{"id":8355,"date":"2022-06-10T04:04:48","date_gmt":"2022-06-10T04:04:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/es\/?post_type=product&p=8355"},"modified":"2022-06-10T04:07:01","modified_gmt":"2022-06-10T04:07:01","slug":"studying-an-emerging-sign-language-wont-kill-it-so-what-are-linguists-scared-of","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.booksofall.com\/es\/studying-an-emerging-sign-language-wont-kill-it-so-what-are-linguists-scared-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Studying an emerging sign language won\u2019t kill it \u2013 so what are linguists scared of?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Emerging sign languages could reveal how all language evolved \u2013 but keeping these fragile languages isolated for research may mean the people who rely on them lose out.<\/h4>\n
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Connie de Vos was sitting on her hands. It was 2006, her first stay in the Balinese village of Bengkala, and visitors had come every night to her house, sitting on the floor of the front patio, eating fruit- or durian-flavoured candies and drinking tea. About eight to ten people were there now, hands flitting in the shadows, chatting away in Kata Kolok, the local sign language: Where is the next ceremony? When is the next funeral? Who just died?<\/p>\n

Kata Kolok was created in Bengkala about 120 years ago and has some special features, such as sticking out your tongue to add \u2018no\u2019 or \u2018not\u2019 to a verb. And unlike American Sign Language (ASL), in which people move their mouths silently as they sign, you also smack your lips gently, which creates a faint popping sound, to indicate that an action has finished.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you walk through the village at six, people start to take their baths, getting ready for dinner,\u201d De Vos recalls. \u201cYou can hear this sound \u2013 pah pah pah \u2013 all through the village.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at the time, De Vos had come to Bengkala to be the first linguist to map Kata Kolok\u2019s grammar and list all of its signs. At that time, she says, it was \u201ckind of untouched\u201d, having emerged in an isolated community with a relatively high number of deaf people. Like similar \u2018village sign languages\u2019 that were starting to be identified in the 2000s, it was rich research material. \u00a0She knew that being first to describe it would be a feather in her cap.<\/p>\n

But studying any phenomenon risks changing it. Archaeologists know that breathing inside an ancient tomb can raise its humidity, while zoologists attracting wild chimpanzees with food have to hope it doesn\u2019t alter the politics of the troop.<\/p>\n

Reference:<\/h4>\n