52 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



clearly that one member of it is felt by the speaker and hearer to have 

 a purely denominating office, another a purely predicating one. It may 

 be objected that in Chinese, for instance, there is no formal distinction 

 made between noun and verb. True, but the logical distinction of sub- 

 ject and predicate is reflected in the form of the Chinese sentence, inas- 

 much as the subject regularly precedes the predicate; thus, while the 

 same word may be either noun or verb, in any particular sentence it 

 necessarily is definitely one and not the other. Other fundamental log- 

 ical categories will, on a more complete survey, be found to be subject to 

 grammatical treatment in all or nearly all languages, but this is not the 

 place to be anything but merely suggestive. Suffice it to remark on the 

 wide-spread systematizing of personal relations ; the wide-spread devel- 

 opment of ideas of tense, number and syntactic case relations; and the 

 clear grammatical expression everywhere or nearly everywhere given to 

 the largely emotional distinction of declarative, interrogative and im- 

 perative modes. 



Granted that there are certain general fundamental traits of sim- 

 ilarity in all known languages, the problem arises of how to explain 

 these similarities. Are they to be explained historically, as survivals 

 of features deep-rooted in an earliest form of human speech that, 

 despite the enormous differentiation of language that the lapse of ages 

 has wrought, have held their own to the present day, or are they to be 

 explained psychologically as due to the existence of inherent human 

 mental characteristics that abide regardless of time and race? If the 

 latter standpoint be preferred, we should be dealing with a phenomenon 

 of parallel development. It is of course impossible to decide cate- 

 gorically between the two explanations that have been offered, though 

 doubtless the majority of students would incline to the psychological 

 rather than to the historical method. At any rate, it is clear that we 

 can not strictly infer a monogenetic theory of speech from the funda- 

 mental traits of similarity that all forms of speech exhibit. Yet even 

 though these are of psychologic rather than historic interest, it is im- 

 portant to have demonstrated the existence of a common psychological 

 substratum, or perhaps we had better say framework, which is more or 

 less clearly evident in all languages. This very substratum or frame- 

 work gives the scientific study of language a coherence and unity quite 

 regardless of any considerations of genetic relationship of languages. 



In spite of the fact that, as we have seen, no tangible evidence can 

 be brought to bear on the ultimate origin or origins of speech, many 

 attempts have been made, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth 

 century, when it was more common for historical and philosophical 

 problems of extreme difficulty to be attacked with alacrity, to point out 

 the way in which human speech originated or at least might have orig- 

 inated. From the very nature of the case, these attempts could not but 



