Some Current Folk Gestures and Sign Languages

Abstract

FEW STUDENTS of culture would deny that linguistic communication by spoken words and the written symbols for them is man's fundamental implement for group life. Signs and gestures have, however, been used from earliest recorded times as a substitute for speech or in order to supplement it.1 Even today social relationships are facilitated by such nonvocal communication; and signs are used in place of words in many occupations where speech sounds would be impractical because of noise, distance, or the need for silence. Whether or not spoken language and written symbols originated in gesture is a moot point that need not be considered here.2 Fundamentally, sounds are but the audible gestures of our speech organs. The manual signs and alphabets of deaf-mutes, the concern of dactylology, constitute one phase of our subject, but they are amply treated elsewhere.3 Communication in Morse or other code by means of radio, signal flags, lights, or telegraphic clicks is, of course, verbal. Indian sign language should also be mentioned, for it is one of the most elaborate ever devised and one of the most useful; but its currency is restricted, now, to only a few of the inheritors of a vanished culture and to such groups as the Boy Scouts who study woodcraft.4 The nervous motions of individuals are, no doubt, of great interest to neurologists; but only consciously made and socially understandable gestures and signs are to be described in this study. Many of those now current have come down to us from the ancients and from