THE GESTUKB-LANGUAGE, 28 



and was thereby often driven to strange shifts. Yet he either 

 drew so directly from his deaf-and-dumb scholars, or succeeded 

 so well in learning to think in their way, that it is often very 

 hard to say exactly where the influence of spoken or written 

 language comes in. For instance, the deaf-mute borrows the 

 signs of space, as we do similar words, to express notions of 

 time ; and Sicard, keeping to these real signs, and only using 

 them with a degree of analysis which has hardly been attained 

 to but by means of words, makes the present tense of his verb 

 by indicating " here " with the two hands held out, palm down- 

 ward, the past tense by the hand thrown back over the shoulder, 

 "behind," the future by putting the hand out, "forward." 

 But when he takes on his conjugation to such tenses as " I 

 should have carried," he is merely translating words into more 

 or less appropriate signs. Again, by the aid of two fore-fingers 

 hooked together, — to express, I suppose, the notion of depen- 

 dence or connection, — he distinguishes between moi and me, 

 and by translating two abstract grammatical terms from words 

 into signs, he introduces another conception quite foreign to 

 the pure gesture-language. If something that has been signed 

 is a substantive, he puts the right hand under the left, to show 

 that it is that which stands underneath ; while if it is an adjec- 

 tive, he puts the right hand on the top, to show that it is the 

 quality which lies upon or is added to the substantive below.^ 



These partly artificial systems are probably very useful in 

 teaching, but they are not the real gesture-language, and what 

 is more, the foreign element so laboriously introduced seems to 

 have little power of holding its ground there. So far as I can 

 learn, few or none of the factitious grammatical signs will bear 

 even the short journey from the schoolroom to the playground, 

 where there is no longer any verb " to be," where the abstract 

 conjvinctions are unknown, and where mere position, quality, 

 action, may serve to describe substantive and adjective alike. 



At Berlin, as in all deaf-and-dumb institutions, there are 

 numbers of signs which, though most natural in their character, 

 would not be understood beyond the limits of the circle in 



' Sicard, 'Theorie des Signes pour I'Instruction des Sourds-muets;' Paris, 1808, 

 vol. ii. p. 562, etc. A really possible distinction appears in "lip," "red," arde, p. 16. 



