THE SCIENCES OF LANGUAGE AND OF ETHNOGRAPHY. 115 
the triangle between Cashmere, Kabul, and Badakhshan, and 
to which I first gave the name of Dardistan in 1866. 
Now, what does this language show us? There the ordinary 
methods proved entirely at fault. Ifone pointed toan object, 
quite apart from the ordinary difficulties of misapprehension, 
the man appealed to, for instance, might say “ your finger,” 
if a finger were the thing of which he thought you wanted 
the name. If not satisfied with the name given in response, 
and you turned to somebody else, another name was obtained ; 
and if you turned to a third person, you got a third name. 
What was the reason for these differences? It was this, that 
the language had not emerged from the state in which it is 
impossible to have such a word as “‘ head,” as distinguished 
from “my head,” or “‘thy head,” or ‘‘his head”; for instance, 
ak is “my name,” and ik is “his name.” ‘Take away the 
pronominal sign, and you are left with k, which means 
nothing. Aus is “my wife,” and gus ‘thy wife.” The s 
alone has no meaning, and, in some cases, it seemed im- 
possible to arrive at putting anything down correctly ; but 
so it is in the initial stage of a language; in the Hunza 
language under discussion, that stage is important to us 
as members of the Aryan group, as the dissociation of 
the pronoun, verb, adverb and conjunction from the act or 
substance only occurs when the language emerges beyond 
the stage, when the groping, as it were, of the human child 
between the mewm and tuum, the first and second persons, 
approaches the clear perception of the outer world, the 
“suum,” the third person. Now, during the twenty years 
referred to ‘“‘his” (house), “his”? (name), and “his” 
(head) are beginning to take the place of ‘ house,” ‘‘ name,” 
“head,” generally, in not quite a decided manner, but still 
they are taking their place. When I subsequently talked to 
the Hunzas, and tried to find a reason for that “idiom,” if onc 
may use the term, it seemed very clear and convincing when 
they said, “‘ How is it possible for ‘a wife’ to exist unless 
she is somebody’s wife?” ‘You cannot say, for instance, 
if you dissociate the one from the other, ‘her wife,’ or ‘his 
husband.’ ‘Head,’ by itself, does not exist; it must be 
somebody’s head.” When, again, you dissociate the 
sound which stands for the action or substance from the 
pronoun, you come, in a certain group of words, to another 
range of thought connected with the primary family rela- 
tion, and showing the existence of that particularly 
ancient form of endogamy, in which all the elder females 
are the mothers and all the elder men are the fathers of 
the tribe. For instance, take a word like “ mother ;” “m” 
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