colors for picturing thought; of all methods of expressing grammatical relations the most imperfect, but curiously combining with its limitations a species of arbitrary selection which allies it even with the phonetic stage of written speech. We note in these earlier expedients of language the large function and discipline required of the memory, as well as of the imagination.
Transition to phonetics. The Rebus.
The transition from imitative to phonetic signs is a very great and rapid step : since it opens the use of the sign in the pure service of sound; that is, as written speech in the proper sense; thus proving that the whole communicable life of man can be represented to the eye. This step, however continuous as respects the use of materials, is animated by a force of tendency for which no materials can account. It involves aspirations to a fresh ideal, and it is taken very early. In the New World, as in Egypt, it begins in the use of images of things to represent syllabic portions of personal names, for which of course no direct imitative signs were possible. Mexican picture-writing abounds in this element: figures of animals, flowers, stones, plumes, are placed beside a human head, their names yielding the syllabic sounds required to designate the person intended.[1] They are true rebuses: picture-signs for sound, as ideographs are picture-signs of thoughts. Ruder than the rudest playing cards, and not unlike them, they reach the widest scope of polysyllabism and the largest mnemonic uses.
This step is perhaps involved in the growth of individuality to a demand for those means of personal designation which mere object-writing cannot supply. Sound, the harbinger of fame, requires its own special servitors. It would be worth inquiry, whether, as in Mexico and Egypt, so also in China, where individuality is so feeble, the phonetic sign began in these personal requirements. It began
- ↑ See De Rosny and Kingsborough.
