Alpena weekly argus. [volume] (Alpena, Mich.) 1871-1893, 1883-11-07
Gesture Language.


Some eighteen years since made an
attempt TO describe and analyze the gest-
ure language, in order TO show the con-
sistency of principle with which men
debarred from spoken language, wheth-
err deaf mutes or men unacquainted
with one another's languages, contrive
TO utter their own thoughts and under
stand the thoughts of others through
expressive gestures. In these gestures
we have q direct and universal outcome
of the human mind, a system by which
q deaf and dumb scholar from an En-
glish asylum can hold converse with
Laplanders or Iroquois or Chinese.
They understand each other because
they use signs for the most part self
expressive and conveying their own
meaning to those who never saw
them before. Now, any idea can be
thus conveyed by self-cxpressive signs,
not in one way alone, but many. A hunt
er of the prairie, for example, has to ex-
press the idea "horse'; this he can do by
various signs, as by the hand so held as
to initiate a horses head, or by the act OF
straddling a pair of forked fingers across
the edge of the other hand, or by the
initiated motion of the gallop; different
as these signs are, each tells its own
tale. When, however, people have
been long used to converse together in
gestures, they are apt to cut them down
into abbreviated forms which do not
show their meaning at first sight, and
might even seem to outsiders to be arti-
fetal. Thus, white man, seeing a
Cheyenne Indian hold his arm
bent forward with the hand closed
knuckles upward, was puzzled as to
what this might mean; the Indian, see
ing his look of perplexity, took stick
and, bending his head and back, COM
pleted the picture into that of bent
old man leaning on staff, thus show
ing that the sign meant ''old man."
Traditional signs may even 60 on after
their reason has passed away, as the
sign of "stone," made by hammering
with the closed fist on the other hand,
gesture dating from the Stone Age, in
which the Indians lived within few
generations, when their only hammer
was stone.
These two examples are taken from
the recent careful collection of North
American gesture signs by Colonel NAL
lery, published by the Smithsonian In
stitution. The labor and expense which
anthropologists in the United States are
now bestowed on tho study of the indi-
genous tribes contrasts, am sorry to
say, with the indifference shown to such
observations in Canada, where tho hab-
its of yet more interesting native tribes
are allowed to die out without even q
record. But to return do the gesture
language. This passageof self-express-
i've signs into what seem arbitrary signs
throws strong light on the principles Of
spoken language, where we find few
self-expressive sounds, such as interjec-
tions and names of animals initiated
from their cries, while the great
majority of words are not even
traceable back to the self-express-
i've stage from which the analogy
of gesture-language leads us to
suppose that they originally sprang.
Moreover, the sequence or collocation OF
gcsture-signs conforms to fixed rules,
which display the action of the thinking
mind. The subject must precede the
attribute; for instance, such sequence
as "heavy stick" would have no sense
to the sign-maker, who necessarily in
PRODUCES the stick before he can clothe
it with an attribute. Phrases, so to
speak, out of an American gesture
story illustrate the gesture-syntax
When the finger-tips of the two hands
arc brought together to show hut or
wigwam, then pointing to ones own
breast does the work of tho proaoun,
"hut-mine. The sequence 'bufalo-
one-shot-killed" starts with the idea OF
buffalo, adds that there was one, and
then the sign-maker, having placed the
idea of that one buffalo before his inter
locutor, can imitatively shoot at it, and
it falls dead. He can even imply the
idea of causation in the sharp following
of the shot by the animals fall, which
makes one the instantaneous conse.
quence of the other.-E. B. Iylor, in
Nature.