Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/33

Rh where the influence of spoken or written language comes in. For instance, the deaf-mute borrows the signs of space, as we do similar words, to express notions of time; and Sicard, keeping to these real signs, and only using them with a degree of analysis which has hardly been attained to but by means of words, makes the present tense of his verb by indicating "here" with the two hands held out, palm downward, the past tense by the hand thrown back over the shoulder, "behind," the future by putting the hand out, "forward." But when he takes on his conjugation to such tenses as "I should have carried," he is merely translating words into more or less appropriate signs. Again, by the aid of two fore-fingers hooked together, to express, I suppose, the notion of dependence or connection, he distinguishes between moi and me, and by translating two abstract grammatical terms from words into signs, he introduces another conception quite foreign to the pure gesture-language. If something that has been signed is a substantive, he puts the right hand under the left, to show that it is that which stands underneath; while if it is an adjective, he puts the right hand on the top, to show that it is the quality which lies upon or is added to the substantive below.

These partly artificial systems are probably very useful in teaching, but they are not the real gesture-language, and what is more, the foreign element so laboriously introduced seems to have little power of holding its ground there. So far as I can learn, few or none of the factitious grammatical signs will bear even the short journey from the schoolroom to the playground, where there is no longer any verb "to be," where the abstract conjunctions are unknown, and where mere position, quality, action, may serve to describe substantive and adjective alike.

At Berlin, as in all deaf-and-dumb institutions, there are numbers of signs which, though most natural in their character, would not be understood beyond the limits of the circle in which they are used. These are signs which indicate an object by some accidental peculiarity, and are rather epithets than names. My deaf-and-dumb teacher, for instance, was named among the