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!
Distinction
Between Identity of Signs and Their Use as
an Art
Colonel Dodge takes a middle ground with
regard to the identity of the signs used by our Indians,
comparing it with the dialects and provincialisms of the
English language, as spoken in England, Ireland, Scotland,
and Wales. But those dialects are the remains of actually
diverse languages, which to some speakers have not become
integrated. In England alone the provincial dialects are
traceable as the legacies of Saxons, Angles, Jutes, and
Danes, with a varying amount of Norman influence. A thorough
scholar in the composite tongue, now called English, will be
able to understand all the dialects and provincialisms of
English in the British Isles, but the uneducated man of
Yorkshire is not able to communicate readily with the
equally uneducated man of Somersetshire. This is the true
distinction to be made. A thorough sign talker would be able
to talk with several Indians who have no signs in common,
and who, if their knowledge of signs were only memorized,
could not communicate together. So also, as an educated
Englishman will understand the attempts of a foreigner to
speak in very imperfect and broken English, a good Indian
sign expert will apprehend the feeble efforts of a tyro in
gestures. But Colonel Dodge's conclusion that there is but
one true Indian sign language, just as there is but one true
English language, is not proved unless it can be shown that
a much larger proportion of the Indians who use signs at
all, than present researches show to be the case, use
identically the same signs to express the same ideas. It
would also seem necessary to the parallel that the signs so
used should be absolute, if not arbitrary, as are the words
of an oral language, and not independent of preconcert and
self-interpreting at the instant of their invention or first
exhibition, as all true signs must originally have been and
still measurably remain. All Indians, as all gesturing men,
have many natural signs in common and many others which are
now conventional. The conventions by which the latter were
established occurred during long periods, when the tribes
forming them were so separated as to have established
altogether diverse customs and mythologies, and when the
several tribes were with such different environment as to
have formed varying conceptions needing appropriate sign
expression. The old error that the North American Indians
constitute one homogeneous race is now abandoned. Nearly all
the characteristics once alleged as segregating them from
the rest of mankind have proved not to belong to the whole
of the pre-Columbian population, but only to those portions
of it first explored. The practice of scalping is not now
universal, even among the tribes least influenced by
civilization, if it ever was, and therefore the cultivation
of the scalp-lock separated from the rest of the hair of the
head, or with the removal of all other hair, is not a
general feature of their appearance. The arrangement of the
hair is so different among tribes as to be one of the most
convenient modes for their pictorial distinction. The war
paint, red in some tribes, was black in others; the mystic
rites of the calumet were in many regions unknown, and the
use of wampum was by no means extensive. The wigwam is not
the type of native dwellings, which show as many differing
forms as those of Europe. In color there is great variety,
and even admitting that the term "race" is properly applied,
no competent observer would characterize it as red, still
less copper-colored. Some tribes differ from each other in
all respects nearly as much as either of them do from the
lazzaroni of Naples, and more than either do from certain
tribes of Australia. It would therefore be expected, as
appears to be the case, that the conventional signs of
different stocks and regions differ as do the words of
English, French, and German, which, nevertheless, have
sprung from the same linguistic roots. No one of those
languages is a dialect of any of the others; and although
the sign systems of the several tribes have greater generic
unity with less specific variety than oral languages, no one
of them is necessarily the dialect of any other.
Instead, therefore, of admitting, with present knowledge,
that the signs of our Indians are "identical" and
"universal," it is the more accurate statement that the
systematic attempt to convey meaning by signs is universal
among the Indians of the Plains, and those still
comparatively unchanged by civilization. Its successful
execution is by an art, which, however it may have
commenced as an instinctive mental process, has been
cultivated, and consists in actually pointing out objects in
sight not only for designation, but for application and
predication, and in suggesting others to the mind by action
and the airy forms produced by action. To insist that sign
language is uniform were to assert that it is perfect—"That
faultless monster that the world ne'er saw."
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Sign Language
Among North American Indians Compared with
that Among Other Peoples and Deaf-Mutes,
1881
