; Here I link to you and copy a very interesting article published in the newspaper El Pais entitled "A New Language created from scratch "by Javier Sampedro, 03/02/2005. It discusses the features of the language for the deaf that although traditionally been considered artificial, recent studies show that it is really a natural human language. Moreover, fully demonstrated, it would be a plus point for the generative theory / language and Chomskyan nativism in language acquisition, and what to say, with which I agree.
"The clan of Al-Sayyid, a group of 3,500 Bedouins in the Negev desert in southern Israel, was founded 200 years ago by one man arrived from Egypt, who married a local woman and had five children. In the third generation (The grandchildren of the founder), the cousins \u200b\u200bbegan aa intermarry. The first born profoundly deaf began in the fifth generation and today, after playing two more rounds of inbreeding, total and 150 people including children and adults.
High rates of profound deafness in this population are explained by a defective gene on chromosome 13, probably imported by the first traveler arrived from Egypt and revealed every time a child inherits two defective copies because inbreeding. Nothing new. But scientists have been astounded by studying their sign language. Because it was invented 70 years ago from scratch, not like into any language in the area, talk or gesture, despite this, in a single generation, has developed a complex syntax very similar to that of any fully developed language in the world. The work is presented in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (online edition).
"Our results indicate that the human brain is equipped to impose a formal structure in any system of human communication," said in an interview via email the main author of the study, Wendy Sandler, University of Haifa (Israel .) "It will take several generations of cultural standard to distinguish consistently different grammatical functions [subject, verb, object] and establish a formal relationship between them. On the contrary, this system arises almost immediately in the life of a new language, with no requirement that the existence of a small community of speakers, or speakers of signs, in this case. "
The sign language the Al-Sayyid Bedouin mark grammatical functions of each word by its order in the phrase: always subject-object-verb. It is not the typical sequence of Castilian, but the most common in the 5,000 languages \u200b\u200bin the world. And Bedouins There can not be copied, because the order of the sentence is different in every language spoken in the area, including theirs, and also in the languages \u200b\u200bof typical signs of Israel and Jordan. Are also peculiar its punctuation (hold hands, repeating the last character) and his silent version of the intonation of the sentence (tilt your head, change the facial expression).
Scientists had already determined in recent years that systems of signs used by deaf people have the same complex structure of spoken languages, and are based on the same brain mechanisms, but the specifics of phonation. For this reason, Sandler and his collaborators consider the language of Al-Sayyid a unique opportunity to witness the birth of a new language, and explore to what extent this process is based on an innate ability of human beings.
"There is currently an intense debate about which parts of the innate linguistic knowledge," he told this newspaper one of the authors, Carol Paden, University of California at San Diego. "Our results do not clarify what language are genetic architectures. What we bring is a description of how to develop a new language. We see that the distinction between subject and object, and the order of prayer, appear very soon, while certain aspects of morphology, such as inflections, or endings, take longer to develop. But this does not necessarily mean that the former are innate and the latter learned. It may be simply that the former are easier to learn. "
" The data we have published relating to the second generation sign language users, "says Sandler." We are now compared with the third generation and we have found some interesting differences. "You see, the language can evolve very quickly even without substantial external influence."
version to read digital newspaper go to:
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/nuevo/lenguaje/creado/cero/elpepisoc/20050203elpepisoc_6/Tes
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