The grievous accusation against foreign people that they have no intelligible language is venerable and general.  With the Greeks the term [Greek:  aglossos], “tongueless,” was used synonymous with [Greek:  barbaros], “barbarian” of all who were not Greek.  The name “Slav,” assumed by a grand division of the Aryan family, means “the speaker,” and is contradistinguished from the other peoples of the world, such as the Germans, who are called in Russian “Njemez,” that is, “speechless.”  In Isaiah (xxxiii, 19) the Assyrians are called a people “of a stammering tongue, that one cannot understand.”  The common use of the expression “tongueless” and “speechless,” so applied, has probably given rise, as TYLOR suggests, to the mythical stories of actually speechless tribes of savages, and the considerations and instances above presented tend to discredit the many other accounts of languages which are incomplete without the help of gesture.  The theory that sign language was in whole or in chief the original utterance of mankind would be strongly supported by conclusive evidence to the truth of such travelers’ tales, but does not depend upon them.  Nor, considering the immeasurable period during which, in accordance with modern geologic views, man has been on the earth, is it probable that any existing races can be found in which speech has not obviated the absolute necessity for gesture in communication among themselves.  The signs survive for convenience, used together with oral language, and for special employment when language is unavailable.

A comparison sometimes drawn between sign language and that of our Indians, founded on the statement of their common poverty in abstract expressions, is not just to either.  This paper will be written in vain if it shall not suggest the capacities of gesture speech in that regard, and a deeper study into Indian tongues has shown that they are by no means so confined to the concrete as was once believed.

ITS ORIGIN FROM ONE TRIBE OR REGION.

Col.  Richard I. Dodge, United States Army, whose long experience among the Indians entitles his opinion to great respect, says in a letter: 

“The embodiment of signs into a systematic language is, I believe, confined to the Indians of the Plains.  Contiguous tribes gain, here and there, a greater or less knowledge of this language; these again extend the knowledge, diminished and probably perverted, to their neighbors, until almost all the Indian tribes of the United States east of the Sierras have some little smattering of it.  The Plains Indians believe the Kiowas to have invented the sign language, and that by them its use was communicated to other Plains tribes.  If this is correct, analogy would lead us to believe that those tribes most nearly in contact with the Kiowas would use it most fluently and correctly, the knowledge becoming less as the contact diminishes.  Thus the Utes, though nearly contiguous (in territory) to the Plains Indians, have only the merest ‘picked up’ knowledge of this language, and never use it among themselves, simply because, they and the Plains tribes having been, since the memory of their oldest men, in a chronic state of war, there has been no social contact.”