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 story has been told by travelers in many
parts of the world that various languages cannot be clearly
understood in the dark by their possessors, using their
mother tongue between themselves. The evidence for this
anywhere is suspicious; and when it is asserted, as it often
has been, in reference to some of the tribes of North
American Indians, it is absolutely false, and must be
attributed to the error of travelers who, ignorant of the
dialect, never see the natives except when trying to make
themselves intelligible to their visitors by a practice
which they have found by experience to have been successful
with strangers to their tongue, or perhaps when they are
guarding against being overheard by others. Captain Burton,
in his City of the Saints, specially states that the
Arapahos possess a very scanty vocabulary, pronounced in a
quasi-unintelligible way, and can hardly converse with one
another in the dark. The truth is that their vocabulary is
by no means scanty, and they do converse with each other
with perfect freedom without any gestures when they so
please. The difficulty in speaking or understanding their
language is in the large number of guttural and interrupted
sounds which are not helped by external motions of the mouth
and lips in articulation, and the light gives little
advantage to its comprehension so far as concerns the vocal
apparatus, which, in many languages, can be seen as well as
heard, as is proved by the modern deaf-mute practice of
artificial speech. The corresponding story that no white man
ever learned Arapaho is also false. A member of Frémont's
party so long ago as 1842 spoke the language. Burton in the
same connection gives a story "of a man who, being sent
among the Cheyennes to qualify himself for interpreting,
returned in a week and proved his competency; all he did,
however, was to go through the usual pantomime with a
running accompaniment of grunts." And he might as well have
omitted the grunts, for he obviously only used sign
language. Lieutenant Abert, in 1846-'47, made much more
sensible remarks from his actual observation than Captain
Burton repeated at second-hand from a Mormon met by him at
Salt Lake. He said: "Some persons think that it [the
Cheyenne language] would be incomplete without gesture,
because the Indians use gestures constantly. But I have been
assured that the language is in itself capable of bodying
forth any idea to which one may wish to give utterance."
In fact, individuals of those American tribes specially
instanced in these reports as unable to converse without
gesture, often, in their domestic abandon, wrap
themselves up in robes or blankets with only breathing holes
before the nose, so that no part of the body is seen, and
chatter away for hours, telling long stories. If in daylight
they thus voluntarily deprive themselves of the possibility
of making signs, it is clear that their preference for talks
around the fire at night is explicable by very natural
reasons wholly distinct from the one attributed. The
inference, once carelessly made from the free use of gesture
by some of the Shoshonian stock, that their tongue was too
meager for use without signs, is refuted by the now
ascertained fact that their vocabulary is remarkably copious
and their parts of speech better differentiated than those
of many people on whom no such stigma has been affixed. The
proof of this was seen in the writer's experience, when
Ouray, the head chief of the Utes, was at Washington, in the
early part of 1880, and after an interview with the
Secretary of the Interior made report of it to the rest of
the delegation who had not been present. He spoke without
pause in his own language for nearly an hour, in a monotone
and without a single gesture. The reason for this depressed
manner was undoubtedly because he was very sad at the
result, involving loss of land and change of home; but the
fact remains that full information was communicated on a
complicated subject without the aid of a manual sign, and
also without even such change of inflection of voice as is
common among Europeans. All theories based upon the supposed
poverty of American languages must be abandoned.
The grievous accusation against foreign people that they
have no intelligible language is venerable and general. With
the Greeks the term αγλωσσος, "tongueless," was used
synonymous with βαρβαρος, "barbarian" of all who were not
Greek. The name "Slav," assumed by a grand division of the
Aryan family, means "the speaker," and is
contradistinguished from the other peoples of the world,
such as the Germans, who are called in Russian "Njemez,"
that is, "speechless." In Isaiah (xxxiii, 19) the Assyrians
are called a people "of a stammering tongue, that one cannot
understand." The common use of the expression "tongueless"
and "speechless," so applied, has probably given rise, as
Tylor suggests, to the mythical stories of actually
speechless tribes of savages, and the considerations and
instances above presented tend to discredit the many other
accounts of languages which are incomplete without the help
of gesture. The theory that sign language was in whole or in
chief the original utterance of mankind would be strongly
supported by conclusive evidence to the truth of such
travelers' tales, but does not depend upon them. Nor,
considering the immeasurable period during which, in
accordance with modern geologic views, man has been on the
earth, is it probable that any existing races can be found
in which speech has not obviated the absolute necessity for
gesture in communication among themselves. The signs survive
for convenience, used together with oral language, and for
special employment when language is unavailable.
A comparison sometimes drawn between sign language and that
of our Indians, founded on the statement of their common
poverty in abstract expressions, is not just to either. This
paper will be written in vain if it shall not suggest the
capacities of gesture speech in that regard, and a deeper
study into Indian tongues has shown that they are by no
means so confined to the concrete as was once believed.
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materials that may imply negative stereotypes reflecting the culture or
language of a particular period or place. These items are presented as
part of the historical record and should not be interpreted to mean that
the WebMasters in any way endorse the stereotypes implied.
Sign Language
Among North American Indians Compared with
that Among Other Peoples and Deaf-Mutes,
1881
