, closes it roughly and shoves it back on the shelf. A Above: The Chilmark Post Office, c.1900, was a social gathering place for the island's deaf community. The sight of two people speaking in sign language would have gone unnoticed in the mid-19th century on Martha's Vineyard. That's when one in four people in the village of Squibnocket, in the town of Chilmark, was born deaf, a phenomenon created by biological and social circumstances still studied today. But on this late-summer day in 2005, the deaf couple is noticeably frustrated. They want to ask a question about the island but are understood only by each other, and that never would have happened 150 years ago. Back then, everyone in Chilmark-the hearing and the deaf- communicated in sign language. At the Chilmark general store or the Squibnocket post office, the main gathering places at the time, children watched their parents discuss the weather and their fishing catch and gossip with neighbors in sign. And the children learned the language themselves. It is particularly ironic that the young man and woman are standing in the Martha's Vineyard Room of the Chilmark library, a room that used to be part of the home of Katie West, the last member of the Martha's Vineyard deaf community. As they browse the history books, they stand on the West home's original yellow pine floorboards, inches away from her brick hearth where conversing in sign language was once as common as tending the fire. West descended from a community for whom deafness was so common that those who didn't hear faced none of the social barriers the deaf know today. And since everyone learned the sign language unique to the island, which became known Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, communication flowed freely. "There wasn't any television or radio to be excluded from," observes Joan Poole Nash, a Chilmark native and teacher of the deaf, whose great-grandmother Emily Howland Poole taught her the local sign language. "The only outside source of information was print." The deaf were active in church affairs and earned wages that were equal to or higher than those the hearing received. The hearing married the deaf, and couples had both hearing and deaf children without feeling like a deaf child was handicapped. As Nash said her greatgrandmother told her years ago, "Those people weren't handicapped. They were just deaf." And as late longtime island resident and historian Gale Huntington told medical anthropologist Nora Ellen Groce for her 1985 book, Everybody Here Spoke Sign Language, "I used to speak [sign language], my mother did, everybody." The first recorded case of deafness on Martha's Vineyard was Jonathan Lambert, who moved to the island in 1694. The trait for island deafness was traced to the rural area of Weald in the English county Kent, where Lambert's family was from, and the characteristic was eventually linked to a recessive gene that originated there. Weald was sparsely populated, had a high incidence of intermarriage, and an extraordinarily high incidence of deafness, Groce reports in her book. The deaf population was so large there that it developed its own sign language, she discovered. During the late 1600s and through the 1700s, conditions were Above: The Tilton family home on Middle Road in the late 1800s. Many Tiltons were deaf. Below: The original of this Thomas Hart Benton portrait of Josie West, who was deaf, hangs in the library of the Martha's Vineyard Historical Society. www.capecodlife.com CAPE COD LIFE PUBLICATIONS 33 34 MARTHA' S VINEYARD LIFE 2006 www.capecodlife.com ripe for the growth of the deaf population on Martha's Vineyard. For starters, the population was booming. In 1700, about 400 people lived on the island, but by 1800 the number grew by more than seven times that to 3,100. After 1710, immigration to Martha's Vineyard had virtually ended and regular contact and marriage with off-islanders had decreased. Since few residents moved off-island, isolation had increased and intermarriage between first, second, and third cousins was common and accepted by Yankee social mores, which Vineyarders followed, Groce reports. For the most part, Vineyarders didn't really question why some folks were born deaf and others weren't. And we didn't know then what we know today about genetics. Alexander Graham Bell lived in Squibnocket for a while to study the phenomenon. He speculated that Gay Head clay could be the culprit. He left the island concluding that deafness could be inherited, but he didn't understand