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!
In no other thoroughly explored part of the
world has there been found spread over so large a space so
small a number of individuals divided by so many linguistic
and dialectic boundaries as in North America. Many wholly
distinct tongues have for an indefinitely long time been
confined to a few scores of speakers, verbally
incomprehensible to all others on the face of the earth who
did not, from some rarely operating motive, laboriously
acquire their language. Even when the American race, so
styled, flourished in the greatest population of which we
have any evidence (at least according to the published views
of the present writer, which seem to have been generally
accepted), the immense number of languages and dialects
still preserved, or known by early recorded fragments to
have once existed, so subdivided it that only the dwellers
in a very few villages could talk together with ease. They
were all interdistributed among unresponsive vernaculars,
each to the other being bar-bar-ous in every meaning
of the term. The number of known stocks or families of
Indian languages within the territory of the United States
amounts now to sixty-five, and these differ among themselves
as radically as each differs from the Hebrew, Chinese, or
English. In each of these linguistic families there are
several, sometimes as many as twenty, separate languages,
which also differ from each other as much as do the English,
French, German, and Persian divisions of the Aryan
linguistic stock.
The use of gesture-signs, continued, if not originating, in
necessity for communication with the outer world, became
entribally convenient from the habits of hunters, the main
occupation of all savages, depending largely upon stealthy
approach to game, and from the sole form of their military
tactics—to surprise an enemy. In the still expanse of virgin
forests, and especially in the boundless solitudes of the
great plains, a slight sound can be heard over a large area,
that of the human voice being from its rarity the most
startling, so that it is now, as it probably has been for
centuries, a common precaution for members of a hunting or
war party not to speak together when on such expeditions,
communicating exclusively by signs. The acquired habit also
exhibits itself not only in formal oratory and in
impassioned or emphatic conversation, but also as a
picturesque accompaniment to ordinary social talk. Hon.
Lewis H. Morgan mentions in a letter to this writer that he
found a silent but happy family composed of an Atsina
(commonly called Gros Ventre of the Prairie) woman, who had
been married two years to a Frenchman, during which time
they had neither of them attempted to learn each other's
language; but the husband having taken kindly to the
language of signs, they conversed together by that means
with great contentment. It is also often resorted to in mere
laziness, one gesture saving many words. The gracefulness,
ingenuity, and apparent spontaneity of the greater part of
the signs can never be realized until actually witnessed,
and their beauty is much heightened by the free play to
which the arms of these people are accustomed, and the small
and well-shaped hands for which they are remarkable. Among
them can seldom be noticed in literal fact—
The graceless action of a heavy hand—
which the Bastard metaphorically condemns in King John.
The conditions upon which the survival of sign language
among the Indians has depended is well shown by those
attending its discontinuance among certain tribes.
Many instances are known of the discontinuance of gesture
speech with no development in the native language of the
gesturers, but from the invention for intercommunication of
one used in common. The Kalapuyas of Southern Oregon until
recently used a sign language, but have gradually adopted
for foreign intercourse the composite tongue, commonly
called the Tsinuk or Chinook jargon, which probably arose
for trade purposes on the Columbia River before the advent
of Europeans, founded on the Tsinuk, Tsihali, Nutka, &c.,
but now enriched by English and French terms, and have
nearly forgotten their old signs. The prevalence of this
mongrel speech, originating in the same causes that produced
the pigeon-English or lingua-franca of the Orient,
explains the marked scantiness of sign language among the
tribes of the Northwest coast.
Where the Chinook jargon has not extended on the coast to
the North, the Russian language commences, used in the same
manner, but it has not reached so deeply into the interior
of the continent as the Chinook, which has been largely
adopted within the region bounded by the eastern line of
Oregon and Washington, and has become known even to the
Pai-Utes of Nevada. The latter, however, while using it with
the Oregonian tribes to their west and north, still keep up
sign language for communication with the Banaks, who have
not become so familiar with the Chinook. The Alaskan tribes
on the coast also used signs not more than a generation ago,
as is proved by the fact that some of the older men can yet
converse by this means with the natives of the interior,
whom they occasionally meet. Before the advent of the
Russians the coast tribes traded their dried fish and oil
for the skins and paints of the eastern tribes by visiting
the latter, whom they did not allow to come to the coast,
and this trade was conducted mainly in sign language. The
Russians brought a better market, so the travel to the
interior ceased, and with it the necessity for the signs,
which therefore gradually died out, and are little known to
the present generation on the coast, though still continuing
in the interior, where the inhabitants are divided by
dialects.
No explanation is needed for the disuse of a language of
signs for the special purpose now in question when the
speech of surrounding civilization is recognized as
necessary or important to be acquired, and gradually becomes
known as the best common medium, even before it is actually
spoken by many individuals of the several tribes. When it
has become general, signs, as systematically employed
before, gradually fade away.
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Sign Language
Among North American Indians Compared with
that Among Other Peoples and Deaf-Mutes,
1881
