180 THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE. 



some sixty-eight elements, so all the words in each 

 of the three or four great groups of Language yield 

 on the last analysis only a few hundred original roots. 

 That still further analysis may break down some or 

 many of these is not impossible. But the facts as 

 they stand are all significant. The further we go 

 back into the past the Languages become thinner and 

 thinner, the words fewer and fewer, the grammar 

 poorer and poorer. Of the thousand known Lan- 

 guages it has been found possible to reduce all to three 

 or four — probably three — great families ; and each of 

 these in turn is capable of almost unlimited philo- 

 logical pruning. In analyzing the Sanskrit language, 

 Professor Max Miiller reduces its whole vocabulary to 

 121 roots — the 121 " original concepts." " These 121 

 concepts constitute the stock-in-trade with which I 

 maintain that every thought that has ever passed 

 through the mind of India, so far as known to us in 

 its literature, has been expressed. It would have been 

 easy to reduce that number still further, for there are 

 several among them which could be ranged together 

 under more general concepts. But I leave this 

 further reduction to others, being satisfied as a first 

 attempt with having shown how small a number of 

 seeds may produce, and has produced, the enormous 

 intellectual vegetation that has covered the soil of 

 India from the most distant antiquity to the present 

 day." » 



That a " first attempt " should have succeeded in 



reducing this vast family of Languages to 121 words 



is significant. The exhumation by philology of this 



early cluster reminds one of the discovery of the seg- 



1 Science of Thought, p. 549. 



