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 preponderance of authority is in favor of the view that
man, when in the possession of all his faculties, did not
choose between voice and gesture, both being originally
instinctive, as they both are now, and never, with those
faculties, was in a state where the one was used to the
absolute exclusion of the other. The long neglected work of
Dalgarno, published in 1661, is now admitted to show wisdom
when he says: "non minus naturale fit homini communicare
in Figuris quam Sonis: quorum utrumque dico
homini naturale." With the voice man at first imitated
the few sounds of nature, while with gesture he exhibited
actions, motions, positions, forms, dimensions, directions,
and distances, and their derivatives. It would appear from
this unequal division of capacity that oral speech remained
rudimentary long after gesture had become an art. With the
concession of all purely imitative sounds and of the
spontaneous action of the vocal organs under excitement, it
is still true that the connection between ideas and words
generally depended upon a compact between the speaker and
hearer which presupposes the existence of a prior mode of
communication. That was probably by gesture, which, in the
apposite phrase of Professor Sayce, "like the rope-bridges
of the Himalayas or the Andes, formed the first rude means
of communication between man and man." At the very least it
may be gladly accepted provisionally as a clue leading out
of the labyrinth of philologic confusion.
For the purpose of the present paper there is, however, no
need of an absolute decision upon the priority between
communication of ideas by bodily motion and by vocal
articulation. It is enough to admit that the connection
between them was so early and intimate that gestures, in the
wide sense indicated of presenting ideas under physical
forms, had a direct formative effect upon many words; that
they exhibit the earliest condition of the human mind; are
traced from the remotest antiquity among all peoples
possessing records; are generally prevalent in the savage
stage of social evolution; survive agreeably in the scenic
pantomime, and still adhere to the ordinary speech of
civilized man by motions of the face, hands, head, and body,
often involuntary, often purposely in illustration or for
emphasis.
It may be unnecessary to explain that none of the signs to
be described, even those of present world-wide prevalence,
are presented as precisely those of primitive man. Signs as
well as words, animals, and plants have had their growth,
development, and change, their births and deaths, and their
struggle for existence with survival of the fittest. It is,
however, thought probable from reasons hereinafter mentioned
that their radicals can be ascertained with more precision
than those of words.
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Sign Language
Among North American Indians Compared with
that Among Other Peoples and Deaf-Mutes,
1881
