🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jul23.095530.1@tnclus.tele.nokia.fi> arantamaki@tnclus.tele.nokia.fi writes:
>
>One book I highly recommend is 'Seeing Voices' by Oliver Sacks. 
>It gave me quite a new aspect to language and
>language acquisition. I also remember that it includes a lot of
>references to other works and studies on learning a visual 
>language.
>
>Annu Rantamaki
>

This book was given a withering but beautifully written review and
insightful in the NY Review of Books last year by David Perlmutter, a
linguist who specializes in ASL, among many other things.  His point was
that Sacks' whole book (which I haven't read) encourages us to view Deaf
signers as otherworldly, inhabiting some other dimension of
understanding, thanks to their manual language.  Perlmutter, on the
other hand, stressed again and again in this article how normal Sign
Language is in the world of languages as a whole -- the linguistic
features of Sign being those features from which spoken languages pick
and choose, the stock-in-trade of normal linguistics.  I strongly
recommend hunting down this review.  It is quite something.

There is a story about that the NY Review of Books delayed the
publication of Perlmutter's review for a long time, trying to get him to
take a more positive tone on the book.  It seems Oliver Sacks is someone
who, in their eyes, should not be reviewed badly (he writes for them
occasionally).  I don't know if this story is true, but in any case,
Perlmutter did comment that Sacks' book would be valuable if only for
sensitizing readers to the existence of a subject matter.  But the whole
slant of Sacks' book, judging from the review, is seen as misguided.

-David Pesetsky