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WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13th, 1889. 
THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH AND DEVELOPMENT 
OF LANGUAGE. 
Miss AGNES CRANE. 
The question of the origin of speech, which is, in a measure, distinct 
from that of the subsequent development of language, was selected in 
consideration of the wider range of subjects your Society afforded by 
the adoption of the title of a Philosophical Soziety. There are, at 
least, five kinds of natural language or means of expressing ideas and 
eelings : (1) Sign or gesture language ; (2) the disjointed cries which 
invariably precede the development of articulate speech (3), just as the 
picture word (4) was antecedent to the development of written lan- 
guage (5). This last, we may remember, passed through successive 
stages, from the picture word or portrayal of the actual object, to the 
ideogram or picture of ideas, or the representation of objects for the 
value of the sound of their names, ultimately attaining unto complete 
phoneticism in the use of arbitrary alphabetical signs as symbols of 
sounds. All these developments are intimately connected. It is not 
improbable that sign or gesture language, which is the mother tongue 
of the deaf and dumb, preceded the development of articulate speech 
among primitive men. There is certainly abundant proof that it 
played a very important part in the earlier stages of oral communica- 
tion. Then the gesture acted, in fact, like the pictured word in the 
first development of written language ; it determined the meaning of 
the idea intended to be conveyed. In fact, it is a form of pictured 
word describing outlines in the air, as well as by pointing out the 
actual objects. Among modern savage tribes gesture still largely 
supplements spoken language, and we ourselves resort to it when in 
difficulties as inarticulate tourists in foreign lands, for it has this 
advantage over articulate speech, it is cosmopolitan. To the deaf and 
dumb sign-language is a picture language. It originates independently 
in the minds of deaf mutes, who understand each other by signs, 
whether they are Germans, Laplanders, or American Indians. 
We still use the finger to lip to signify silence, indicate 
the height of a person or thing by placing the hand above the 
ground—the deaf mute sign for little ; point “ Go there” ; beckon with 
the fore-finger for “Come here,” and this finger is called the index- 
finger, and is placed on our walls and in our streets as.a picture-written 
direction, Our syntax depends on the language we speak. Primitive 
man had no syntax at all. Gesture language has the natural order of 
syntax. First comes the noun, then its qualification, the object before 
the action. ‘‘ Horse black bring” ; “ Hungry bread me give” ; are 
examples of sign-word sentences, The negative is expressed and not 
the postive. The syntax of the American native tongues resembles 
that of gesture language, which has no copula and no auxillary “ to 
be.” That fascinating writer, E. B. Tylor—the Darwin of anthropology 
