SAN DIEGO, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- Linguists are gaining insights into how language was born from a language created in a small village in Israel's Negev Desert.
The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, which serves as an alternative language of a community of about 3,500 deaf and hearing people, has developed a distinct grammatical structure early in its evolution and a structure that favors a particular word order: verbs after objects.
"Because ABSL developed independently, it may reflect fundamental properties of language in general and provide insight into basic questions about the way in which human language develops from the very beginning," said study author Carol Padden of the University of California, San Diego. "Our findings support the idea that word order is one of the first features of a language, and that it appears very early."
The study authors also include: Mark Aronoff from Stony Brook University, in New York; and Irit Meir and Wendy Sandler both of the University of Haifa in Israel.
The study, the first linguistic analysis of a language arising naturally with no outside influence, is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
