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Show RESULT IN MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING. 39 ing the code in which the other was educated and which he had before practiced, one being mutually devised for the occasion, and those specially designed for secrecy are often deciphered. So, if any one of the more approximately conventional signs is not quickly comprehended, an Indian skilled in the principle of signs resorts to another expression of his flexible art, perhaps reproducing the gesture unabbreviated and made more graphic, perhaps presenting either the same or another conception or quality of the same object or idea by an original portraiture. The same tribe has, indeed, in some instances, as appears by the collected lists, a choice already furnished by tradition or importation, or recent invention or all together, of several signs for the same thought- object Thus there are produced synonyms as well as dialects in sign- language. The general result is that two intelligent mimes seldom fail of mutual understanding, their attention being exclusively directed to the expression of thoughts by the means of comprehension and reply equally possessed by both, without the mental confusion of conventional sounds only intelligible to one. The Indians who have been shown over the civilized East have also often succeeded in holding intercourse, by means of their invention and application of principles, in what may be called the voiceless mother utterance, with white deaf- mutes, who surely have no semiotlc code more nearly connected with that attributed to the plain- roamers than is derived from their common humanity. When they met together they were found to pursue the same course as that noticed at the meeting together of deaf- mutes who were either not instructed in any methodical dialect or who had received such instruction by different methods. They seldom agreed in the signs at first presented, but soon understood them, and finished by adopting some in mutual compromise, which proved to be those most strikingly appropriate, graceful, and convenient, but there still remained in some cases a plurality of fitting signs for the same idea or object. On one of the most interesting of these occasions, at the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, in 1873, it was remarked that the signs of the deaf- mutes were much more readily understood by the Indmns, who were Absaroki or Crows, Arapahos, and Cheyennes, than were theirs by the deaf- mutes, and that the latter greatly excelled in pantomimic effect. This need not be sur- |