why some families with two deaf parents had some children who were deaf and some who weren't. The end of the deaf community occurred with the 1952 death of Katie West, but the decline in the deaf population had started much sooner after the establishment of the country's first residential school for the deaf in 1817 in Hartford, Conn. Vineyard children began attending in the 1820s and 1830s, and by the 1860s, many children were staying at such schools until their mid- to late teens. They married classmates from off-island, whose deafness was caused by other reasons. Such marriages diluted the island gene pool, so the children born to them did not inherit the recessive Kentish Weald gene. Social and economic changes in the late 19th century also affected the deaf population. The once-prosperous whaling and schooner industries on the island declined, so more young people headed elsewhere in search of a livelihood. A wave of new immigrants from the Portuguese Azores to the Vineyard also changed the mix, as did advances in transportation. The island became a vacation destination, bringing in even more people, some of whom stayed year-round. While most islanders generally knew who was deaf and who was hearing, being deaf did not dominate one's image in the community. Consider Gale Huntington's story "Chilmark's Deaf: Valued Citizen," which ran in The Dukes County Intelligencer, published by the Dukes County Historical Society in February 1981. Huntington writes of Ben Mayhew, Jared's brother, who was hearing impaired and ran a small subsistence farm and "would row a boat or dory as well as anybody else, thanks to a harness on one oar into which he would slip his arm." To differentiate him from two other Ben Mayhews also living in Chilmark at the time, residents nicknamed him One-armed Ben. "It is significant that it was that handicap that was chosen for identification, rather than his deafness," Huntington writes in a footnote. The entire Chilmark area was bilingual in English and MVSL, which likely came before or was developed simultaneously with American Sign Language, according to Nash, now of Newton. She continues to keep the language alive by teaching it to her students, fielding questions from other scholars studying the deaf, and dispelling the occasional "urban legend" about the Vineyard deaf community, she says. Nash, whose family dates back 300 years in Chilmark, studied MVSL as a student at Boston University and created an oral history of the language in 1977 by videotaping those who still spoke it, including her great-grandmother Emily, who was in her 90s at the time. "All the people we were interviewing were just natural storytellers," Nash recalls. "My great-grandmother gave great information. 'I wasn't a great signer,' she would say. She knew a sign in one context wasn't the same in another," and she didn't know how to use them interchangeably, Nash says. This told her what a complex language it was. The language was complex and at times, quite imaginative, as longtime Vineyarder Eric Cottle recalled in an interview with historian Linsey Lee in her 1998 book Vineyard Voices: Words, Faces and Voices of Island People, "They had signs for most of the people," Cottle said. "Now Ernest Mayhew, that was a sign! Because they hung a May basket on something, and he had run right into a clothesline, come right across there and thrown on his back. And that was Ernest Mayhew's sign-go like that-grab your neck, and let's talk about Ernest Mayhew!" There were other signs that made the language unique to the Vineyard: a flicking thumb for "cranberry" and two fingers hooked together for "swordfish." "And they (islanders) still do use it," Nash says of today's Vineyarders," but it gets less and less complex with each generation." Her father Everett Henry Poole uses it on his fishing boat when he is out of earshot. "He uses it for two things-the weather and his catch," she says. Cottle learned the language from none other than Katie West, who was the housekeeper in a friend's home where he often had lunch as a boy, and who lived in the house that is now part of the Chilmark library. This is the same place where that young couple stood last summer disheartened, until the librarian introduced them to Nash, who happened to be on island visiting her mother-and in the library at the time. "They wanted to know if there were gravestones here with fingered signs on them," Nash reports after a conversation with the pair in American Sign Language. "It's that urban legend stuff."

