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 reader will understand without
explanation that there is in the gesture speech no organized
sentence such as is integrated in the languages of
civilization, and that he must not look for articles or
particles or passive voice or case or grammatic gender, or
even what appears in those languages as a substantive or a
verb, as a subject or a predicate, or as qualifiers or
inflexions. The sign radicals, without being specifically
any of our parts of speech, may be all of them in turn.
There is, however, a grouping and sequence of the
ideographic pictures, an arrangement of signs in connected
succession, which may be classed under the scholastic head
of syntax. This subject, with special reference to the order
of deaf-mute signs as compared with oral speech, has been
the theme of much discussion, some notes of which, condensed
from the speculations of M. Rémi Valade and others, follow
in the next paragraph without further comment than may
invite attention to the profound remark of Leibnitz.
In mimic construction there are to be considered both the
order in which the signs succeed one another and the
relative positions in which they are made, the latter
remaining longer in the memory than the former, and spoken
language may sometimes in its early infancy have reproduced
the ideas of a sign picture without commencing from the same
point. So the order, as in Greek and Latin, is very
variable. In nations among whom the alphabet was introduced
without the intermediary to any impressive degree of
picture-writing, the order being (1) language of signs,
almost superseded by (2) spoken language, and (3) alphabetic
writing, men would write in the order in which they had been
accustomed to speak. But if at a time when spoken language
was still rudimentary, intercourse being mainly carried on
by signs, figurative writing had been invented, the order of
the figures would be the order of the signs, and the same
order would pass into the spoken language. Hence Leibnitz
says truly that "the writing of the Chinese might seem to
have been invented by a deaf person." The oral language has
not known the phases which have given to the Indo-European
tongues their formation and grammatical parts. In the
latter, signs were conquered by speech, while in the former,
speech received the yoke.
Sign language cannot show by inflection the reciprocal
dependence of words and sentences. Degrees of motion
corresponding with vocal intonation are only used
rhetorically or for degrees of comparison. The relations of
ideas and objects are therefore expressed by placement, and
their connection is established when necessary by the
abstraction of ideas. The sign talker is an artist, grouping
persons and things so as to show the relations between them,
and the effect is that which is seen in a picture. But
though the artist has the advantage in presenting in a
permanent connected scene the result of several transient
signs, he can only present it as it appears at a single
moment. The sign talker has the succession of time at his
disposal, and his scenes move and act, are localized and
animated, and their arrangement is therefore more varied and
significant.
It is not satisfactory to give the order of equivalent words
as representative of the order of signs, because the
pictorial arrangement is wholly lost; but adopting this
expedient as a mere illustration of the sequence in the
presentation of signs by deaf-mutes, the following is quoted
from an essay by Rev. J.R. Keep, in American Annals of
the Deaf and Dumb, vol. xvi, p. 223, as the order in
which the parable of the Prodigal Son is translated into
signs:
"Once, man one, sons two. Son younger say, Father property
your divide: part my, me give. Father so.—Son each, part his
give. Days few after, son younger money all take, country
far go, money spend, wine drink, food nice eat. Money by and
by gone all. Country everywhere food little: son hungry
very. Go seek man any, me hire. Gentleman meet. Gentleman
son send field swine feed. Son swine husks eat, see—self
husks eat want—cannot—husks him give nobody. Son thinks,
say, father my, servants many, bread enough, part give away
can—I none—starve, die. I decide: Father I go to, say I bad,
God disobey, you disobey—name my hereafter son, no—I
unworthy. You me work give servant like. So son begin go.
Father far look: son see, pity, run, meet, embrace. Son
father say, I bad, you disobey, God disobey—name my
hereafter son, no—I unworthy. But father servants
call, command robe best bring, son put on, ring finger put
on, shoes feet put on, calf fat bring, kill. We all eat,
merry. Why? Son this my formerly dead, now alive: formerly
lost, now found: rejoice."
