THE ORIGIN OF SIGN LANGUAGE.

In observing the maxim that nothing can be thoroughly understood unless its beginning is known, it becomes necessary to examine into the origin of sign language through its connection with that of oral speech.  In this examination it is essential to be free from the vague popular impression that some oral language, of the general character of that now used among mankind, is “natural” to mankind.  It will be admitted on reflection that all oral languages were at some past time far less serviceable to those using them than they are now, and as each particular language has been thoroughly studied it has become evident that it grew out of some other and less advanced form.  In the investigation of these old forms it has been so difficult to ascertain how any of them first became a useful instrument of inter-communication that many conflicting theories on this subject have been advocated.

Oral language consists of variations and mutations of vocal sounds produced as signs of thought and emotion.  But it is not enough that those signs should be available as the vehicle of the producer’s own thoughts.  They must be also efficient for the communication of such thoughts to others.  It has been, until of late years, generally held that thought was not possible without oral language, and that, as man was supposed to have possessed from the first the power of thought, he also from the first possessed and used oral language substantially as at present.  That the latter, as a special faculty, formed the main distinction between man and the brutes has been and still is the prevailing doctrine.  In a lecture delivered before the British Association in 1878 it was declared that “animal intelligence is unable to elaborate that class of abstract ideas, the formation of which depends upon the faculty of speech.”  If instead of “speech” the word “utterance” had been used, as including all possible modes of intelligent communication, the statement might pass without criticism.  But it may be doubted if there is any more necessary connection between abstract ideas and sounds, the mere signs of thought, that strike the ear, than there is between the same ideas and signs addressed only to the eye.

The point most debated for centuries has been, not whether there was any primitive oral language, but what that language was.  Some literalists have indeed argued from the Mosaic narrative that because the Creator, by one supernatural act, with the express purpose to form separate peoples, had divided all tongues into their present varieties, and could, by another similar exercise of power, obliterate all but one which should be universal, the fact that he had not exercised that power showed it not to be his will that any man to whom a particular speech had been given should hold intercourse with another miraculously set apart from him by a different speech.  By this