GESTUEE-LANGTJAGE AND WORD-LANGUAGE. 77 



signs, and explained the difficulty tliey found in making them 

 understand by signs the objects or ideas for which they wanted 

 the native names, go on to say how imperfect and devoid of 

 inflexion or construction these languages are. Signs with 

 hand or mouth, they say, are required to make them intelli- 

 gible. To say, " I will go into the wood," the Indian uses the 

 words '' wood-go," and points his mouth like a snout in the 

 direction he means.^ Madame Pfeifier, too, visited the Puris, 

 and says that for "to-day," "to-morrow," and "yesterday," 

 they have only the word "dayj" the rest they express by 

 signs. For " to-day " they say " day," and touch themselves 

 on the head, or point straight upward ; for " to-morrow " they 

 say also " day," pointing forward with the finger ; and for 

 "yesterday," again "day," pointing behind them.^ 



Mr. Mercer, describing the low condition of some of the 

 Veddah tribes of Ceylon, stated that not only is their dialect 

 incomprehensible to a Singhalese, but that even their commu- 

 nications with one another are made by signs, grimaces, and 

 guttural sounds, which bear little or no resemblance to distinct 

 words or systematized language.^ 



Dr. Milligan, speaking of the language of Tasmania, and the 

 rapid variation of its dialects, says " The habit of gesticulation, 

 and the use of signs to eke out the meaning of monosyllabic 

 expressions, and to give force, precision, and character to 

 vocal sounds, exerted a further modifying effect, producing, as 

 it did, carelessness and laxity of articulation, and in the appli- 

 cation and pronunciation of words." " To defects in orthoepy 

 the aborigines added short-comings in syntax, for they ob- 

 served no settled order or arrangement of words in the con- 

 struction of their sentences, but conveyed in a supplementary 

 fashion by tone, manner, and gesture those modifications of 

 meaning which we express by mood, tense, number, etc."* 



We fijid a similar remark made about a tribe of North 

 American Indians, by Captain Burton. " Those natives who, 



' Spix and Mavtius, ' Eeise in Brasilien ; ' Munich, 1823, etc., vol. i. p. 385, etc. 

 2 Ida Pfeiffer, 'Eine Frauenfahrt urn die Erde ;' Vienna, 1850, p. 103. 

 ^ Sir J. Emerson Tennent, 'Ceylon,' 3rd ed. ; London, 1859, vol. ii. p. 441. 

 '* MUIigan, in Papers and Proc. of Roy. Soc. of Tasmania, 1859 ; vol. iii. 

 part ii. 



