The Ancient Origins of Sign Handshapes

BRIEF REPORT

The Ancient Origins of Sign Handshapes George Montgomery

T      of different languages spoken by the original native peoples of North America is generally thought to be the reason for their use of agreed sign handshapes as a common language. What is less well known is that a similar wide variety of mutually incomprehensible local versions of early Chinese also favored the use of handshapes for common communication across the spoken language barriers (Jensen ). These handshapes strongly influenced the ancient written script of China, gave it its pictographic characters, which, like the handshapes, were comprehensible across the divisions of spoken varieties of the language. Early Chinese written characters are iconic as well as symbolic and also use an occasional rebus evoking phonetic values (ibid.). Some of these written characters seem to be derived from handshapes that evolved into less obviously manual pictographs in modern Chinese scripts (ibid.). One such written sign suggests hands indicating a crown. Superficially, this sign might seem to have persisted remarkably and retained its meaning over more than four millennia occurring in Anglo-Saxon monastic sign and current British Sign Language as , with variants ()  in Irish Sign Language; the crown of  in Danish Sign Language, and () George Montgomery is Director of the Research Unit at Donaldson’s College, Edinburgh, Scotland, where he also serves on the board of governors and is the Hon. Secretary of the Donalsonian (alumni) Association. He is a former senior lecturer in applied psychology at Edinburgh University and the Powrie V. Doctor Chair of Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University.

 S L S V.  N.  S 

Brief Report/The Ancient Origins of Sign Handshapes

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welcome: (Two hands extended in greeting) wrong: (Two hands diverging) sovereign: (Two hands over the head) F       . Early Chinese pictographs derived from handshapes

 meaning  in International Sign Language. Even such strong similarities, however, cannot be assumed to constitute proof of continuity without additional supporting historical evidence, and, apart from any iconic similarity, due to elaborate headgear frequently denoting authority, we must also take into consideration the human tendency to read meaning into random coincidence. Nevertheless, the influence of early fingercounting on written and finger-alphabets is demonstrable apart from any coincidental similarities arising from the limited handshape permutations possible with the ten digits and two hands. This common numerical basis of most of the world’s hand alphabets accounts for many similarities over different times and places (Frøkjaer-Jenson ). Additionally, a great many similarities arise when hand-alphabets are adopted from other language traditions, a circumstance more common than not and paralleled by the world’s spoken languages, most of which— percent according to one estimate (Mengham )—are written in a script taken from some other linguistic tradition. Some examples from Africa, Asia, and Europe show interesting similarities that may demonstrate some continuities of language evolution over and above the incontestable fact that fingers and tally marks are much the same wherever and whenever they occur. The earliest number records found on a tally bone used some , years ago at a site near Ishango in Central Africa show not merely simple totals but also more complex patterns of prime numbers and meaningful sets that add up to totals with a base of , of which  result in the same total of :



S   L     S    







⳱ 









⳱ 





  



⳱ 

This shows that abacus-like row totals and matrixlike number relationships have an incredibly long history (Joseph ). The oldest Chinese numbers were represented by pictographs of vertical fingers, whereby  was represented by a raised little or index finger,  by raised little and ring finger, and  by a pictograph of four fingers without the thumb (Jensen ). Those numerals could be used to keep count when written or scored on a tally board. Inevitably, this led to the realization that such markings had a great advantage over transient finger-reckoning because they could keep a permanent record of transactions, making them much more accountable. Nevertheless, finger calculation, often in conjunction with tally or abacus scoring, has survived in continuous use and development from before the first pictographic script was used until present-day China. Early forms of writing, counting, and signing emerged in prescientific cultures saturated with notions of magic, sacrifice, and propitiation wherein supernatural causation was invoked to override everyday cause and effect. Thus, handshapes and written and tallied numbers were from their origins used for magical purposes such as the Chinese ‘‘magic square’’ matrices, in which all horizontal, vertical, and diagonal array sums were contrived to be equal and which were worn as lucky charms. The handshapes of the one-hand and two-hand alphabets used by the international Deaf communities linked to the United Nations’ World Federation of the Deaf derive from the finger-reckoning of Europe, which was in turn derived from the standardized finger calculation used throughout the Roman Empire in conjunction with the board abacus. In both pagan and Christian eras, numerical handshapes continued to be used beyond their everyday mundane use by traders in the marketplace for superstitious purposes. For example, the use of the handshape for the number eight was used in rituals worshipping Sabzios, Mithras, and Apollo from Asia Minor to Hadrian’s Wall in the far north of Roman Britain. All early

