The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1884-08-21
Gesture Language.

Some eighteen years since l 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-
er 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 direct and universal outcome |
of the human mind, system by which |
O 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-expressive signs.
notin enc way alone, but many. A hunt
er of the prairie, for example, has to ex-
press the idea 'shorse"; this he can do by
various signs. as by the hand so held as
to initiate horses head, or by the act of
straddling pair of forked fingers across
the edge of the other hand, or by the
initiated motion of the gallop; different
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
| CHEYENNE Indian hold his arm
bent forward with the hand closed
knuckles upward, was puzzled as to
what this might mean; the Indian, Sec
ing his look of perplexity, took stick
and, bending his head and back, COM
! pleted the picture into that of a bent
| old man leaning on staff, thus show
ing that the sign meant ''old man. y
Traditional signs may even go 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 q 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 the study of the indi-
genous tribes contrasts, am sorry to
say, with the indifference shown to such
observations in Canada, where the hab-
its of yet more interesting native tribes
are allowed to die out without even a
record. But to return to the gesture
language This passage of 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 interiec-
tons 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
i of gesture-language leads us to
suppose that they originally sprang.
! Moreover, the sequence or collocation Of
! gesture-sigus conforms to fixed rules,
which display the action of the thinking
! mind. The subject must precede the
attribute; for instance, such a sequence
; as sheavy 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
I speak, out of an American gesture
story illustrate the gestures ntax.
! When the fnger-tips of the two hands
I. !. are brought together to show hut Oh
: wigwam, then pointing to ones OWE
J breast does the work of the proaonn
"hut-mine- The sequence ''buffalo
= one-shot- killed. starts with the idea O
: esuffalo, adds that there was one, and
: hen the sign-maker, having placed th,
!. idea of that one buffalo before his inter
. ocutor, can imitatively shoot at it, ant
It falls dead. He can even imply tn.
: dea of causatien In the sharp following
. Of the shot BY the animals fall, which
! makes one the instantaneous conse
= quence of the other.--E. B. Tylor. II
Nature.