While this is generally accompanied by facial expression, manner of
action, or pause, instances have been noticed suggesting the device of
interrogation points and periods.
_MARK OF INTERROGATION._
The Shoshoni, Absaroka, Dakota, Comanche, and other Indians, when
desiring to ask a question, precede the gestures constituting the
information desired by a sign intended to attract attention and
"asking for," viz., by holding the flat right hand, with the palm
down, directed, to the individual interrogated, with or without
lateral oscillating motion; the gestural sentence, when completed,
being closed by the same sign and a look of inquiry. This recalls the
Spanish use of the interrogation points before and after the question.
_PERIOD_.
A Hidatsa, after concluding a short statement, indicated its
conclusion by placing the inner edges of the clinched hands together
before the breast, and passing them outward and downward to their
respective sides in an emphatic manner, Fig. 334, page 528. This sign
is also used in other connections to express _done_.
The same mode of indicating the close of a narrative or statement is
made by the Wichitas, by holding the extended left hand horizontally
before the body, fingers pointing to the right, palm either toward the
body or downward, and cutting edgewise downward past the tips of the
left with the extended right hand. This is the same sign given in the
ADDRESS OF KIN CH[=E]-[)E]SS as _cut off_, and is illustrated in Fig.
324, page 522. This is more ideographic and convenient than the device
of the Abyssinian Galla, reported by M.A. d'Abbadie, who denoted a
comma by a slight stroke of a leather whip, a semicolon by a harder
one, and a full stop by one still harder.
_GESTURES AIDING ARCHAEOLOGIC RESEARCH._
The most interesting light in which the Indians of North America can
be regarded is in their present representation of a stage of evolution
once passed through by our own ancestors. Their signs, as well as
their myths and customs, form a part of the paleontology of humanity
to be studied in the history of the latter as the geologist, with
similar object, studies all the strata of the physical world. At this
time it is only possible to suggest the application of gesture signs
to elucidate pictographs, and also their examination to discover
religious, sociologic, and historic ideas preserved in them, as has
been done with great success in the radicals of oral speech.