Deaf Jam  Sign here, please—a language mystery in the desert  In
Talking Hands, her first book, New York Times obituarist
Margalit Fox joins a group of linguists travelling to Al-Sayyid,
a Bedouin village in the middle of the Israeli desert, to
research the origins of language in the human brain. About 70
years ago, as a result of isolation and intermarriage, deaf
children began to be born in Al-Sayyid at an astoundingly high
rate. The first of these children used a private system of
"homesigns" to communicate within their families; when they
interacted with each other, the homesigns became a pidgin, a
kind of simplified contact language that arises when two or more
cultures meet. Most interesting, the next generation of deaf
children transformed the pidgin into a creole, a fully complex
language with its own internal structure. By now, Al-Sayyid
signers have developed a system robust and abstract enough to
describe anything from Israeli social security to Bedouin
folktales. The researchers that Fox profiles