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Show 6 AID TO AMERICAN LINGUISTICS. its wofds has disappeared, the fewer points of contact can it retain with signs. The higher languages are more precise because the consciousness of the derivation of most of their words is lost,. so that they have become counters, good for any sense agreed upon; but in our native dialects, which have not advanced in that direction to the degree exhibited by those of civilized man, the connection between the idea and the word is only less obvious than that still unbroken between the idea and the sign, and they remain strongly affected by the concepts of outline, form, place, position, and feature on which gesture is founded, while they are similar in their fertile combination of radicals. For these reasons the forms of sign- language adopted by our Indians will be of special value to the student of American linguistics. A comparison sometimes drawn between sign- language and that of our Indians, founded on the statement of their common poverty in abstract expressions, is not just to either. Allusion has before been made to the capacities of the gesture- speech in that regard, and a deeper study into Indian tongues has shown that they are by no means so confined to the concrete as was once believed. Indian language consists of a series of words that are but slightly differentiated parts of speech following each other in the order suggested in the mind of the speaker without absolute laws of arrangement, as its sentences are not completely integrated. The sentence necessitates parts of speech, and parts of speech are possible only when a language has reached that stage where sentences are logically constructed. The words of an Indian tongue being synthetic or undifferentiated parts of speech, are in this respect strictly analogous to the gesture elements which enter into a sign- language. The study of the latter is therefore valuable for comparison with the words of the speech. The one language throws much light upon the other, and neither can be studied to the best advantage without a knowledge of the other. ORIGIN AND EXTENT OF GESTURE- SPEECH. It is an accepted maxim that nothing is thoroughly understood unless its beginning is known. While this can never be absolutely accomplished for sign- language, it may be traced to, and claims general interest from, |
