GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 61 



axes, and imagining himself in the place of another person, or 

 even of an inanimate object, can describe the position of him- 

 self or anything else with respect to them. Movement and 

 direction come before his mind as a real or imaginary going 

 from one place to another, and such movement gives him the 

 idea of time which the deaf-and-dumb man expresses by draw- 

 ing a line with his finger along his arm from one point to 

 another, and the speaker by a similar adaptation of prepositions 

 or adverbs of place. 



I do not wish to venture below the surface of this difficult 

 subject, for an elaborate examination of which I would espe- 

 cially refer to the researches of Professor Pott, of Halle. ^ But 

 it may be worth while to call attention to an apparent resem- 

 blance of two divisions of the root-words of our Aryan lan- 

 guages to the two great classes of gesture-signs. Professor Max 

 Miiller divides the Sanskrit root-forms into two classes, the pre- 

 dicative roots, such as to shine, to extend, and eo forth ; and the 

 demonstrative roots, "a small class of independent radicals, not 

 predicative in the usual sense of the word, but simply pointing, 

 simply expressive of existence under certain more or less defi- 

 nite, local or temporal prescriptions.'^* If we take from amono- 

 the examples given, here, there, this, that, thou, he, as types, we 

 have a division of the elements of the Sanskrit language to 

 which a division of the signs of the deaf-mute into predicative 

 and demonstrative would at least roughly correspond. Many 

 centuries ago the Indian grammarians made desperate efforts 

 to bring pronouns and verbs, as the Germans say, " under one 

 hat." They deduced the demonstrative ta from tan, to stretch, 

 and the relative ya from yag, to worship. Unity is pleasant to 

 mankind, who are often ready to sacrifice things of more con- 

 sequence than etymology for it. But perhaps, after all, the 

 world may not have been constructed for the purpose of pro- 

 viding for the human mind just what it is pleased to ask for. 

 Of course, any full comparison of speech and the gesture- 

 language would have to go into the hard problem of the rela- 

 tion of prepositions to adverbs and pronouns on the one hand, 



• Pott, 'Etymologische Forschungen,' new ed.; Lemgo and Detmold, 1859, etc., 

 vol. i. ^ Miiller, Lectures, 3rd ed. ; London, 1862, p. 272. 