Brief Report/The Ancient Origins of Sign Handshapes

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F       . Roman handshape for eight acquired many meanings later in history

Semitic and Western alphabets numbered their letters in a fixed order, or abecedary. Thus all letters had a fixed number value (A ⳱ , B ⳱ , C ⳱ , D ⳱ , and E ⳱  in Latin, for example). This gave rise to the acutely irrational practice of numerology, in particular the use of the ‘‘fadic’’ addition of the number values of the letters in a name. The name Abe in the Latin alphabet, for example, would be represented by the numbers , , and , and, by fadic addition, these added up to . The fadic total was then pronounced lucky or unlucky according to the meanings associated with it in the traditions of numerology. A whole learned tradition of numerology was developed by the Hebrew cult of the Cabbala and existed with Christian offshoots throughout the Middle Ages. This ‘‘science of numbers’’ became orthodox standard teaching in European monastic schools for centuries. Even the fringe scripts of Europe such as Celtic Oghams and Nordic Runes had fixed-order ‘‘alphabets’’ (called the Beithluisnion, Futhark, and Futhorc) and, by fadic addition, were able to give numerological meanings to words, especially names. When the Nordic rune alphabets were replaced by the Roman script, the original runes were valued more than ever for their magical properties. In Viking times, a full-time specialist runester was employed to improve decision making. The saga of Erik the Red described in detail the rune-mistress and her Scots companion who were the first European women to land in Vinland (America). Similarly, profitable

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S   L     S   

‘‘reading the runes’’ is even today sought by thousands of modern Danes who pay a sizeable  Kroner to change their names to a luckier fadic total, pathetically hoping to upgrade their health and fortune (Montgomery ). Despite the widespread use of fadic conversion of letters to numbers and of numbers to handshapes, there was no record of anyone making the next (to us obvious) step to switch letters to handshapes until the eighth-century Northumbrian monk Bede (Eriksson ). Self-described as ‘‘dumb’’ (i.e., speechless) in childhood, Bede had a personal interest in all kinds of languages in spoken, sung, written, and manual modes. He was the first person in history to write in the English language, and his works were massively influential throughout Europe. Most sought after was his treatise on finger calculation, which also contained the world’s first handshapes explicitly recorded as conventional signs. These early signs were largely overlooked in favor of his description of the first reproducible finger-alphabet. He gave as an example of its use the message caute age, ‘‘watch out.’’ The A ⳱ , B ⳱  (and so on) retractive number shapes are encoded as in Figure .

F       . Conventional signs recorded by St. Bede in AD 

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F       . Bede’s ‘‘Caute age’’

This seems a very appropriate message for one who had been brought to trial for heresy and had learned the value of discretion the hard way (Bede ). Bede’s version of the Roman hand-counting system was widely disseminated throughout Europe and beyond. His treatise concerning finger-alphabet communication was available to the early Italian and Spanish educators of deaf children, and vestiges of his system in the early one-hand alphabet have been traced in detail. The evolutionary line leading to the modern one-hand international alphabet is a much later development arising from the delayed written impact of Bede’s De Computo. Here our concern is for influences on earlier alphabets; fuller treatment of the course of the one-hand evolutionary line is given elsewhere (Montgomery and Dimmock ). Bede had access to two secret, sacred alphabets native to the British Isles, which may have influenced him in some degree to make his breakthrough into fingerspelling. The Runic script, used in memorials in his own church, which survive today, would have reminded him of the fadic codeswitching from letters to numbers. The other influence was that of the Ogham script used in areas of the British Isles unoccupied by the Roman army. It consists of a matrix of twenty letters, each letter being represented by , , , , or  tallylike slashes from four different kinds of slash, cut to follow a stem line. It was used from around the fourth century until it was replaced by the Latin script or Graeco-Gaelic uncials. It is the most simplified of the world’s scripts (Figure ). The slash simplification makes it ideal for cutting into tally sticks, and it is easily read by a blind person, making it tempting to see it as

