WORDS AND SIGNS NOT CONVERTIBLE. 57 



signs as compared with oral speech, some notes of winch, condensed from 

 the speculations of Valade and others, are as follows: 



In mimic construction there are to be considered both the order in which 

 the signs succeed one another and the relative positions in winch they are 

 made, the latter remaining longer in the memory than the former, and 

 spoken language may sometimes in its early infancy have reproduced the 

 ideas of a sign-picture without commencing from the same point. So the 

 order, as in Greek and Latin, is very variable. In nations among whom the 

 alphabet was introduced without the intermediary to any impressive deo-ree 

 of picture-writing, the order being, 1, language of signs, almost superseded 

 by, 2, spoken language, and, 3, alphabetic writing, men would write in the 

 order in which they had been accustomed to speak. But if at a time when 

 spoken language was still rudimentary, intercourse being mainly carried on 

 by signs, figurative writing was invented, the order of the figures will be 

 the order of the signs, and the same order will pass into the spoken lan- 

 guage. Hence Leiunitz says truly that " the writing of the Chinese might 

 seem to have been invented by a deaf person." Their oral language has 

 not known the phases which have given to the Indo-European tongues 

 their formation and grammatical parts. In the latter, signs were conquered 

 by speech, while in the former, speech received the yoke. 



If the collocation of the figures of Indians taking the place of our sen- 

 tences shall establish no rule of construction, it will at least show the 

 natural order of ideas in the aboriginal mind and the several modes of 

 inversion by which they pass from the known to the unknown, beginning 

 with the dominant idea or that supposed to be best known. So far as 

 studied by the present writer the Indian sign-utterance, as well as that 

 natural to deaf-mutes, appears to retain the characteristic of pantomime in 

 giving first the principal figure, and in adding the accessories successively, 

 the ideographic expressions being in the ideological order. 



As of sentences so of words, strictly known as such, there can be no 

 accurate translation. So far from the signs representing words as logo- 

 graphs, they do not in their presentation of the ideas of actions, objects 

 and events, under physical forms, even suggest words, which must be skill- 

 fully fitted to them by the glossarist and laboriously derived from them by 



