Читать книгу Sign Talk - Ernest Thompson Seton - Страница 13

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There are two distinct attitudes toward Indian Sign Language:

First, that of the student who sees in it a beautiful product of evolution, a perfect demonstration of the subtle laws of speech growth, the outcome of human mind yearning for converse with human mind, rebellious at its shut-in loneliness, battering with its hands the prison walls, till it could reach out and signal to the next locked-in, before it had yet found the way of modulated sounds. This, then, was the means which responded to the demand for communion and mental fellowship before there was a spoken speech. It began, as all codes must, with the broadest, simplest root ideas, and expressed their inter-relationships at most by context, sequence, proximity, or emphasis, but not by inflection.

Every student of the Sign Language is impressed by this thought and very naturally considers every true sign of the old Sign Language a thing sacred, precious as a pre-Homeric manuscript. He believes that to modify it or tamper with it would be to rob it of all value as a living expression of growth, and much like trying to readjust the crystalline forms on a frost-covered pane by shaping them with a hot iron. The student recognizes it as his first and highest duty to make faithful, unadulterated, untooled records of the oldest types of signs. This is the academic attitude. I am fully in sympathy with it.

Second, the practical attitude which realizes that Sign Language, never dead, is coming to its renaissance and can serve many useful ends among us here to-day. But to complete its possibilities it must be brought up to date by the addition of elements that stand for the latest modern ideas; and therefore does not hesitate to seize on and adopt these elements wherever they may be found. Thus, it may be held, is a contamination of the thought by interminglement of spurious recent creations. But it is merely submitting the code to the ordinary rules of all language. We should remember, further, that the ancient signs, as well as the modern, were invented by men who had need of them. The only difference is that the one was invented recently, the other maybe thousands of years ago; and that without such changes the Sign Language could not serve its beneficent purpose to-day among the deaf, the distant, the roar-environed, the moving picture folk, and those of unknown speech about us. Hand-talk fully developed will find much good work to do; and it matters little where the elements of the code were gathered so long as they meet with general acceptation; which implies that they be needed, serviceable, and of sound construction. The forty odd Deaf Signs included here have been admitted on this basis.