TONE AND GESTURE, II7 



junctlvc sentence he expresses by an alternative or contrast ; 

 'I should be punished if I were lazy and naughty,' would be 

 put, ' I lazy, naughty, no ! — lazy, naughty, I punished, yes ! ' 

 Obligation may be expressed in a similar way ; * I must love 

 and honour my teacher,' may be put, * Teacher, I beat, deceive, 

 scold, no ! — I love, honour, yes 1 ' As Steinthal says in his 

 admirable essay, it is only the certainty which speech gives to 

 a man's mind in holding fast ideas in all their relations, 

 which brings him to the shorter course of expressing only the 

 positive side of the idea, and dropping the negative. . . . 



" To ' make ' is too abstract an idea for the deaf-mute ; to 

 show that the tailor makes the coat, or that the carpenter 

 makes the table, he would represent the tailor sewing the 

 coat, and the carpenter sawing and planing the table. Such 

 a proposition as ' Rain makes the land fruitful,' would not 

 come into his way of thinking : ' rain fall, plants grow,' 

 would be his pictorial expression. . . . The order of the signs 

 by which the Lord's Prayer is rendered is much as follows : — 

 ' Father our, heaven in — name Thy hallowed — kingdom Thy 

 come — will Thy done — earth on, heaven in, as. Bread give us 

 daily — trespasses our forgive us, them trespass against us, 

 forgive as. Temptation lead not— but evil deliver from — 

 Kingdom power glory thine for ever.' " * 



I shall now add some quotations from Colonel Mallery on 

 the same subject. 



" The reader will understand without explanation that 

 there is in sign-language no organized sentence such as is in 

 the language of civilization, and that he must not look for 

 articles or particles, or passive voice or case or grammatic 

 gender, or even what appears in those languages as a 

 substantive or a verb, as a subject or a predicate, or as 

 qualifiers or inflexions. The sign radicals, without being 

 specifically any of our parts of speech, may be all of them in 

 turn. Sign-language cannot show by inflection the reciprocal 

 dependence of words and sentences. Degrees of motion 

 corresponding with vocal intonations are only used rhetori- 



• Early History of Mankind^ pp. 24-32. 



