Sign Language Among North American Indians 6

Sign Language Among North American Indians 6

Several descriptions of pure pantomime, intermixed with the more

conventionalized signs, will be found in the present paper. In

especial, reference is made to the Address of Kin Chē-ĕss,

Nátci's Narrative, the Dialogue between Alaskan Indians, and

Na-wa-gi-jig's Story.

 

 

 

 

SOME THEORIES UPON PRIMITIVE LANGUAGE.

 

Cresollius, writing in 1620, was strongly in favor of giving

precedence to gesture. He says, "Man, full of wisdom and divinity,

could have appeared nothing superior to a naked trunk or block had he

not been adorned with the hand as the interpreter and messenger of

his thoughts." He quotes with approval the brother of St. Basil in

declaring that had men been formed without hands they would never have

been endowed with an articulate voice, and concludes: "Since, then,

nature has furnished us with two instruments for the purpose of

bringing into light and expressing the silent affections of the

mind, language and the hand, it has been the opinion of learned and

intelligent men that the former would be maimed and nearly useless

without the latter; whereas the hand, without the aid of language, has

produced many and wonderful effects."

 

Rabelais, who incorporated into his satirical work much true learning

and philosophy, makes his hero announce the following opinion:

 

"Nothing less, quoth Pantagruel [Book iii, ch. xix], do I believe than

that it is a mere abusing of our understandings to give credit to

the words of those who say that there is any such thing as a natural

language. All speeches have had their primary origin from the

arbitrary institutions, accords, and agreements of nations in their

respective condescendments to what should be noted and betokened

by them. An articulate voice, according to the dialecticians, hath

naturally no signification at all; for that the sense and meaning

thereof did totally depend upon the good will and pleasure of the

first deviser and imposer of it."

 

Max Müller, following Professor Heyse, of Berlin, published an

ingenious theory of primitive speech, to the effect that man had a

creative faculty giving to each conception, as it thrilled through his

brain for the first time, a special phonetic __EXPRESSION__, which faculty

became extinct when its necessity ceased. This theory, which makes

each radical of language to be a phonetic type rung out from the

organism of the first man or men when struck by an idea, has been

happily named the "ding-dong" theory. It has been abandoned mainly

through the destructive criticisms of Prof. W.D. WHITNEY, of Yale

College. One lucid explanation by the latter should be specially

noted: "A word is a combination of sounds which by a series of

historical reasons has come to be accepted and understood in a certain

community as the sign of a certain idea. As long as they so accept

and understand it, it has existence; when everyone ceases to use and

understand it, it ceases to exist."

 

Several authors, among them Kaltschmidt, contend that there was

but one primitive language, which was purely onomatopoeic, that

is, imitative of natural sounds. This has been stigmatized as the

"bow-wow" theory, but its advocates might derive an argument from the

epithet itself, as not only our children, but the natives of Papua,

call the dog a "bow-wow." They have, however, gone too far in

attempting to trace back words in their shape as now existing to any

natural sounds instead of confining that work to the roots from which

the words have sprung.

 

Another attempt has been made, represented by Professor Noiré, to

account for language by means of interjectional cries. This Max Müller

revengefully styled the "pooh-pooh" theory. In it is included the

rhythmical sounds which a body of men make seemingly by a common

impulse when engaged in a common work, such as the cries of sailors

when hauling on a rope or pulling an oar, or the yell of savages in an

attack. It also derives an argument from the impulse of life by which

the child shouts and the bird sings. There are, however, very few

either words or roots of words which can be proved to have that

derivation.

 

Professor SAYCE, in his late work, _Introduction to the Science of

Language, London_, 1880, gives the origin of language in gestures,

in onomatopoeia, and to a limited extent in interjectional cries.

He concludes it to be the ordinary theory of modern comparative

philologists that all languages are traced back to a certain number

of abstract roots, each of which was a sort of sentence in embryo,

and while he does not admit this as usually presented, he believes

that there was a time in the history of speech, when the articulate

or semi-articulate sounds uttered by primitive men were made the

significant representations of thought by the gestures with which

they were accompanied. This statement is specially gratifying to the

present writer as he had advanced much the same views in his first

publication on the subject in the following paragraph, now reproduced

with greater confidence:

 

"From their own failures and discordancies, linguistic scholars have

recently decided that both the 'bow-wow' and the 'ding-dong' theories

are unsatisfactory; that the search for imitative, onomatopoeic, and

directly expressive sounds to explain the origin of human speech has

been too exclusive, and that many primordial roots of language have

been founded in the involuntary sounds accompanying certain actions.

