Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/71

Rh for an elaborate examination of which I would especially refer to the researches of Professor Pott, of Halle. But it may be worth while to call attention to an apparent resemblance of two divisions of the root-words of our Aryan languages to the two great classes of gesture-signs. Professor Max Müller divides the Sanskrit root-forms into two classes, the predicative roots, such as to shine, to extend, and so forth; and the demonstrative roots, "a small class of independent radicals, not predicative in the usual sense of the word, but simply pointing, simply expressive of existence under certain more or less definite, local or temporal prescriptions." If we take from among the examples given, here, there, this, that, thou, he, as types, we have a division of the elements of the Sanskrit language to which a division of the signs of the deaf-mute into predicative and demonstrative would at least roughly correspond. Many centuries ago the Indian grammarians made desperate efforts to bring pronouns and verbs, as the Germans say, "under one hat." They deduced the demonstrative ta from tan, to stretch, and the relative ya from yaǵ, to worship. Unity is pleasant to mankind, who are often ready to sacrifice things of more consequence than etymology for it. But perhaps, after all, the world may not have been constructed for the purpose of providing for the human mind just what it is pleased to ask for. Of course, any full comparison of speech and the gesture-language would have to go into the hard problem of the relation of prepositions to adverbs and pronouns on the one hand, and to verb-roots on the other. As to this matter, I can only say that the educated deaf-mute puts his right forefinger into the palm of his left hand to say "in," takes it out again to say "out," puts his right hand above or below his left to say "above" or "below," etc., which are imitative signs, very likely learnt from the teacher. But the natural gestures with which he shows that anything is "above me," "behind me," and so on, are of a more direct character, and are rather demonstrative than predicative.

The class of imitative and suggestive signs in the gesture-language corresponds in some measure with the Chinese words