I will ask the reader to refer to the whole passage in which I previously treated of the syntax of gesture,[272] giving special attention to the points just noted, and also to the following:—invariable absence of the copula, and frequent absence of the verb (as “Apple-father-I” = “My father gave me an apple”); resemblance of sentences to the polysynthetic or unanalyzing type (as “I-Tom-struck-a-stick” = “Tom struck me with a stick”); the device whereby syntax, or order of apposition, is made to distinguish between predicative, attributive, and possessive meanings, and therefore also between substantives and adjectives; the importance of grimace in association with gesture (as when a look of inquiry converts an assertion into a question); the highly instructive means whereby relational words, and especially pronouns, are rendered in the gestures of pointing; the no less instructive manner whereby a general idea is rendered in a summation of particular ideas (as “Did you have soup? did you have porridge?” &c. = “What did you have for dinner?”); and the receptual or sensuous source of all gesture-signs which are concerned in expressing ideas presenting any degree of abstraction (as striking the hand to signify “hard,” &c.).
Hence, we may everywhere trace a fundamental similarity between the comparatively undeveloped form of conceptual thought as displayed in gesture, and that which philology has revealed as distinctive of early speech. Of course in both cases conceptual thought is there: the ideation is human, though, comparatively speaking, immature. But the important point to notice is the curiously close similarity between the forms of language-structure as revealed in gesture and in early speech. For no one, I should suppose, can avoid perceiving the idiographic character of gesture-language, whereby it is more nearly allied to the purely receptual modes of communication which we have studied in the lower animals, than is the case with our fully evolved forms of predication. It therefore seems to me highly suggestive that the earliest forms and records of spoken language that we possess (notwithstanding that they are still far from aboriginal), follow so closely the model which is still supplied to us in the idiographic gestures of deaf-mutes. Such syntax as there is—_i.e._ such _a putting in order_ as is expressive of the mode of ideational grouping—so nearly resembles the syntax of gesture-language, that we can at once perceive their common psychological source. It is on account of this structural resemblance between gesture and early speech that I have devoted so much space to our consideration of the former; and if I do not now dwell at greater length upon the significance of the analogy, it is only because this significance appears too obvious to require further treatment.