In no other thoroughly explored part of the world has there been found
spread over so large a space so small a number of individuals divided
by so many linguistic and dialectic boundaries as in North America.
Many wholly distinct tongues have for an indefinitely long time been
confined to a few scores of speakers, verbally incomprehensible to
all others on the face of the earth who did not, from some rarely
operating motive, laboriously acquire their language. Even when the
American race, so styled, flourished in the greatest population of
which we have any evidence (at least according to the published views
of the present writer, which seem to have been generally accepted),
the immense number of languages and dialects still preserved, or known
by early recorded fragments to have once existed, so subdivided it
that only the dwellers in a very few villages could talk together with
ease. They were all interdistributed among unresponsive vernaculars,
each to the other being _bar-bar-ous_ in every meaning of the term.
The number of known stocks or families of Indian languages within the
territory of the United States amounts now to sixty-five, and these
differ among themselves as radically as each differs from the Hebrew,
Chinese, or English. In each of these linguistic families there are
several, sometimes as many as twenty, separate languages, which also
differ from each other as much as do the English, French, German, and
Persian divisions of the Aryan linguistic stock.
The use of gesture-signs, continued, if not originating, in necessity
for communication with the outer world, became entribally convenient
from the habits of hunters, the main occupation of all savages,
depending largely upon stealthy approach to game, and from the sole
form of their military tactics--to surprise an enemy. In the still
expanse of virgin forests, and especially in the boundless solitudes
of the great plains, a slight sound can be heard over a large area,
that of the human voice being from its rarity the most startling,
so that it is now, as it probably has been for centuries, a common
precaution for members of a hunting or war party not to speak together
when on such expeditions, communicating exclusively by signs. The
acquired habit also exhibits itself not only in formal oratory and
in impassioned or emphatic conversation, but also as a picturesque
accompaniment to ordinary social talk. Hon. LEWIS H. MORGAN mentions
in a letter to this writer that he found a silent but happy family
composed of an Atsina (commonly called Gros Ventre of the Prairie)
woman, who had been married two years to a Frenchman, during which
time they had neither of them attempted to learn each other's
language; but the husband having taken kindly to the language of
signs, they conversed together by that means with great contentment.
It is also often resorted to in mere laziness, one gesture saving
many words. The gracefulness, ingenuity, and apparent spontaneity of
the greater part of the signs can never be realized until actually
witnessed, and their beauty is much heightened by the free play to
which the arms of these people are accustomed, and the small and
well-shaped hands for which they are remarkable. Among them can seldom
be noticed in literal fact--