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S   L     S   

F       . The Ogham Beithluisnion: An early Gaelic script and possible finger code

an early Braille-type alphabet. It has been popularly and persistently linked to the Druids, custodians of pre–Christian Celtic religion, in the absence of any hard evidence. The burning of the Druid books at St. Patrick’s demand, for example, has often been assumed to have disposed of stores of records on wooden staves, wands, or tallies. With its base of , suggesting fingers, Ogham is easily manualizable (see Figure ) and has been regarded as a finger-code by one investigator who thought it too lengthy to be suited to writing (Macalister ). Although initially derided, this view seems more credible in light of our later discovery of numerological patterns in the Ogham Beithluisnion and thus a link to fingercounting and its associated alphabetic letter values. Additionally, structural similarity between Ogham and the British finger-alphabet must be accepted as another significant link or else explained away. Alone of the world’s alphabets, Ogham and the British finger-alphabet sequence vowels separately from consonants. Indian and Semitic alphabets that appear to begin with vowels, on closer inspection use vowels only in syllables linked to consonants (Naveh ). Greek first represented vowels separately from syllables (as in most modern scripts) but did not sequence these separately from consonants. For example, the As in  have the same symbol, separate from the consonants  and . This is an improvement over two symbols showing  and . These vowel similarities taken together with the highly manualizable nature of the Ogham script

Brief Report/The Ancient Origins of Sign Handshapes

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(Bragg ) with its different values given to left- and right-pointing horizontal handshapes as in the system described by Bede are not easy to dismiss as irrelevant. The possibility that the British finger-alphabet originated in Ireland, as undoubtedly did the British Deaf Association, needs to be considered seriously. Taking a cue from Anderson’s cartographic work on number handshapes (Frøkjær-Jensen ), letters of the Ogham matrix were transformed into numerical values to see whether any mathematical pattern or magic underlay its construction. Numbers, of course, vary according to the order of letters in different alphabets, and this was examined as a clue to the origins of Ogham. The values derived from Arabic, Hebrew, Coptic, Phoenician, Greek, Iberian, Gothic, Saxon, and Runic alphabets were substituted, but no number structure, magic or otherwise, emerged. When number values of the old Irish form of the Latin alphabet were put in place of the Ogham letters, however, a clear equal value of the sums of the first three sets was discovered, and the Latin origins of the later form of the Beithluisnion were confirmed.

F       . How Ogham may be manualized. Note this would introduce meanings to orientation, unlike the Roman system.

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S   L     S    Set

Rank Number

Fadic Sum

AOUEI

    



BLVSN

    



HDTCQ

    



MGNgZR

  ?  

?

Uncertainty about the status of the Gaelic letter Ng leaves the fourth set incomplete. The three sums of  could not arise by coincidence, and their similarity is most likely contrived to conform to numerological pattern and arrived at by finger-reckoning, using the method described by Bede, which was commonplace in the marketplaces of the Roman Empire. The objection that Ireland was not in the Roman Empire has been invalidated since a Roman trading post was unearthed near Dublin in the s. This implied the use of the standard finger-reckoning, which, like the use of Latin and patches of Christianity, predated Patrick’s arrival. This alphanumeric numerological structure in the Ogham matrix with its format strongly suggestive of the board abacus widely used with fingercounting throughout the Roman Imperial sphere of influence and its groups of five, suggesting fingers, sets a cultural milieu in which the use of conventional finger number signs almost certainly obtained and where the code-switch to letters made the use of a finger-alphabet only a matter of time. But, despite the vowel similarity between Ogham and the British finger-alphabet, no clear record of a finger-Ogham exists. Sifting through the evidence and winnowing out (with regret) fascinating semimythological clues such as the almost Californian practice of Imbas Forosnai, the use of palm and finger meditation, there remained one contender for a remote link between Ogham and the British finger-alphabet through the Scottish glove alphabet of the seventeenth century (Dalgarno ), which, like the Ogham script is blind-friendly and has also been reliably reported as being used to communicate with blind persons. Using the base hand as tab, the letters on the joints and palm are made by pointing to them with the index finger of the contralateral hand. The old order of the Ogham script began B ⳱ , L ⳱ , N ⳱  and thus differs from the classical matrix illustrated. If this present

