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 aid to be derived from
the study of sign language in prosecuting
researches into the science of language was
pointed out by Leibnitz, in his
Collectanea Etymologica, without
hitherto exciting any thorough or scientific
work in that direction, the obstacle to it
probably being that scholars competent in
other respects had no adequate data of the
gesture speech of man to be used in
comparison. The latter will, it is hoped, be
supplied by the work now undertaken.
In the first part of this paper it was
suggested that signs played an important
part in giving meaning to spoken words.
Philology, comparing the languages of earth
in their radicals, must therefore include
the graphic or manual presentation of
thought, and compare the elements of
ideography with those of phonics. Etymology
now examines the ultimate roots, not the
fanciful resemblances between oral forms, in
the different tongues; the internal, not the
mere external parts of language. A marked
peculiarity of sign language consists in its
limited number of radicals and the infinite
combinations into which those radicals enter
while still remaining distinctive. It is
therefore a proper field for etymologic
study.
From these and other considerations it is
supposed that an analysis of the original
conceptions of gestures, studied together
with the holophrastic roots in the speech of
the gesturers, may aid in the ascertainment
of some relation between concrete ideas and
words. Meaning does not adhere to the phonic
presentation of thought, while it does to
signs. The latter are doubtless more
flexible and in that sense more mutable than
words, but the ideas attached to them are
persistent, and therefore there is not much
greater metamorphosis in the signs than in
the cognitions. The further a language has
been developed from its primordial roots,
which have been twisted into forms no longer
suggesting any reason for their original
selection, and the more the primitive
significance of its words has disappeared,
the fewer points of contact can it retain
with signs. The higher languages are more
precise because the consciousness of the
derivation of most of their words is lost,
so that they have become counters, good for
any sense agreed upon and for no other.
It is, however, possible to ascertain the
included gesture even in many English words.
The class represented by the word
supercilious will occur to all readers,
but one or two examples may be given not so
obvious and more immediately connected with
the gestures of our Indians. Imbecile,
generally applied to the weakness of old
age, is derived from the Latin in, in
the sense of on, and bacillum, a
staff, which at once recalls the Cheyenne
sign for old man, mentioned above,
page 339. So time appears more nearly
connected with τεινω, to stretch, when
information is given of the sign for long
time, in the Speech of Kin Chē-ĕss,
in this paper, viz., placing the thumbs and
forefingers in such a position as if a small
thread was held between the thumb and
forefinger of each hand, the hands first
touching each other, and then moving slowly
from each other, as if stretching a
piece of gum-elastic.
In the languages of North America, which
have not become arbitrary to the degree
exhibited by those of civilized man, the
connection between the idea and the word is
only less obvious than, that still unbroken
between the idea and the sign, and they
remain strongly affected by the concepts of
outline, form, place, position, and feature
on which gesture is founded, while they are
similar in their fertile combination of
radicals.
Indian language consists of a series of
words that are but slightly differentiated
parts of speech following each other in the
order suggested in the mind of the speaker
without absolute laws of arrangement, as its
sentences are not completely integrated. The
sentence necessitates parts of speech, and
parts of speech are possible only when a
language has reached that stage where
sentences are logically constructed. The
words of an Indian tongue, being synthetic
or undifferentiated parts of speech, are in
this respect strictly analogous to the
gesture elements which enter into a sign
language. The study of the latter is
therefore valuable for comparison with the
words of the former. The one language throws
much light upon the other, and neither can
be studied to the best advantage without a
knowledge of the other.
Some special resemblances between the
language of signs and the character of the
oral languages found on this continent may
be mentioned. Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull
remarks of the composition of their words
that they were "so constructed as to be
thoroughly self-defining and immediately
intelligible to the hearer." In another
connection the remark is further enforced:
"Indeed, it is a requirement of the Indian
languages that every word shall be so framed
as to admit of immediate resolution to its
significant elements by the hearer. It must
be thoroughly self-defining, for (as
Max Müller has expressed it) 'it requires
tradition, society, and literature to
maintain words which can no longer be
analyzed at once.'... In the ever-shifting
state of a nomadic society no debased coin
can be tolerated in language, no obscure
legend accepted on trust. The metal must be
pure and the legend distinct."
Indian languages, like those of higher
development, sometimes exhibit changes of
form by the permutation of vowels, but often
an incorporated particle, whether suffix,
affix, or infix, shows the etymology which
often, also, exhibits the same objective
conception that would be executed in
gesture. There are, for instance, different
forms for standing, sitting, lying, falling,
&c., and for standing, sitting, lying on or
falling from the same level or a higher or
lower level. This resembles the pictorial
conception and execution of signs.
Major J.W. Powell, with particular reference
to the disadvantages of the multiplied
inflections in Indian languages, alike with
the Greek and Latin, when the speaker is
compelled, in the choice of a word to
express his idea, to think of a great
multiplicity of things, gives the following
instance:
"A Ponca Indian in saying that a man killed
a rabbit, would have to say: the man, he,
one, animate, standing, in the nominative
case, purposely killed, by shooting an
arrow, the rabbit, he, the one, animate,
sitting, in the objective case; for the form
of a verb to kill would have to be selected,
and the verb changes its form by inflection
and incorporated particles to denote person,
number, and gender as animate or inanimate,
and gender as standing, sitting, or lying,
and case; and the form of the verb would
also express whether the killing was done
accidentally or purposely, and whether it
was by shooting or by some other process,
and, if by shooting, whether by bow and
arrow, or with a gun; and the form of the
verb would in like manner have to express
all of these things relating to the object;
that is, the person, number, gender, and
case of the object; and from the
multiplicity of paradigmatic forms of the
verb to kill, this particular one would have
to be selected." This is substantially the
mode in which an Indian sign talker would
find it necessary to tell the story, as is
shown by several examples given below in
narratives, speeches, and dialogues.
Indian languages exhibit the same fondness
for demonstration which is necessary in sign
language. The two forms of utterance are
alike in their want of power to express
certain words, such as the verb "to be," and
in the criterion of organization, so far as
concerns a high degree of synthesis and
imperfect differentiation, they bear
substantially the same relation to the
English language.
It may finally be added that as not only
proper names but nouns, generally in Indian
languages are connotive, predicating some
attribute of the object, they can readily be
expressed by gesture signs, and therefore
among them, if anywhere, it is to be
expected that relations may be established
between the words and the signs.
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Sign Language
Among North American Indians Compared with
that Among Other Peoples and Deaf-Mutes,
1881
