Some special resemblances between the language of signs and the character of the oral languages found on this continent may be mentioned.  Dr. J. HAMMOND TRUMBULL remarks of the composition of their words that they were “so constructed as to be thoroughly self-defining and immediately intelligible to the hearer.”  In another connection the remark is further enforced:  “Indeed, it is a requirement of the Indian languages that every word shall be so framed as to admit of immediate resolution to its significant elements by the hearer.  It must be thoroughly self-defining, for (as Max Mueller has expressed it) ’it requires tradition, society, and literature to maintain words which can no longer be analyzed at once.’...  In the ever-shifting state of a nomadic society no debased coin can be tolerated in language, no obscure legend accepted on trust.  The metal must be pure and the legend distinct.”

Indian languages, like those of higher development, sometimes exhibit changes of form by the permutation of vowels, but often an incorporated particle, whether suffix, affix, or infix, shows the etymology which often, also, exhibits the same objective conception that would be executed in gesture.  There are, for instance, different forms for standing, sitting, lying, falling, &c., and for standing, sitting, lying on or falling from the same level or a higher or lower level.  This resembles the pictorial conception and execution of signs.

Major J.W.  POWELL, with particular reference to the disadvantages of the multiplied inflections in Indian languages, alike with the Greek and Latin, when the speaker is compelled, in the choice of a word to express his idea, to think of a great multiplicity of things, gives the following instance: 

“A Ponca Indian in saying that a man killed a rabbit, would have to say:  the man, he, one, animate, standing, in the nominative case, purposely killed, by shooting an arrow, the rabbit, he, the one, animate, sitting, in the objective case; for the form of a verb to kill would have to be selected, and the verb changes its form by inflection and incorporated particles to denote person, number, and gender as animate or inanimate, and gender as standing, sitting, or lying, and case; and the form of the verb would also express whether the killing was done accidentally or purposely, and whether it was by shooting or by some other process, and, if by shooting, whether by bow and arrow, or with a gun; and the form of the verb would in like manner have to express all of these things relating to the object; that is, the person, number, gender, and case of the object; and from the multiplicity of paradigmatic forms of the verb to kill, this particular one would have to be selected.”  This is substantially the mode in which an Indian sign talker would find it necessary to tell the story, as is shown by several examples given below in narratives, speeches, and dialogues.

Indian languages exhibit the same fondness for demonstration which is necessary in sign language.  The two forms of utterance are alike in their want of power to express certain words, such as the verb “to be,” and in the criterion of organization, so far as concerns a high degree of synthesis and imperfect differentiation, they bear substantially the same relation to the English language.