As, however, the action was the essential, and the consequent

or concomitant sound the accident, it would be expected that a

representation or feigned reproduction of the action would have been

used to express the idea before the sound associated with that

action could have been separated from it. The visual onomatopoeia of

gestures, which even yet have been subjected to but slight artificial

corruption, would therefore serve as a key to the audible. It is also

contended that in the pristine days, when the sounds of the only words

yet formed had close connection with objects and the ideas directly

derived from them, signs were as much more copious for communication

than speech, as the sight embraces more and more distinct

characteristics of objects than does the sense of hearing."

 

 

 

_CONCLUSIONS._

 

The preponderance of authority is in favor of the view that man, when

in the possession of all his faculties, did not choose between voice

and gesture, both being originally instinctive, as they both are now,

and never, with those faculties, was in a state where the one was used

to the absolute exclusion of the other. The long neglected work of

Dalgarno, published in 1661, is now admitted to show wisdom when he

says: "_non minus naturale fit homini communicare in_ Figuris _quam_

Sonis: _quorum utrumque dico homini_ naturale." With the voice man

at first imitated the few sounds of nature, while with gesture he

exhibited actions, motions, positions, forms, dimensions, directions,

and distances, and their derivatives. It would appear from this

unequal division of capacity that oral speech remained rudimentary

long after gesture had become an art. With the concession of all

purely imitative sounds and of the spontaneous action of the vocal

organs under excitement, it is still true that the connection between

ideas and words generally depended upon a compact between the

speaker and hearer which presupposes the existence of a prior mode of

communication. That was probably by gesture, which, in the apposite

phrase of Professor SAYCE, "like the rope-bridges of the Himalayas or

the Andes, formed the first rude means of communication between man

and man." At the very least it may be gladly accepted provisionally as

a clue leading out of the labyrinth of philologic confusion.

 

For the purpose of the present paper there is, however, no need of an

absolute decision upon the priority between communication of ideas by

bodily motion and by vocal articulation. It is enough to admit that

the connection between them was so early and intimate that gestures,

in the wide sense indicated of presenting ideas under physical forms,

had a direct formative effect upon many words; that they exhibit the

earliest condition of the human mind; are traced from the remotest

antiquity among all peoples possessing records; are generally

prevalent in the savage stage of social evolution; survive agreeably

in the scenic pantomime, and still adhere to the ordinary speech of

civilized man by motions of the face, hands, head, and body, often

involuntary, often purposely in illustration or for emphasis.

 

It may be unnecessary to explain that none of the signs to be

described, even those of present world-wide prevalence, are presented

as precisely those of primitive man. Signs as well as words, animals,

and plants have had their growth, development, and change, their

births and deaths, and their struggle for existence with survival of

the fittest. It is, however, thought probable from reasons hereinafter

mentioned that their radicals can be ascertained with more precision

than those of words.

 

 

 

 

HISTORY OF GESTURE LANGUAGE.

 

There is ample evidence of record, besides that derived from other

sources, that the systematic use of gesture speech was of great

antiquity. Livy so declares, and Quintilian specifies that the "_lex

gestus ... ab illis temporibus heroicis orta est_." Plato classed its

practice among civil virtues, and Chrysippus gave it place among the

proper education of freemen. Athenæus tells that gestures were even

reduced to distinct classification with appropriate terminology. The

class suited to comedy was called Cordax, that to tragedy Eumelia, and

that for satire Sicinnis, from the inventor Sicinnus. Bathyllus from

these formed a fourth class, adapted to pantomime. This system appears

to have been particularly applicable to theatrical performances.

Quintilian, later, gave most elaborate rules for gestures in oratory,

which are specially noticeable from the importance attached to the

manner of disposing the fingers. He attributed to each particular

disposition a significance or suitableness which are not now obvious.

Some of them are retained by modern orators, but without the same, or

indeed any, intentional meaning, and others are wholly disused.