THE WITNESS OF PHILOLOGY, 301 



source of these highly ancient " pronominal " or " demonstrative 

 elements," it is easy to imagine that they may have arisen in 

 the same apparently spontaneous way as very young children 

 will now devise arbitrary sounds, both as proper names and 

 as adverbs of position. That we should not err in thus 

 comparing the grade of mental evolution exhibited by the 

 earliest framers of spoken language with that of a young 

 child, is rendered apparent by the additional and highly 

 interesting fact, that, just as a young child begins by speaking 

 of the Ego in the third person, so it was with early man in 

 his use of personal pronouns. "Man regarded himself as an 

 object before he learnt to regard himself as a subject ; and 

 hence ' the objective cases of the personal as well as of the 

 other pronouns are always older than the subjective ; ' and 

 the Sanskrit mam, ma (Greek juc, Latin me) is earlier than 

 aha^n (kywv and ego)." * 



Lest it should be thought that I am assuming too much 

 in thus referring the origin of pronominal elements to gesture- 

 signs, I will here quote the opinion of Professor Max Miiller, 

 who of all philologists is least open to suspicion of bias 



* Farrar, Origin of Latiguage, p. 99. The passage continues, '*We might 

 have conjectured this from the fact already noticed, that children learn to speak 

 of themselves in the third person — i.e. regard themselves as objects — long before 

 they acquire the power of representing their material selves as the instrument of 

 an abstiact entity." He also alludes to *'some admirable remarks to this effect 

 in Mr. F. Whalley Harper's excellent book on the Power of Greek Tenses ;^'' and 

 recurs to the subject in his more recently published Chapters on Language, p. 62. 

 I could quote other authorities who have commented upon this philological 

 peculiarity of early pronouns ; but will only add the following in order to show 

 how the peculiarity in question may continue to survive even in languages still 

 spoken. "The Malay ulun, 'I,' is still 'a man' in Lampong, and the Kawi 

 ugwang, *I,' cannot be separated from 7iwa7ig, 'a man'" (Sayce, hitroduciion, 

 ii. 26). Lastly, Wundt has pointed out that this impersonal form of speech is 

 distinctive, not only of early pronominal elements, but also of early forms of 

 predication. For instance, "Die ersten Urtheile, die in das Bewusstsein 

 hereinbrechen, subjektlose Urtheile sind, und dass die Pradikate derselben stets 

 eine sinnliche Vorstellung ausdriicken. * Es leuchtet es gliinzt, es tont,' — solcher 

 Art sind die Urtheile, die der Mensch zuerst denkt und zuerst ausspricht. Jenes 

 Pradikat, dass sogleich bei der Wahrnehmung eines Gegenstandes sich aufdrangt, 

 wird zur Bezeichnung des Gegenstandes selber. ' Das Leuchtende, Glanzende, 

 Tonende,' — solcher Art sind die Worter, die ursprlinglich in der Sprache gebildet 

 werden" {loc. cit., ii. 377). 



