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!
Examination into the identity of signs is
complicated by the fact that in the collection and
description of Indian signs there is danger lest the
civilized understanding of them may be mistaken or forced.
The liability to those errors is much increased when the
collections are not taken directly from the Indians
themselves, but are given as obtained at second-hand from
white traders, trappers, and interpreters, who, through
misconception in the beginning and their own introduction or
modification of gestures, have produced a jargon in the
sign, as well as in the oral intercourse. An Indian talking
in signs, either to a white man or to another Indian using
signs which he never saw before, catches the meaning of that
which is presented and adapts himself to it, at least for
the occasion. Even when he finds that his interlocutor
insists upon understanding and presenting a certain sign in
a manner and with a significance widely different from those
to which he has been accustomed, it is within the very
nature, tentative and elastic, of the gesture art—both
performers being on an equality—that he should adopt the one
that seems to be recognized or that is pressed upon him, as
with much greater difficulty he has learned and adopted many
foreign terms used with whites before attempting to acquire
their language, but never with his own race. Thus there is
now, and perhaps always has been, what may be called a
lingua-franca, in the sign vocabulary. It is well known
that all the tribes of the Plains having learned by
experience that white visitors expect to receive certain
signs really originating with the latter, use them in their
intercourse just as they sometimes do the words "squaw" and
"papoose," corruptions of the Algonkian, and once as
meaningless in the present West as the English terms "woman"
and "child," but which the first pioneers, having learned
them on the Atlantic coast, insisted upon treating as
generally intelligible.
The perversity in attaching through preconceived views a
wrong significance to signs is illustrated by an anecdote
found in several versions and in several languages, but
repeated as a veritable Scotch legend by Duncan Anderson,
esq., Principal of the Glasgow Institution for the Deaf and
Dumb, when he visited Washington in 1853.
King James I. of England, desiring to play a trick upon the
Spanish ambassador, a man of great erudition, but who had a
crotchet in his head upon sign language, informed him that
there was a distinguished professor of that science in the
university at Aberdeen. The ambassador set out for that
place, preceded by a letter from the King with instructions
to make the best of him. There was in the town one Geordy, a
butcher, blind of one eye, a fellow of much wit and
drollery. Geordy is told to play the part of a professor,
with the warning not to speak a word; is gowned, wigged, and
placed in a chair of state, when the ambassador is shown in
and they are left alone together. Presently the nobleman
came out greatly pleased with the experiment, claiming that
his theory was demonstrated. He said: "When I entered the
room I raised one finger to signify there is one God. He
replied by raising two fingers to signify that this Being
rules over two worlds, the material and the spiritual. Then
I raised three fingers, to say there are three persons in
the Godhead. He then closed his fingers, evidently to say
these three are one." After this explanation on the part of
the nobleman the professors sent for the butcher and asked
him what took place in the recitation room. He appeared very
angry and said: "When the crazy man entered the room where I
was he raised one finger, as much as to say I had but one
eye, and I raised two fingers to signify that I could see
out of my one eye as well as he could out of both of his.
When he raised three fingers, as much as to say there were
but three eyes between us, I doubled up my fist, and if he
had not gone out of that room in a hurry I would have
knocked him down."
The readiness with which a significance may be found in
signs when none whatever exists is also shown in the great
contest narrated by Rabelais between Panurge and the English
philosopher, Thaumast, commencing as follows:
"Everybody then taking heed in great silence, the Englishman
lifted his two hands separately, clinching the ends of his
fingers in the form that at Chion they call the fowl's tail.
Then he struck them, together by the nails four times. Then
he opened them and struck one flat upon the other with a
clash once; after which, joining them as above, he struck
twice, and four times afterwards, on opening them. Then he
placed them, joined and extended the one above the other,
seeming to pray God devoutly.
"Panurge suddenly moved his right hand in the air, placed
the right-hand thumb at the right-hand nostril, holding the
four fingers stretched out and arrayed in parallel lines
with the point of the nose; shutting the left eye entirely,
and winking with the right, making a profound depression
with eyebrow and eyelid. Next he raised aloft the left with
a strong clinching and extension of the four fingers and
elevation of the thumb, and held it in line directly
corresponding with the position of the right, the distance
between the two being a cubit and a half. This done, in the
like manner he lowered towards the ground both hands, and
finally held them in the midst as if aiming straight at the
Englishman's nose."
And so on at great length. The whole performance of Panurge
was to save the credit of Pantagruel by making fantastic and
mystic motions in pretended disputation with the signs given
by Thaumast in good faith. Yet the latter confessed himself
conquered, and declared that he had derived inestimable
information from the purposely meaningless gestures. The
satire upon the diverse interpretations of the gestures of
Naz-de-cabre (Pantagruel, Book III, chap. xx) is to
the same effect, showing it to have been a favorite theme
with Rabelais.
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Sign Language
Among North American Indians Compared with
that Among Other Peoples and Deaf-Mutes,
1881
