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Sign talk

Chapter 41: SIGN TALK
By Ernest Thompson Seton
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About This Book

The book offers a practical, illustrated manual of a universal gesture code for use in military, outdoor, and everyday settings, compiling 1,725 signs drawn from the Cheyenne gesture language, other Indigenous vocabularies, Deaf-mute systems, and occupational signals. It combines comparative historical notes, source lists, and hundreds of author-drawn illustrations, with French and German equivalents added for international users. Entries provide descriptions of gestures and their movements, use cases for camping, hunting, and public service, and guidance for teaching and adapting signs across different communities.

Footnotes

1 Professor Elmer D. Read writes me that all of these are in use among the deaf also, except the signs for “shame” and “church”; for these they make the Indian signs “red” and “house prayer,” respectively.

2 “After going carefully over your syntax I approve it in the main but I think it quite likely that many of the rules are not so inflexible as this makes them seem; besides which, there must be always a certain amount of modification by transliteration from the spoken language of those using the signs. This would manifest itself in a growing conformity of the Sign Language syntax to that of the more dominant spoken language.”—F. W. Hodge (Ethnologist, Smithsonian Institution).

3 Since the above was written, I have come across L. F. Hadley’s pictographic writing of the Sign Language, fully set forth in the bibliographical matter. E. T. S.

SIGN TALK

A Universal Signal Code, Without Apparatus, for Use in the Army, the Navy, Camping, Hunting, Daily Life and Among the Plains Indians