Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/72

62 which are neither verbs, substantives, adjectives, nor adverbs, but answer the purpose of all of them, as, for instance, ta, meaning great, greatness, to make great, to be great, greatly; or they may be compared with what Sanskrit roots would be if they were used as they stand in the dictionaries, without any inflections. In the gesture-language there seems no distinction between the adjective, the adverb which belongs to it, the substantive, and the verb. To say, for instance, "The pear is green," the deaf-and-dumb child first eats an imaginary pear, and then using the back of the flat left hand as a ground, he makes the fingers of the right hand grow up on the edge of it like blades of grass. We might translate the signs as "pear-grass;" but they have quite as good a right to be classed as verbs, for they are signs of eating in a peculiar way, and growing.

It is not necessary to have recourse to Asiatic languages for analogies of this kind with the gesture-language. The substantive-adjective is common enough in English, and indeed in most other languages. In such compounds as chestnut-horse, spoon-bill, iron-stone, feather-grass, we have the substantive put to express a quality which distinguishes it. Our own language, which has gone so far towards assimilating itself to the Chinese by dropping inflection and making syntax do its work, has developed to a great extent a concretism which is like that of the Chinese, who makes one word do duty for "stick" and "to beat with a stick," or of the deaf-mute, whose sign for "butter" or the act of "buttering" is the same, the imitation of spreading with his finger on the palm of his hand. To butter bread, to cudgel a man, to oil machinery, to pepper a dish, and scores of such expressions, involve action and instrument in one word, and that word a substantive treated as the root or crude form of a verb. Such expressions are concretisms, picture-words, gesture-words, as much as the deaf-and-dumb man's one sign for "butter" and "buttering." To separate these words, and to say that there is one butter, a noun, and another butter, a verb, may be convenient for the dictionary; but to pretend that there is a real distinction between the words is a mere grammatical juggle, like saying that the noun man has a nominative case