MALLERY, ] INDIAN AND SIGN LANGUAGES COMPARED. 351 
tween the idea and the word is only less obvious than that still unbroken 
between the idea and the sign, and they remain strongly affected by the 
concepts of outline, form, place, position, and feature on which gesture 
is founded, while they are similar in their fertile combination of radicals. 
Indian language consists of a series of words that are but slightly 
differentiated parts of speech following each other in the order sug- 
gested in the mind of the speaker without absolute laws of arrange- 
ment, as its sentences are not completely integrated. The sentence 
necessitates parts of speech, and parts of speech are possible only when 
a language has reached that stage where sentences are logically con- 
structed. The words of an Indian tongue, being synthetic or undiffer- 
entiated parts of speech, are in this respect strictly analogous to the 
gesture elements which enter into a signlanguage. The study of the 
latter is therefore valuabie for comparison with the words of the former. 
The one language throws much light upon the other, and neither can be 
studied to the best advantage without a knowled ge of the other. 
Some special resemblances between the lan guage of signs and the char- 
acter of the oral languages found on this continent may be mentioned. 
Dr. J. HAMMOND TRUMBULL remarks of the composition of their 
words that they were ‘‘so constructed as to be thoroughly self-defining 
and immediately intelligible to the hearer.” In another connection the 
remark is further enforced: “ Indeed, it is a requirement of the Indian 
languages that every word shall be so framed as to admit of immediate 
resolution to its significant elements by the hearer. It must be thor- 
oughly self-defining, for (as Max Miiller has expressed it) ‘it requires tra- 
dition, society, and literature to maintain words which can no longer be 
analyzed at once” * * * In the ever-shifting state of a nomadic 
society no debased coin can be tolerated in language, no obscure legend 
accepted on trust. The metal must be pure and the legend distinct.” 
Indian languages, like those of higher development, sometimes exhibit 
changes of form by the permutation of vowels, but often an incorporated 
particle, whether suffix, affix, or infix, shows the etymology which often, 
also, exhibits the same objective conception that would be executed in 
gesture. There are, for instance, different forms for standing, sitting, 
lying, falling, &¢., and for standing, sitting, lying on or falling from the 
same level or a higher or lower level. This resembles the pictorial con- 
ception and execution of signs. 
Major J. W. POWELL, with particular reference to the disadvantages of 
the multiplied inflections in Indian languages, alike with the Greek and 
Latin, when the speaker is compelled, in the choice of a word to express 
his idea, to think of a great multiplicity of things, gives the following 
instance : 
“A Ponca Indian in saying that a man killed a rabbit, would have to 
say: the man, he, one, animate, standing, in the nominative case, pur- 
posely killed, by shooting an arrow, the rabbit, he, the one, animate, 
sitting, in the objective case; for the form of a verb to kill would have 