Brief Report/The Ancient Origins of Sign Handshapes

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F       . Dalgarno’s ‘‘Glove’’ ()

Ogham matrix is fitted on the fingers of one hand in the manner of Dalgarno’s Glove and then compared with the letters of the Glove, one finds that letters , , and  alone are in the same place. Comparing the Glove with the old Ogham order using horizontally placed consonants and the vowel order of the Latin alphabet, one finds that the letters   are in the same place on the palm and fingers. This -percent concordance cannot be due to chance. At first blush, this concordance is hard to explain. It seems extremely unlikely that Dalgarno, brought up in northeastern Scotland, where Ogham memorial stones abound to this day, should have inherited knowledge of a finger-alphabet based on the Ogham matrix after more than ten centuries. But his contemporary Angus McFarquhar has left manuscripts (National Library of Scotland LXII, LXI, LIX, –) in which he used the Ogham matrix as a code. The illustration (Figure ) of the document ‘‘Irish Charms Written in Ogham by a Modern Quack for Concealment’’ (circa , p. ) shows the pen-and-ink adaptation of Ogham and confirms that knowledge of the script, although hidden in secrecy, was never lost. The link with healing goes back through the herbalist folk lore of the Gaelic medicine men called Sennachies to vestiges of the Druid

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S   L     S   

F       . Irish medical charms penned in Ogham as a code. National Library of Scotland .. (Minchin c. )

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medical lore, which was encouraged to continue after the mass conversion by St. Patrick. Physicians, Sennachies, and even ‘‘Quacks’’ are more likely than most to meet Deaf people, and Dalgarno directed his manual alphabet explicitly to the education of Deaf people (Dalgarno ). The link of the glove alphabet with the current British and Australian finger-alphabet is shown by the obviously identical vowels , made by pointing the index finger in sequence to the contralateral fingertips of the thumb (), index finger (), middle finger (), ring finger (), and little finger (). Admittedly, much of the evidence is more circumstantial than is comfortable for historians, but there is a clear, sometimes attenuated, evolutionary line from our primeval forbears in Africa, through imperial China and Rome, Celtic Druid lore, and medieval monks down to the one-hand abecedario first used in the education of Deaf children in Spain and to the two-hand glove alphabet (used by Alexander Graham Bell with Deaf children in the United States) and present-day British and Australian finger-codes. This gives some cause to marvel at the persistence of manual traditions over the centuries— unless, of course, it is all just an exercise in virtual reality based on a series of improbable coincidences.

References Bede. . De Computo vel Loguela per Gestum Digitorum. Illustrated in , National Library, Madrid. Bragg, L. . Visual Kinetic Communication in Europe before . Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education (). Dalgarno, G. . Didascalocophus or the Deaf and Dumb Man’s Tutor. Oxford. Dimmock, A. F. . Cruel Legacy: An Introduction to Deaf History. Edinburgh: Scottish Workshop Publications. ¨ rebro, Sweden: Daufr. Eriksson, P. . The History of Deaf People. O Fro¨kjær-Jensen, B. . The Sciences of Deaf Signing. Copenhagen: Københaven University Press. Jensen, H. . Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Berlin: Verlag der Wissenschaften. Joseph, G. G. . The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics. London: Penguin. Macalister, R. A. S. . The Archaeology of Ireland. London: Meuthen.

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S   L     S   

Mengham, R. . The Descent of Language. London: Bloomsbury. Montgomery, G. . Reading the Runes. CMSI International (): –. Montgomery, G., and A. F. Dimmock. . The Hand of Time. Edinburgh: Scottish Workshop Publications. Naveh, J. . Origins of the Alphabet. Jerusalem: Jerusalem Publishing House.