62 GESTURE-LANGUAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 



and to verb-roots on the other. As to this matter, I can only- 

 say that the deaf-mute puts his right fore-finger into the palm 

 of his left hand to say " in," takes it out again to say " out/' 

 puts his right hand above or below his left to say " above" or 

 " below/' etc., signs which are merely imitative and sugges- 

 tive. But the gestures with which he shows that anything is 

 " above me," " behind me," and so on, are of a more direct 

 character, and are rather demonstrative than predicative. 



The class of imitative and suggestive signs in the gesture- 

 language corresponds in some measure with the Chinese words 

 which are neither verbs, substantives, adjectives, nor adverbs, 

 but answer the purpose of all of them, as, for instance, ta, 

 meaning great, greatness, to malce great, to be great, greatly ;^ 

 or they may be compared with what Sanskrit roots would be 

 if they were used as they stand in the dictionaries, without 

 any inflections. In the gegture^language there seems no dis- 

 tinction between the adjective, the adverb which belongs to it, 

 the substantive, and the verb. To say, for instance, " The 

 pear is green," the deaf-andrdumb child first eats an imaginary 

 pear, and then using the back of the flat left hand as a ground, 

 he makes the fingers of the right hand grow up on the edge of 

 it like blades of gras. We might translate these signs as 

 " pear-grass /' but they have quite as good a right to be 

 classed as verbs, for they are signs of eating in a peculiar way, 

 and growing. 



It is not necessary to have recourse to Asiatic languages for 

 analogies of this kind with the gesture-language. The sub- 

 stantive-adjective is common enough in English, and indeed 

 in most other languages. In such compounds as chestnid- 

 liorse, spoon-bill, iron-stone, feather-grass, we have the sub- 

 stantive put to express a quality which distinguishes it. Our 

 own language, which has gone so far towards assimilating 

 itself to the Chinese by di'opping inflection and making syntax 

 do its work, has developed to a great extent a concretism 

 which is like that of the Chinese, who makes one word do 

 duty for " stick" and to " beat with a stick," or of the deaf- 

 mute, whose sign for " butter" or the act of " buttering" is 

 ' Endlicher, Chin. Grramiii. ; Vienna, 1845, p. 168. 



