Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/32

22 of course new signs immediately come up for them. So to express "railway" and "locomotive," the left hand makes a chimney, and the steam curling almost horizontally out is imitated with the right fore-finger. The tips of the fingers of the half-closed hand coming towards one like rays of light, is "photograph."

But the casual observer, who should take down every sign he saw used in class by masters and pupils, as belonging to the natural gesture-language, would often get a very wrong idea of its nature. Teachers of the deaf-and-dumb have thought it advisable for practical purposes, not merely to use the independent development of the language of signs, but to add to it and patch it so as to make it more strictly equivalent to their own speech and writing. For this purpose signs have to be introduced for many words, of which the pupil mostly learns the meaning through their use in writing, and is taught to use the sign where he would use the word. Thus, the clenched fists, pushed forward with the thumbs up, mean "yet." To throw the fingers gently open from the temple means "when." To move the closed hands with the thumbs out, up and down upon one's waistcoat, is to "be." All these signs may, it is true, be based upon natural gestures. Dr. Scott, for instance, explains the sign "when" as formed in this way. But this kind of derivation does not give them a claim to be included in the pure gesture-language; and it really does not seem as though it would make much difference to the children if the sign for "when" were used for "yet," and so on.

The Abbé Sicard has left us a voluminous account of the sign-language he used, which may serve as an example of the curious hybrid systems which grow up in this way, by the grafting of the English, or French, or German grammar and dictionary on the gesture-language. Sicard was strongly impressed with the necessity of using the natural signs, and even his most arbitrary ones may have been based on such; but he had set himself to make gestures do whatever words can do, and was thereby often driven to strange shifts. Yet he either drew so directly from his deaf-and-dumb scholars, or succeeded so well in learning to think in their way, that it is often very hard to say exactly