In mimic construction there are to be considered both the order in which the signs succeed one another and the relative positions in which they are made, the latter remaining longer in the memory than the former, and spoken language may sometimes in its early infancy have reproduced the ideas of a sign picture without commencing from the same point.  So the order, as in Greek and Latin, is very variable.  In nations among whom the alphabet was introduced without the intermediary to any impressive degree of picture-writing, the order being (1) language of signs, almost superseded by (2) spoken language, and (3) alphabetic writing, men would write in the order in which they had been accustomed to speak.  But if at a time when spoken language was still rudimentary, intercourse being mainly carried on by signs, figurative writing had been invented, the order of the figures would be the order of the signs, and the same order would pass into the spoken language.  Hence LEIBNITZ says truly that “the writing of the Chinese might seem to have been invented by a deaf person.”  The oral language has not known the phases which have given to the Indo-European tongues their formation and grammatical parts.  In the latter, signs were conquered by speech, while in the former, speech received the yoke.

Sign language cannot show by inflection the reciprocal dependence of words and sentences.  Degrees of motion corresponding with vocal intonation are only used rhetorically or for degrees of comparison.  The relations of ideas and objects are therefore expressed by placement, and their connection is established when necessary by the abstraction of ideas.  The sign talker is an artist, grouping persons and things so as to show the relations between them, and the effect is that which is seen in a picture.  But though the artist has the advantage in presenting in a permanent connected scene the result of several transient signs, he can only present it as it appears at a single moment.  The sign talker has the succession of time at his disposal, and his scenes move and act, are localized and animated, and their arrangement is therefore more varied and significant.

It is not satisfactory to give the order of equivalent words as representative of the order of signs, because the pictorial arrangement is wholly lost; but adopting this expedient as a mere illustration of the sequence in the presentation of signs by deaf-mutes, the following is quoted from an essay by Rev. J.R.  Keep, in American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, vol. xvi, p. 223, as the order in which the parable of the Prodigal Son is translated into signs: