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Show 4 AID TO DECIPHER PICTOGRAPHS. intellectual ideas, founded on analogies, are common all over the world as well as among deaf- mutes. Concepts of the intangible and invisible are only learned through percepts of tangible and visible objects, whether finally expressed to the eye or to the ear, in terms of sight or of sound. It will be admitted that the elements of the sign- language are truly natural and universal, by recurring to which the less natural signs adopted dialectically or for expedition can, with perhaps some circumlocution, be explained. This power of interpreting itself is a peculiar advantage, for spoken languages, unless explained by gestures or indications, can only be interpreted by means of some other spoken language. There is another characteristic of the gesture- speech that, though it cannot be resorted to in the dark, nor where the attention of the person addressed has not been otherwise attracted, it has the countervailing benefit of use when the voice could not be employed. When highly cultivated its rapidity on familiar subjects exceeds that of speech and approaches to that of thought itself. This statement may be startling to those who only notice that a selected spoken word may convey in an instant a meaning for which the motions of even an expert in signs may require a much longer time, but it must be considered that oral speech is now wholly conventional, and that with the similar development of sign- language conventional expressions with hands and body could be made more quickly than with the vocal organs, because more organs could be worked at once. Without such supposed development the habitual communication between deaf- mutes and among Indians using signs is perhaps as rapid as between the ignorant class of speakers upon the same subjects, and in many instances the signs would win at a trial of speed. Apart from their practical value for use with living members of the tribes, our native semiotics will surely help the archaeologist in his study of native picture- writing, the sole form of aboriginal records, for it was but one more step to fasten upon bark, skins, or rocks the evanescent air- pictures that still in pigments or carvings preserve their skeleton outline, and in their ideography approach the rudiments of a phonetic alphabet. Gesture-language is, in fact, not only a picture- language, but is actual writing, though dissolving and sympathetic, and neither alphabetic nor phonetic. |