Village of the Deaf In a Bedouin Town, a Language Is Born

Margalit Fox Sign

language, like any language, differs from place to place. In 1924 when athletes from Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain, Holland, and Poland gathered at the first World Games for the Deaf, they had to develop a new language to communicate with each other. Their impromptu system of hand signs became the foundation of a global sign language called International Sign. Despite, the existence of International Sign, deaf people and others throughout the world have developed unique sign languages to fit the uniqueness of their lived experiences. In recent years, for example, deaf and non-deaf poets have adapted sign languages to share their worldviews in ways that words and speech alone cannot. Pioneering sign language poets like Clayton Valli have helped the hearing world understand that signing, like speech, has rhymes, rhythm, and meter. Humans communicate to connect and understand each other. This desire to connect is no different in the deaf community, even in remote locations where deaf people may not have opportunities to learn established sign languages. This selection describes the evolution of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, a language created in a remote Israeli village where an inherited form of deafness has created an incidence of deafness approximately forty times that of the general population. Linguistic anthropologists "discovered" this island of the deaf in the late 1990s and have collaborated with the local population to learn more about the evolution of language. As you read this selection, ask yourself the following questions: ¦ In what ways is Al-Sayyid an "island of the deaf?" ¦ What is the difference between first and second generation users of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language? ¦ How do Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, American Sign Language, and British Sign Language differ? ¦ In what ways is Al-Sayyid an "island of the deaf?" ¦ How does Bedouin Sign Language grammar differ from the verb-second grammar discussed in Bhattarcharjee's chapter "From Heofonum to Heavens?" The following tenns discussed in this selection are included in the Glossary at the back of the book: Babel homesigns Bedouin language instinct On this summer evening, the house is alive with people. In the main room, the owner of the house, a stocky man in a plaid shirt, has set a long plastic banquet table on the earthen floor, with a dozen plastic patio chairs around it. Children materialize with platters of nuts, sunflower seeds, and miniature fruit. At Fox, Margalit "Village of the Deaf: In a Bedouin Town, a Language Is Bom." Discover Magazine (July 2007):66-69 from Talking Hands: What Sigil Language Reveals About the Mind by Fox. (Simon & Schuster, 2007). Reprinted with permission of the author. the head of the table, the owner is joined by a group of men in their thirties and forties. Down one side of the table is a row of boys, from toddlers to teenagers. At the foot of the table sits a knot of six visitors: four linguistics scholars, a video camera operator, and me. The man and his family are Bedouins, and the house is at tire edge of their village, Al-Sayyid. Though they live in the desert, the Bedouins of Al-Sayyid are not nomads. Their people have inhabited this village, tucked into an obscure comer of what is now Israel, miles from the nearest town, for nearly 200 years. They are rooted, even middle class. Men and boys are 173 174 LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY bareheaded and dressed in Western clothing, mostly T-shirts and jeans. They own automobiles, computers, and VCRs. But there is something even more remarkable about the Al-Sayyid Bedouins-an unusual language, never documented until now. The house is a Babel tonight. Around the table, six languages are flowing. There are snatches of English, mostly for my benefit. There is Hebrew: two of the linguists are from an Israeli university, and many men in Al-Sayyid speak Hebrew as well. There is a great deal of Arabic, the language of the home for Bedouins throughout the Middle East. But in the illuminated room, it is the other languages that catch the eye. They are signed languages, the languages of the deaf. As night engulfs the desert and the cameraman's lights throw up huge, signing shadows, it looks as though language itself has become animate, as conversations play out in silhouette on the whitewashed walls. There are three signed languages going. There is American Sign Language, used by one of the visitors, a deaf linguist from California. There is Israeli Sign Language (ISL), the language of the deaf in that country, whose structure the two Israeli scholars have devoted years to analyzing. And there is a third language, the one the linguists have journeyed here to see: Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), which is spoken in this village and nowhere else in the world. In Al-Sayyid, the four linguists have encountered a veritable island of the deaf. In this isolated traditional community, where marriage to outsiders is rare, a form of inherited deafness has been passed down from one generation to the next for the last 70 years. Of the 3,500 residents of the village today, nearly 150 are deaf, an incidence forty times that of the general population. As a result, an indigenous signed language has sprung up, evolving among the deaf villagers as a means of communication. But what is so striking about the sign language of Al-Sayyid is that many hearing villagers can also speak it. It permeates