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CHAPTER XIX. 
CONVENTIONALIZING. 
Before writing was invented by a people there were attempts in its 
direction which are mentioned in other chapters of this paper. Human 
forms were drawn pictorially in the act of making gesture signs and in 
significant actions and attitudes and combinations of them. Other 
natural objects, as well as those purely artificial, which represented 
work or the result of work, were also drawn with many differing signi- 
fications. When any of these designs had become commonly adopted 
on account of its striking fitness or even from frequent repetition with 
a special signification, it became a conventional term of thought-writ- 
ing, with substantially the same use as when, afterward, the combina- 
tions of letters of an alphabet into words became the arbitrary signs of 
sound-writing. While the designs thus became conventional terms, 
their forms became more and more abbreviated or cursive until in many 
sases the original concept or likeness was lost. Sometimes when a 
specimen of the original form is preserved, its identity in meaning with 
the current form can be ascertained by correlation of the intermediate 
shapes. 
The original ideography is often exhibited by exaggeration. For 
instance, a loud voice has been sometimes indicated by a human face 
with an enormous mouth. Hearing, among the Peruvians, was early 
expressed by aman with very large ears; then by a head with such ears, 
and afterwards by the form of the ears without the head. Soon such 
forms became so conventionalized as to be practically ideographic writ- 
ing. In the same manner a numeral cipher has become the represen- 
tation of a mathematical quantity, a written musical note shows a kind 
and degree of sound, and other pictured sigus give values of weights 
and measures. All of these signs express ideas independent of any 
language and may be understood by peoples speaking all diversities of 
language. 
So also the idea of smallness and subjection may be conveyed by 
drawing an object in an obviously diminished size, of which examples 
are given in this chapter. Another expedient, illustrations of which 
also appear, is by repetition and combination, with reference to which 
the following condensed remarks of James Summers (a) are in point: 
The earliest Chinese characters were pictorial; but pictures could not be made 
which would clearly express all ideas. One of the means devised to express concepts 
that could not be indicated by a simple sketch, was to combine two or more familiar 
pictures. For instance, a man with a large eye represents ‘‘seeing;” two men, 
“to follow;” three men, “‘many;” two men on the ground, “sitting.” 
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