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Show THE SYNTAX OF SIGNS. 5 Though written characters are in our minds associated with speech, they are shown, by successful employment in hieroglyphs and by educated deaf- mutes, to be representative of ideas without the intervention of sounds, and so also are the outlines of signs. This will be more apparent if the motions expressing the most prominent feature, attribute, or function of an object are made, or supposed to be made, so as to leave a luminous track impressible to the eye, separate from the members producing it. The actual result is an immateriate graphic representation of visible objects and qualities which, invested with substance, has become familiar to us as the rebusj and also appears in the form of heraldic blazonry styled punning or " canting." The reproduction of gesture- lines in the pictographs made by our Indians seems to have been most frequent in the attempt to convey those subjective ideas which were beyond the range of an artistic skill limited to the direct representation of objects, so that the part of the pictographs, which is still the most difficult of interpretation, is precisely the one which the study of sign- language is likely to eludicate. In this connection it may be mentioned that a most interesting result has been obtained in the tentative " comparison so far made between the gesture- signs of our Indians and some of the characters in the Chinese, Assyrian, Mexican, and Runic alphabets or syllabaries, and also with Egyptian hieroglyphs. While the gesture- utterance presents no other part of grammar to the philologist besides syntax, or the grouping and sequence of its ideographic pictures, the arrangement of signs when in connected succession affords an interesting comparison with the early syntax of vocal language, and the analysis of their original conceptions, studied together with the holo-phrastic roots in the speech of the gesturers, may aid to ascertain some relation between concrete ideas and words. Meaning does not adhere to the phonetic 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 |
