| OCR Text |
Show CAUSES OF THE ERRONEOUS REPORT. 15 viated the diversity is vastly increased. The original conception, being independent, has necessarily also varied, because all objects have several characteristics, and what struck one set of people as the most distinctive of these would not always so impress another. From these reasons we cannot expect, without trouble, to understand the etymology of all the signs, being less rich in ancillary material than were even the old philologists, who guessed at Latin and Greek derivations before they were assisted by Sanscrit and other Aryan roots. It is not difficult to conjecture some of the causes of the report under consideration. Explorers and officials are naturally brought into contact more closely with those persons of the tribes visited who are experts in the sign- language than with their other members, and those experts are selected, on account of their skill as interpreters, as guides to accompany the visitors. The latter also seek occasion to be present when the signs are used, whether with or without words, in intertribal councils, and then the same class of experts are the orators, for this long exercise in gesture- speech has made the Indian politicians, with no special effort, masters of the art only acquired by our public speakers after laborious apprenticeship before their mirrors. The whole theory and practice of sign- language being that all who understand its principles can make themselves mutually intelligible, - the fact of the ready comprehension and response among all the skilled gesturers gives the impression of a common code. Furthermore, if the explorer learns to use any of the signs used by any of the tribes, he will probably be understood in any other by the same class of persons who will surround him in the latter, thereby confirming him in the " universal" theory. Those of the tribe who are less skilled, but who are not noticed, might be unable to catch the meaning of signs which have not been actually taught to them, just as ignorant persons among us cannot derive any sense from newly- coined words or those strange to their habitual vocabulary, which linguistic scholars would instantly understand, though never before heard, and might afterward adopt. In order to sustain the position taken as to the existence of a general system instead of a uniform code, admitting the generic unity while denying the specific identity, and to show that this is not a distinction without |
