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Show WORDS AND SIGNS NOT CONVERTIBLE. 57 signs as compared with oral speech,- some notes of which, condensed from the speculations of VALADE and others, are as follows: In mimic construction there are to be considered both the order in which the signs succeed one another and the relative positions in which they are made, the latter remaining longer in the memory than the former, and spoken language may sometimes in its early infancy have reproduced the ideas of a sign- picture without commencing from the same point So the order, as in Greek and Latin, is very variable. In nations among whom the alphabet was introduced without the intermediary to any impressive degree of picture- writing, the order being, 1, language of signs, almost superseded by, 2, spoken language, and, 3, alphabetic writing, men would write in the order in which they had been accustomed to speak. But if at a time when spoken language was still rudimentary, intercourse being mainly carried on by signs, figurative writing was invented, the order of the figures will be the order of the signs, and the same order will pass into the spoken language. Hence LEIBNITZ says truly that " the writing of the Chinese might seem to have been invented by a deaf person." Their oral language has not known the phases which have given to the Indo- European tongues their formation and grammatical parts. In the latter, signs were conquered by speech, while in the former, speech received the yoke. If the collocation of the figures of Indians taking the place of our sentences shall establish no rule of construction, it will at least show the natural order of ideas in the aboriginal mind and the several modes of inversion by which they pass from the known to the unknown, beginning with the dominant idea or that supposed to be best known. So far as studied by the present writer the Indian sign- utterance, as well as that natural to deaf- mutes, appears to retain the characteristic of pantomime in giving first the principal figure, and in adding the accessories successively, the ideographic expressions being in the ideological order. As of sentences so of words, strictly known as such, there can be no accurate translation. So far from the signs representing words as logo-graphs, they do not in their presentation of the ideas of actions, objects and events, under physical forms, even suggest words, which must be skillfully fitted to them by the glossarist and laboriously derived from them by |