More than 140 sign languages are used today, primarily by deaf communities around the world. Like spoken languages, each sign language has its own grammar, vocabulary and other special features. For example, American Sign Language is unintelligible（无法了解的）to British Sign language. In fact, American Sign language has more in common with French Sign Language, largely because French educators played a key role in helping get deaf schools founded in the United States during the 19th century.
There haven’t been a lot of comparisons of sign languages. University of Texas, Austin linguist Justin Powers and his colleagues aim to address that information gap. In order to study the question of sign language evolution, they first collected a database of manual alphabets from dozens of different sign languages around the world. So a manual alpha-bet is kind of a subsystem within a sign language that is used to represent a written language. And there’s a hand shape that corresponds to each letter.
To uncover relationships between the alphabets% the researchers used the same methods that biologists use to figure out relationships between different species, based on their DNA. The methods grouped sign languages in this study into five main European lineages（谱系）. And those were Austrian origin, British origin, French origin, Spanish and Swedish. Power says manual alphabets from Austria, France and Spain could date back to one-handed manual alphabets from 16th- and 17th-century Spain. But each of those lineages evolved independently of each other.
The study also confirmed the French origins of American Sign Language and those of other countries, including Mexico, Brazil and the Netherlands. Surprisingly, the Austrian manual alphabet influenced sign languages as far away as Russia. But while this lineage has largely died out, remains of it live on in Icelandic Sign language today.
Power says future research comparing the vocabularies of different sign languages could provide even more clues about how they’ve changed over time. Understanding how sign languages evolve would tell us a lot about the way that language, in general, evolves.
【小题1】What can we know about American Sign Language?| A．It was created by French educators. |
| B．It is less related to French Sign language. |
| C．It was further developed before the 19th century. |
| D．It has little in common with British Sign Language. |
| A．Every letter means a hand gesture. |
| B．It is used to replace the written language. |
| C．Every letter is the same as the normal alphabet. |
| D．It is used together with the shape of mouth. |
| A．Worrying. | B．Astonishing. |
| C．Moving. | D．Disappointing. |
| A．The changes of different sign languages. |
| B．The evolution of different sign languages. |
| C．The meaning of researching sign languages. |
| D．The vocabulary of different sign languages. |
