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So, in the late 1970s, the dastardly Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua and decided to
do something evil and frankly rather disgusting: provide education for all the children.
This cruel, red-led literary crusade forced kids out of the household and into life-sized
centers for Kids Who Can’t Read Good; which resulted not only in kids reading gooder,
but also in them developing a new language from scratch.
You see, until the 1970s, Nicaragua had no real deaf community—which meant isolated
deaf children’s only means of communication were whatever rudimentary, mimic-styled signs
they invented to communicate needs to their usually hearing families.
But then, the Sandinistas took deaf 4 to 16-year olds, put them together in the country’s
first deaf schools, and brought in Eastern German educators to teach the kids Spanish
sign language, which mostly involved teaching them how to use letter signs to spell out
Spanish words.
This wasn’t very useful, though, largely because the deaf kids had never been taught
to read, so they didn’t have a clear concept of what a word was… or what a letter was…
and also, importantly, they did not speak Spanish… because again, they were deaf.
Rather than listening with their eyes to how their teachers wanted them to communicate,
the children did something far cooler and Half as Interestinger: they started to communicate
amongst themselves.
Because of the unusual confluence of circumstances—they were all coming from isolated villages, without
knowing how to read, and without ever being taught to speak any other language—that
meant they had to invent a completely new language from scratch at the same age as when
most of us were putting crayons into places they didn’t belong.
Now, it’s tough to identify when a new language is taking shape right in front of your eyes,
but luckily for us, the ignored and unsuccessful teachers called for backup.
Unable to get through to the children, but recognizing that the kids were communicating
with one another, Nicaraguan education officials brought in a cunning American linguist, Judy
Kegl, in 1986, to figure out what the kids were talking about.
To make sense of what these kids were saying in a language disconnected from any established
dialect, Kegl basically had to make a Rosetta stone: to get the kids to communicate something
in their sign language that she already knew in her own language.
So, pre-empting the 8 million movie recap podcasts that now plague the world, she showed
each student a 90-second cartoon and then filmed them describing what they had just
watched.
Once she translated it, she had two findings.
First, this language wasn’t just a bunch of vocab bundled together—this language
had rules.
Take, for example, their sign for “speak.”
At first, it was simple: a hand opening and closing in front of their mouth.
But then, they changed it, so that they would start the sign with the hand open at the speaker’s
position, but move it forward to the position of the person being addressed, where they
would close it.
That little motion is a huge deal—by incorporating information about the subject and object of
a verb, the kids had intuited the concept of verb agreement, which is pretty impressive
considering that you, the viewer, do not know what verb agreement is.
The second thing she found was that the older children, the original architects of this
language, leaned on rather rudimentary signing—only a few signs to describe the whole clip—while
the younger students signed more complicated, time-sensitive summaries of the cartoon.
This told her that the language was growing and maturing from one generation to the next.
Ultimately, she was able to separate the language’s development into three stages.
First were the home signs—a few basic signs, usually just acting something out, that each
kid had developed in their own individual home with their usually hearing parents.
When the deaf kids came together, though, they sort of combined all their home signs
to develop a basic pidgin—not the kind Piers Morgan fed in Home Alone 2, but a limited,
simplified language traditionally used to communicate between people who don’t share
a common tongue.
That basic pidgin was called Lenguaje de Signos Nicaragense, which according to Google, translates
to “About 899,000 results.”
But the key component came next—younger students came in, quickly mastered the basic
pidgin developed by the older students, and then without even meaning to, elevated it
to a real, full-on language, which linguists called the idioma, or Nicaraguan Sign Language.
Now, all this suggested that groups of young children possess a semi-mystical, unconscious,
and incredibly powerful ability to not only understand, but develop language—something
that we kind of already knew based on how good kids are at coming up with new ways to
make fun of adults.
By continually communicating with each other, adjusting, and innovating, they come to consensus
about adopting new signs, dropping others, and developing a grammatical system.
It’s one of humankind’s most remarkable abilities, rivaled only by the ability to
eat 75 hot dogs in 10 minutes.
Because people can never just let a nice thing be nice, this example was quickly jumped on
by experts to prove various linguistic theories, including the highly controversial concept
of innate speaker capacity.
It’s a theory developed by linguist and anarchist Dumbledore Noam Chomsky, which argues
that grammar is in part a function of innate human genetics—that there is a universal
grammar programmed into our DNA—which in part explains both why children are so incredibly
good at learning language, and why all human languages share relatively similar structures.
In the end, the point is that I couldn’t think of a good ending for this video, so
here’s the sign the kids came up with for raccoon.
While I don’t know any other cool vocab or how to end my videos, I do know that we
made a Nebula Plus companion video to this compiling all the jokes we cut because they
were lame, rude, or too long.
I also know that CuriosityStream is currently hosting a massive Earth Day sale where subscriptions
are 41% off—which comes out well under a dollar a month.
And then I also know that any CuriosityStream subscription initiated at CuriosityStream.com/HAI
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And therefore I know that now is the perfect time to sign up if you haven’t already.
Also, on CuriosityStream, you can, for example, learn about how past societies pulled off
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