What Kusch read this week

In order to help jump-start the Badger, I have decided to follow the suit of Clockmaker and write at least one post a week (an auxiliary reason is to stop the Badger from drowning in Clockmaker posts).

I will save the earth-shattering insights in the nature of the universe for another week, however. This week I will provide an account of my literary sojourns these last few days. I have read a book by a fellow named Oliver Sacks - somewhat famous for books like "The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat" - entitled "Seeing Voices". It deals with the deaf in general and their use of language in particular, and encompasses such subjects as the history of sign language and of the education of the deaf, the horrible consequences that befall a deaf child that doesn't come in contact with any form of language he can understand as he grows up, and those grammatical and neurological aspects of sign language that make them totally unlike any spoken language.

It is this last subject that really got my imagination spinnig, and that has made me seriously consider learning (swedish) sign language. Because it's really fucking cool. If anyone believes that sign language is nothing but spoken language coded onto a set of hand gestures, they are gravely mistaken. Its spatio-visual nature provide it with many opportunities that our sound-based languages lack entirely. I feel sign language is the "final frontier" of languages, and I imagine it should be studied by anyone with an interest in the nature of human language and how it relates to human thought in general.

Oh, was that just me? Well, the rest of youseguys might wanna check out a funny Internet film-clip instead.