every aspect of community life, used between parents and children, husbands and wives, from sibling to sibling and neighbor to neighbor. The team plans to observe the language, to record it, and to produce an illustrated dictionary, the firstever documentary record of the villagers' signed communication system. But the linguists are after something even larger. Because Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language has arisen entirely on its own, it offers a living demonstration of the "language instinct," man's inborn capacity to create language from thin air. If the linguists can decode this language-if they can isolate the formal elements that make Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language a language-they will be in possession of compelling new evidence in the search for the ingredients essential to all language. And in so doing, they will have helped illuminate one of the most fundamental aspects of what it means to be human. When Wendy Sandler, a linguist at the University of Haifa, first heard about Al-Sayyid in the late 1990s, she knew at once that she had to investigate. Over the next few years, she and hit Meir, a colleague at Haifa, made cautious forays into Al-Sayyid, setting in motion the diplomacy that is a critical part of linguistic fieldwork: explaining their intentions, hosting a day of activities at the village school, over time earning the trust of a number of the villagers. Their work has a sense of urgency. Although the sign language of Al-Sayyid arose in a linguistic vacuum, the social realities of modem life, even in a remote desert community, make it impossible for it to remain that way. Over the years, many of Al-Sayyid's deaf children have been bused to special classes for the deaf in nearby towns, where they are taught all day in spoken language-Hebrew or Arabic-accompanied by signs from Israeli Sign Language, a language utterly different from their own. In just one generation, when the older Bedouin signers die, the unique signed language of the village, at least in its present form, may be significantly altered. Omar, the owner of the home in which we gathered for the first recording session, greeted us in Hebrew. Although he is hearing, Omar has deaf siblings and knows the village sign language. Carol Padden, a linguist from the University of California, San Diego, who is deaf, starts to sign to him, using gestures international enough that they can be readily understood. Omar replies expansively in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign: the seeds of a simple contact pidgin have been sown. When signers of different languages come together, communication is achieved partly through the use of the most transparent gestures possible, partly through a shared understanding of the particular devices that signed languages use to convey meaning. (Just such a contact language, called International Sign Pidgin, has developed over the years at places like sign-linguistics meetings, where deaf people from many countries converge.) The sign language of a particular country is rarely contingent on the spoken language that surrounds it. American and British Sign Languages are mutually unintelligible. A deaf American will have an easier time understanding a deaf Frenchman: ASL is historically descended from French Sign Language. Even the manual alphabet used by deaf signers can differ from one country to another. The letters of the American manual alphabet are signed using one hand; those of the British manual alphabet are made with two hands. In her lab's mission statement, Wendy sums up how studying sign languages can illuminate how the VILLAGE OFTHE DEAF: IN A BEDOUIN TOWN, A LANGUAGE IS BORN 175 mind works: "It usually comes as a surprise to the layman to learn that nobody sat down and invented the sign languages of the deaf. These languages arise spontaneously, wherever deaf people have an opportunity to congregate. That shows that they are the natural product of the human brain, just like spoken languages. But because these languages exist in a different physical modality, researchers believe that they offer a unique window into the kind of mental system that all human language belongs to." Linguists have long believed that the ideal language to analyze would be one in its infancy. They even dream of the following experiment: simply grab a couple of babies, lock them in a room for a few years and record the utterances they produce. The scenario came to be known as the Forbidden Experiment. It's been tried. The historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century b.c., told of the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetichus, who, in an attempt to discover what the oldest civilization was, took two infants from their mothers and dispatched them to an isolated hut under the care of a mute shepherd. Eventually, one of the babies uttered the word bekos, which turned out to be the Phrygian word for "bread," bringing the experiment to a happy conclusion. But near the end of the twentieth century, linguists began to realize that their sought-after virgin language existed in the sign language of the deaf. Signed languages spring from the same mental machinery that spoken languages do, but they are linguistic saplings. The conditions that create an Al-Sayyid-a place where hundreds of people are habitual signers-are extremely particular. First, you need a gene for a form of inherited deafness. Second, you need huge families to pass the gene along, yielding an unusually large deaf population in a short span of time. Of Al-Sayyid's 3,500 residents, about