While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
The generalization of Tylor that "gesture
language is substantially the same among savage tribes all
over the world," interpreted by his remarks in another
connection, is understood as referring to their common use
of signs, and of signs formed on the same principles, but
not of precisely the same signs to express the same ideas.
In this sense of the generalization the result of the
writer's study not only sustains it, but shows a surprising
number of signs for the same idea which are substantially
identical, not only among savage tribes, but among all
peoples that use gesture signs with any freedom. Men, in
groping for a mode of communication with each other, and
using the same general methods, have been under many varying
conditions and circumstances which have determined
differently many conceptions and their semiotic execution,
but there have also been many of both which were similar.
Our Indians have no special superstition concerning the
evil-eye like the Italians, nor have they been long familiar
with the jackass so as to make him emblematical of
stupidity; therefore signs for these concepts are not
cisatlantic, but even in this paper many are shown which are
substantially in common between our Indians and Italians.
The large collection already obtained, but not now
published, shows many others identical, not only with those
of the Italians and the classic Greeks and Romans, but of
other peoples of the Old World, both savage and civilized.
The generic uniformity is obvious, while the occasion of
specific varieties can be readily understood.
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Sign Language
Among North American Indians Compared with
that Among Other Peoples and Deaf-Mutes,
1881
