| OCR Text |
Show SINGLE SIGNS. 59 guages. This division is not appropriate to the signs of Indians, which are all natural in this sense, and in their beauty, grace, and impressiveness. In another meaning of " natural," given by deaf- mute authorities, it has little distinction from " innate," and still another, " conveying the meaning at first sight," is hardly definite. The signs of our Indians may be divided, in accordance with the mode of their consideration, into innate ( generally emotional) and invented; into developed and abridged ; into radical and derivative ; and into, 1. Indicative, as directly as possible of the object intended; 2. Imitative, representing it by configurative drawing; 3. Operative, referring to actions; and 4. Expressive, being chiefly facial. As they are rhetorically as well as directly figurative, they may be classified under the tropes of metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and catachresis, with as much or as little advantage as has been gained by the labeling in text- books of our figures of articulate speech. The most useful division, however, for the analysis and report with which collectors are concerned is into single and compound, each including a number of subordinate groups, examples of which will be useful. Some of those here submitted are taken from the selected list before introduced to discriminate between the alleged universality of the signs themselves and of their use as an art, and the examples of deaf- mute signs have been extracted from those given for the same purpose by Mgr. D. DE HAERNE in his admirable analysis of those signs, which also has been used so far as applicable. Those will be equally illustrative, both the Indian and deaf- mute signs being but dialects of a common stock, and while all the examples might be taken from the collection of Indian signs already made, the main object of the present work is to verify and correct that collection rather than to publish more of it than necessary, with possible perpetuation of error in some details. SINGLE SIGNS. Single signs have been often styled " simple," which term is objectionable because liable to be confounded with the idea of " plain," in which sense nearly all Indian signs, being natural, are simple They are such |
