THE SYNTAX OF SIGNS. 5 



Though written characters are in our minds associated with speech, they 

 are shown, by successful employment in hieroglyphs and by educated 

 deaf-mutes, to be representative of ideas without the intervention of sounds, 

 and so also are the outlines of signs. This will be more apparent if the 

 motions expressing the most prominent feature, attribute, or function of 

 an object are made, or supposed to be made, so as to leave a luminous 

 track impressible to the eye, separate from the members producing it. The 

 actual result is an immateriate graphic representation of visible objects and 

 qualities which, invested with substance, has become familiar to us as the 

 rebus, and also appears in the form of heraldic blazonry styled punning 

 or "canting." The reproduction of gesture-lines in the pictographs made 

 by our Indians seems to have been most frequent in the attempt to con- 

 vey those subjective ideas which were beyond the range of an artistic skill 

 limited to the direct representation of objects, so that the part of the picto- 

 graphs, which is still the most difficult of interpretation, is precisely the 

 one which the study of sign-language is likely to eludicate. In this con- 

 nection it may be mentioned that a most interesting result has been obtained 

 in the tentative comparison so far made between the gesture-signs of our 

 Indians and some of the characters in the Chinese, Assyrian, Mexican, and 

 Runic alphabets or syllabaries, and also with Egyptian hieroglyphs. 



While the gesture-utterance presents no other part of grammar to the 

 philologist besides syntax, or the grouping and sequence of its ideographic 

 pictures, the arrangement of signs when in connected succession affords 

 an interesting comparison with the early syntax of vocal language, and 

 the analysis of their original conceptions, studied together with the holo- 

 phrastic roots in the speech of the gesturers, may aid to ascertain some 

 relation between concrete ideas and words. Meaning does not adhere 

 to the phonetic presentation of thought, while it does to signs. The 

 latter are doubtless more flexible and in that sense more mutable than 

 words, but the ideas attached to them are persistent, and therefore there 

 is not much greater metamorphosis in the signs than in the cognitions. 

 The further a language has been developed from its primordial roots, 

 which have been twisted into forms no longer suggesting any reason 

 for their original selection, and the more the primitive significance of 