It may be remarked, not only from this example, but from
general study, that the verb "to be" as a copula or
predicant does not have any place in sign language. It is
shown, however, among deaf-mutes as an assertion of presence
or existence by a sign of stretching the arms and hands
forward and then adding the sign of affirmation. Time
as referred to in the conjunctions when and then
is not gestured. Instead of the form, "When I have had a
sleep I will go to the river," or "After sleeping I will go
to the river," both deaf-mutes and Indians would express the
intention by "Sleep done, I river go." Though time present,
past, and future is readily expressed in signs (see page
366), it is done once for all in the connection to which it
belongs, and once established is not repeated by any
subsequent intimation, as is commonly the case in oral
speech. Inversion, by which the object is placed before the
action, is a striking feature of the language of deaf-mutes,
and it appears to follow the natural method by which objects
and actions enter into the mental conception. In striking a
rock the natural conception is not first of the abstract
idea of striking or of sending a stroke into vacancy, seeing
nothing and having no intention of striking anything in
particular, when suddenly a rock rises up to the mental
vision and receives the blow; the order is that the man sees
the rock, has the intention to strike it, and does so;
therefore he gestures, "I rock strike." For further
illustration of this subject, a deaf-mute boy, giving in
signs the compound action of a man shooting a bird from a
tree, first represented the tree, then the bird as alighting
upon it, then a hunter coming toward and looking at it,
taking aim with a gun, then the report of the latter and the
falling and the dying gasps of the bird. These are
undoubtedly the successive steps that an artist would have
taken in drawing the picture, or rather successive pictures,
to illustrate the story. It is, however, urged that this
pictorial order natural to deaf-mutes is not natural to the
congenitally blind who are not deaf-mute, among whom it is
found to be rhythmical. It is asserted that blind persons
not carefully educated usually converse in a metrical
cadence, the action usually coming first in the structure of
the sentence. The deduction is that all the senses when
intact enter into the mode of intellectual conception in
proportion to their relative sensitiveness and intensity,
and hence no one mode of ideation can be insisted on as
normal to the exclusion of others.
Whether or not the above statement concerning the blind is
true, the conceptions and presentations of deaf-mutes and of
Indians using sign language because they cannot communicate
by speech, are confined to optic and, therefore, to
pictorial arrangement.
The abbé Sicard, dissatisfied with the want of tenses and
conjunctions, indeed of most of the modern parts of speech,
in the natural signs, and with their inverted order,
attempted to construct a new language of signs, in which the
words should be given in the order of the French or other
spoken language adopted, which of course required him to
supply a sign for every word of spoken language. Signs,
whatever their character, could not become associated with
words, or suggest them, until words had been learned. The
first step, therefore, was to explain by means of natural
signs, as distinct from the new signs styled methodical, the
meaning of a passage of verbal language. Then each word was
taken separately and a sign affixed to it, which was to be
learned by the pupil. If the word represented a physical
object, the sign would be the same as the natural sign, and
would be already understood, provided the object had been
seen and was familiar; and in all cases the endeavor was to
have the sign convey as strong a suggestion of the meaning
of the word as was possible. The final step was to
gesticulate these signs, thus associated with words, in the
exact order in which the words were to stand in a sentence.
Then the pupil would write the very words desired in the
exact order desired. If the previous explanation in natural
signs had not been sufficiently full and careful, he would
not understand the passage. The methodical signs did not
profess to give him the ideas, except in a very limited
degree, but only to show him how to express ideas according
to the order and methods of spoken language. As there were
no repetitions of time in narratives in the sign language,
it became necessary to unite with the word-sign for verbs
others, to indicate the different tenses of the verbs, and
so by degrees the methodical signs not only were required to
comprise signs for every word, but also, with every such
sign, a grammatical sign to indicate what part of speech the
word was, and, in the case of verbs, still other signs to
show their tenses and corresponding inflections. It was, as
Dr. Peet remarks, a cumbrous and unwieldly vehicle, ready at
every step to break down under the weight of its own
machinery. Nevertheless, it was industriously taught in all
our schools from the date of the founding of the American
Asylum in 1817 down to about the year 1835, when it was
abandoned.
The collection of narratives, speeches, and dialogues of our
Indians in sign language, first systematically commenced by
the present writer, several examples of which are in this
paper, has not yet been sufficiently complete and exact to
establish conclusions on the subject of the syntactic
arrangement of their signs. So far as studied it seems to be
similar to that of deaf-mutes and to retain the
characteristic of pantomimes in figuring first the principal
idea and adding the accessories successively in the order of
importance, the ideographic expressions being in the
ideologic order. If the examples given are not enough to
establish general rules of construction, they at least show
the natural order of ideas in the minds of the gesturers and
the several modes of inversion by which they pass from the
known to the unknown, beginning with the dominant idea or
that supposed to be best known. Some special instances of
expedients other than strictly syntactic coming under the
machinery broadly designated as grammar may be mentioned.
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Sign Language
Among North American Indians Compared with
that Among Other Peoples and Deaf-Mutes,
1881
