🚀 go-pugleaf

There was a paper about this published around 1979.  I don't have any
references except my memory: the paper was by Lila Gleitman, Henry
Gleitman and co-authors, and its title began "Beyond Herodotus:..." with
some stuff after the colon (i.e. the informative part of the title).
The claims were very interesting.  Deaf children raised in an
exclusively oralist environment, with no access to any sign language
speech community, are known to create their own signing systems, if they
are in contact with other deaf children.  There was an image of deaf
kids in an oralist classroom, when the teacher's back was turned, madly
signing away to each other.  The Gleitmans et al. examined some of this
so-called "home sign" and concluded that it was systematic and in part
non-iconic, and argued that it represented a natural occurence of the
experiment reported in Herodotus, spontaneous creation of a natural
language ex nihilo.  My hunch is that sign language studies were
probably not advanced enough then to make the argument really stick, but
perhaps there has been work on the topic since their paper that some
reader here might know about.

Sorry that I don't have a good citation for the paper, but I imagine
that some sleuthing in late 1970s citation indices could yield the
proper attribution.

-David Pesetsky