THE WITNESS OF PHILOLOGY. 339 



sentence-words, therefore, leads us back to a state of ideation 

 wherein as yet the powers of conceptual thought were in that 

 nascent condition which betokens what I have called their 

 pre-conceptual stage — or a stage which may be observed in a 

 comparatively foreshortened state among children before the 

 dawn of self-consciousness. 



There can be no reasonable doubt that during this stage 

 of mental evolution sentence-words arose in the race as they 

 now do in the individual, the only difference being that then 

 they had to be invented instead of learnt. This difference 

 would probably have given a larger importance to the 

 principle of onomatopoeia,* and certainly a much larger 

 importance to the co-operation of gesture, than now obtains in 

 the otherwise analogous case of young children. But in the 

 one case as in the other, I think there can be no reasonable 

 question that sentence-words must have owed their origin 

 to receptual and pre-conceptual apprehensions of all kinds, 

 whether of objects, qualities, actions, states, relations, or of 

 any two or more of these "categories" as they may happen 

 to have been blended in the hitherto undifferentiating percep- 

 tions of aboriginal man. 



I must now allude to the results of our previous inquiry 

 touching " the syntax of gesture-language." For com- 

 parison will show that in all essential particulars the semiotic 

 construction of this the most original and immediately 

 graphic mode of communication, bears a striking resemblance 

 to that which is presented by the earliest forms of articulate 

 language, both as revealed by philology and in " baby-talk." f 

 Thus, as we saw, "gesture-language has no grammar pro- 

 perly so called. The same sign stands for ' walk,' * walkest,' 

 'walking,' * walked,' 'walker.'- Adjectives and verb§ are 

 not easily distinguished by the deaf and dumb. Indeed, 

 our elaborate system of parts of speech is but little applic- 



• Bleek entertains no doubt on this point. 



t Compare also close of Chapter VII. (pp. 138-144), where the children 

 mentioned by Dr. Hale are shown to have adopted the syntax o( gesture- la nj^uago 

 in their spontaneously devised spoken languaj^e. 



