300 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN MAN. 



" The making of words as distinct from sentences was 

 a long and laborious process, and there are many languages, 

 like those of North America, in which the process has hardly 

 yet begun. A dictionary is the result of reflection, and ages 

 must elapse before a language can enter upon its reflective 

 stage." * 



Or, to give only one more quotation, as Professor Max 

 Miiller says, "it is difficult for us to think in Chinese, or in 

 any radical language, without transferring to it our categories 

 of thought But if we watch the language of a child, which 

 is really Chinese spoken in English, we see that there is a 

 form of thought, and of language, perfectly rational and 

 intelligible to those who have studied it, in which, neverthe- 

 less, the distinction between noun and verb, nay, between 

 subject and predicate, is not yet realized." f 



Starting, then, from this undifferentiated condition of 

 language, let us next see how the " parts of speech " became 

 evolved. 



There appears to be no doubt that one of the earliest 

 parts of speech to become differentiated was the pronoun. 

 Moreover, all the pronouns (or " pronominal elements ") as 

 originally differentiated were indistinguishable from what we 

 should now call adverbs ; and they were all concerned with 

 denoting relations of place. % No exception to this general 

 statement can be made even as regards the personal pronouns. 

 ''Hie, iste, ille, are notoriously a sort of correlatives to ego, tu, 

 sui, and, if the custom of the languages had allowed it, might, 

 on every occasion, be substituted for them." § Now, there is 

 very good reason to conclude that these pronominal adverbs, 

 or adverbial pronouns, were in the first instance what may 

 be termed articulate translations of gesture-signs — i.e. of a 

 pointing to place-relations. / being equivalent to this one, he 

 or she or it to that 07ie. &c., we find it easy to supply the 

 indicative gestures out of which these denotative terms arose ; 

 and although we are not now able to supply the phonetic 



* Sayce, Introduction, &=€., i. 121. f Science 0/ Thought, p. 242. 



X Gamett, Fhilolo. Essays, p. 87. § Ibid., 77, 78. 



