might express a human hand, or as the system is perfected, a large, small, closed, black, or red hand; and finally 'Big Hand,' an Indian chief; and all this would be equally intelligible to American or Asiatic, savage or civilized, without respect to language.
HIEROGLYPHIC WRITING.
Symbolic picture-writing indicates invisible or abstract objects, actions, or conditions, by the use of pictures supposed to be suggestive of them; the symbols are originally in a manner representative, and rarely, if ever, arbitrarily adopted. As a symbol the
might express power, a blow, murder, the number one or five. These symbols are also independent of language.
Phonetic picture-writing represents not objects, but sounds by the picture of objects in whose names the sound occurs; first words, then syllables, then elementary sounds, and last—by modification of the pictures or the substitution of simpler ones—letters and an alphabet. According to this system the
signifies successively the word 'hand,' the syllable 'hand' in handsome, the sound 'ha' in happy, the aspiration 'h' in head, and finally, by simplifying its form or writing it rapidly, the