Evening star., 1938-09-08
OF STARS,
MEN AND ATOMS
Notebook of Science Proaress
in Field, Laboratory
and Study.
By THOMAS R. HENRY.

ny HOMAS n. HENKI.
CAMBRIDGE, England (By MaiD -
An international sign language, rooted In
the belief that man Is not an inherently
talking animal and that gestures are
still more natural forms of expression
than words now Is being composed by
Sir Richard Paget, foremost living au-
thority on the physiological background
of speech.
This is based, he explained to the
British Association for the Advance
ment of Science recently, both on re-
searches into the ways of life of primi-
tive man and on the experiences of
deaf mutes as revealed in such records
as the autobiography Of Helen Keller.
The mentality of the uninstructed
deaf mute, he said, is essentially the
same as that of the cave man Of the
Aurignacian period when the first crude
drawings of animals were made on cave
walls. 1t is extremely unlikely, he in
sisted, that human beings could talk or
that there was anything approaching
language before they first learned to
draw and, he held, writing of a sort
must have preceded speaking. From
that time on speech has been handed
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to be looked upon as something with
which man naturally is endowed by
nature.
At very early period. he said, man
probably had very crude system of
gestures and emotional cries not much
more elaborate than that possessed by
some mammals He could make a warm
ing gesture of fright accompanied by
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it only meant that there was something
in the nelghborhood which threatened.
But it can be deduced from the expert
ences of the deaf mutes, he insisted, that
primitive man without language did not
dlfierentlate any specific objects Sun
and sky and clouds were all one. So
were bear and tree and foliage. He had
not gesture meaning bear because he
recognized nc such distinct thing.
But his livelihood depended on killing
such things as bear" Gradually there
grew up the idea of drawing pictures as
magical procedure to help in this kill
ing, and this required picking the shape
Of the creatures out of the general pat
tern OF things. Once this had been done,
and the shape fixed in the mind by
drawing it, it became a distinct thing
in itself.
Once this happened man invented
some hand gesture to express this thing.
Once this was done a word had come
into existence Actually the gesture
might be combination hand movement
and throat movement, or sound.
Then. through countless generations.
the hand gesture tended to be replaced
altogether by the throat gesture and
spoken language came into existence.
This is precisely the psychological ex-
perience through which Helen Keller
passed, ne said, although later she amply
demonstrated that she had mind of a
high order. Her first realization was
that water" and bowl were two
separate things which could be expressed
by different signs Before that, said
Sir Richard, she was pre-Aurignacian.
After that she rapidly became an edu-
Gated girl with specific signs for all
objects.
But the substitution of throat gestures
from hand gestures, he insisted, has not
been an unmixed advantage. For one
thing it has brought about the school
boys curse, grammar which is natural
in hand gestures and very unnatural in
throat gestures. This he illustrated with
the conjugation of verbs. The gesture
for come" is merely drawing the
partially closed hand towards the chest.
The number who come is indicated by
holding out tho appropriate number of
fingers. With this system, he said, the
whole conjugation of verbs becomes al
most automatically obvious to every
body. But the gestures have been trans
lated so clumsily into words that school
children sweat for years over them and
they are the chief difficulty in learning
a foreign language.
Even in the word languages, he said,
II hope to see us get rid of grammar
The Chinese have almost succeeded in
doing 1t. We have almost succeeded in
doing it in English"
The hand gesture language, he said,
has a much wider range of expression
than any word language. Thus there
are only about SO signs" that can be
made with the mouth and all words
must be variations of these. The hands
can make approximately 100000 signs
The first great advantage of the new
sign language. based on gestures which
would almost automatically be uni
versally understood, would come in the
education of deaf mutes, he said. Studies
have shown that these children are al
most always mentally retarded until
they reach a certain point, from which
they squirt rapidly ahead to normal in
telligence. This is the point, he insisted,
where they first learn to differentiate
objects in the environment, just as
primitive man learned to differentiate
them by drawing them.
The second advantage would come
from the ease with which it might be-
come medium of international COM
munication, free of all the difficulties
of learning complex grammars and long
vocabularies. The preparation of the
new language now has been underway
for about three years.