THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE 57 



cuckoo, but that he was going to hunt for it; or it 

 might be a command for another to go on the hunt, 

 the one word serving for a whole sentence. Such a 

 use of language is occasionally found to-day; and 

 our philologists are agreed that there is evidence 

 that language in general must be traced back to 

 sentence words, the earliest step in language forma- 

 tion being the use of single words to express com- 

 plete ideas. But such sentence words are incomplete 

 without either special intonations or gestures, or 

 both. Simple languages of savages are commonly, if 

 not always, accompanied by gestures. Some savage 

 languages are largely gestures with a few words, and 

 in some African tribes so large a part do gestures 

 play in their languages that it is said they cannot 

 understand each other at night. There is every rea- 

 son for believing that the primitive language was 

 differentiated into the parts of speech by pointing 

 and thus that grammar arose from gestures. One of 

 the first parts of speech to be differentiated was the 

 pronoun, and pronouns came from pointing. The 

 speaker might point to himself as '*!" and to an- 

 other as "you" or ''he," and from such gestures 

 arose the pronouns. 



The Nature of Primitive Language 



From various facts of the nature just mentioned 

 the attempt has been made to picture language at its 

 origin. It is, of course, evident that nowhere have 

 we any primitive language to study. The oldest 

 written language was the Egyptian, of which we 

 have records going back probably four thousand 

 years or more. But it is self-evident that a language 

 that has reached the stage of being written is very 