one in 25 is deaf-4 percent of the population. For deafness, a rate of 4 percent is a staggering figure: in the United States, the incidence of deafness in the general population is about one in 1,000. The presence of so many deaf signers in their midst also encourages widespread signing among the hearing. This helps keep the indigenous signed language alive for the village as a whole. Wendy and her colleagues aren't claiming that Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) mirrors the evolutionary development of language in Homo sapiens. Rather, as Wendy explained, "we're able to see, given the fully developed human brain, what happens when it has to make a language out of nothing." The first deaf children were born in Al-Sayyid 70 years ago, about ten of them in a single generation. By the time of our visit, only one member of the first deaf generation was still alive, an elderly woman too infirm to be interviewed. Today, the 150 or so deaf people of Al-Sayyid include the second generation, men and women in their thirties and forties; and the third generation, their children. When they were small, the first-generation signers had developed systems of gestures, called homesigns, to communicate with their families. With so many homesigners in close proximity, a functional pidgin could develop quickly. And in just one generation, the children of these signers, like children of pidgin speakers everywhere, took their parents' signed pidgin and gave it grammar, spontaneously transforming it into the signed language of Al-Sayyid. Over time, the language developed complexity. "People can talk about things that are not in the here-and-now," says Wendy. "They can talk about the traditional folklore of the tribe and say, 'People used to do it this way and now they don't,' They're able to transmit a lot of information--and things that are quite abstract." For example, "A signer told us about the traditional method of making babies immune to scorpion bites. It takes a high degree of sophistication about their culture, and it also takes a high degree of abstraction to be able to convey it." Another villager, Anwar, is a particularly fine signer. On the linguists' previous visit, they recorded him telling a story nearly half an hour long, of how he was lost in Egypt for several years as a child. When Anwar was about eight, he somehow found his way onto a bus bound for Egypt. Because he couldn't communicate with anyone, he had no idea where he was supposed to be going, or where to get off. He left the bus somewhere in Egypt, where he knew no one. He was taken in by a local family and lived with them for three years. One day, someone from Al-Sayyid passed through and heard the story of the mysterious deaf boy. He recognized Anwar and brought him home. Anwar recounted this for the linguists entirely in the village sign language. In all human languages, the task of showing who did what to whom is one of the principal functions of grammar. Many languages do this through verb agreement. But as a young, relatively bare language, ABSL displayed little of the elaborate verb agreement-made by altering the path of a verb's movement through space-that is the hallmark of established sign languages. Yet in the sentences they signed every day, the people of Al-Sayyid conveyed, clearly and without ambiguity, who did what to whom. Identifying the way in which they did so was the team's first important discovery. In most spoken languages, there is a trade-off between verb agreement and rigid word order when it comes to expressing who did what to whom. And rigid word order the sign language of Al-Sayyid had with a vengeance. The-second-generation signers of ABSL, 176 LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY the team discovered, routinely rely on word order to encode the who-did-what-to-whom of discourse. As the linguists wrote in their first major paper on the village, "In the space of one generation from its inception, systematic grammatical structure has emerged in the language." As the team analyzed sentence after sentence of ABSL, they saw signers use the same word order again and again: subject-object-verb, or SOV. In some sentences, subject or object might be absent (as in MONEY COLLECT, "I saved money," which has no overt subject). But in almost all of them, the verb appeared at the very end of the sentence or clause. It was noteworthy that this very young language already had word order of any kind, especially given that ABSL, like any signed language, could just as easily do without it. This was truly astonishing: the emerging language of Al-Sayyid makes vigorous use of word order even though it doesn't have to. As long as the grant money holds out, and as long as the people of Al-Sayyid will have them, the linguists will come back to the village at least twice a year. It is too soon to tell whether the village sign language in the pure, isolated form will endure much beyond this generation. The signing of the deaf children, Al-Sayyid's third generation, is already permeated with ISL. Most parents in Al-Sayyid believe that for their deaf children to make their way in Israeli society, they will need to know the national signed language, and no one disputes their point. "We don't know how the language will change, and for us, that's where the drama is," Wendy wrote me in an message a few years after our trip. "And that's why we have to keep studying it very carefully across the generations."

Question 1: What do these languages have in common?

Question 2: What are shared environmental factors that led to the development of these languages?