An offhand comment by a former professor tipped off New York Times reporter Margalit Fox to a remarkable linguistic quest: A group of researchers studying, firsthand, the birth of a language. The birth of a language? These scientists had been working secretly in a Bedouin village in the Israeli desert that, because of an unusually high population of deaf residents, had spontaneously created its own sign language, used by deaf and hearing villagers alike. What their experience teaches us about all languages, signed and spoken, is the subject of Margalit's amazing new book, Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind, and our conversation:

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