Читать книгу Sign Talk - Ernest Thompson Seton - Страница 16

Table of Contents

The Sign Language is a system of root ideas expressed by gestures, preferably made only by the hands, without sounds or reference to letters, or words, spoken or written, and not delimited by anything corresponding to words. There can be but little doubt that Sign Language preceded all audible speech.

Being fundamentally a true spontaneous language, wholly removed from any spoken language, it must necessarily have its own syntax and idiom.

Its syntax is simple and primitive, much like that of spoken language in its earliest or monosyllabic stage, as defined by Hovelacque. Yet clearly many signs are amplified by an associated but subsidiary root, so that we may consider it entering the second or agglutinative stage. Thus deer, signed by holding up the hands to indicate branching horns, is a simple or isolated root; but white-tailed deer which gives first deer, then adds the qualifying sign banner tail by waving the right index up high, is in close correspondence with agglutinative language. Still more so are the signs finished or done added to a verb to show the past tense, or the different twists to the sign give that turns it respectively into give me or give you, or the variations of talk which make it mean I talk to you, you talk to me, or they talk to each other.

The sentence construction is elemental. Dependent sentences are not used nor are negative or involved questions.

The relation of one idea to another is indicated chiefly by proximity and sequence, rarely by connectives and (with a few exceptions) never by inflection. So that the same sign may be the equivalent of a noun, a verb, or a phrase, etc., according as it is used.