The words of these songs are invariable, even to the extent that by their use for generations many of them have become archaic and form no part of the colloquial language. Indeed, they are not always understood by the best of the shaman songsters, which fact recalls the oriental memorization of the Veda ritual through generations by the priests, who thus, without intent, preserved a language. The sounds were memorized, although the characters designating or, more correctly, recalling them, were not representations of sound, but of idea.
Practically, the words--or sounds, understood or not, which passed for words--as well as the notes, were memorized by the singers, and their memory, or that of the shaman, who acted as leader or conductor or precentor, was assisted by the charts. Exoteric interpretation of any ideographic and not merely conventional or purely arbitrary characters in the chart, which may be compared for indistinctness with the translated libretto of operas, may suggest the general subject-matter, perhaps the general course, of the chant, but can not indicate the exact words, or, indeed, any words, of the language chanted.
A simple mode of explaining the amount of symbolism necessarily contained in the charts of the order of songs is by likening them to the illustrated songs and ballads lately published in popular magazines, where every stanza has at least one appropriate illustration. Let it be supposed that the text was obliterated forever, indeed, the art of reading lost, the illustrations remaining, as also the memory to some persons of the words of the ballad. The illustrations, kept in their original order, would always supply the order of the stanzas and also the particular subject-matter of each particular stanza, and that subject-matter would be a reminder of the words. This is what the rolls of birchbark supply to the initiated Ojibwa. Schoolcraft pretended that there is intrinsic symbolism in the characters employed, which might imply that the words of the chants were rather interpretations of those characters than that the latter were reminders of the words. But only after the vocables of the actual songs and chants have been learned can the mnemonic characters be clearly understood. Doubtless the more ideographic and the less arbitrary the characters the more readily can they be learned and retained in the memory, and during the long period of the practical use of the mnemonic devices many exhibiting ideography and symbolism have been invented or selected.