516 NATURE OF ROOTS AND WORDS. 



means of communication between man and man." In otter words, 

 the primary purpose of language, or the reason that man talked at 

 all, was that he wanted something, and wanted some one else to know 

 it and to help him in supplying his wants. His motive' in using 

 articulate sounds was not the communication of his feelings ; his 

 emotions of pain, anger, &c., could have been made known readily 

 and completely enough by inarticulate cries, groans, howls and growls. 

 The motive was the pressing want of the moment. His wants may 

 be summed up in two words : nourishment and warmth. The natural 

 objects which supplied the means of satisfying these were at once the' 

 primary cause and object of his first words. These would be edible 

 roots, the fruits of the earth, the earth in which they grew, the plants 

 which bore them ; further, the animals he hunted, their skins, bones, 

 &c., and the implements with which he hunted and worked — natural 

 and artificial — sticks and stones, bows and arrows, axes, awls, &c. 

 As man is a social animal, and the unit of society is, as Sir Heriry 

 Maine* has pointed out, not the individual but the family, we must 

 add himself, his relations and friends. The sun, moon and stars, the 

 sea and the sky, were all objects of less primary importance to him. 

 From the nature, then, of the names given to himself, his relations 

 and allies, to the edible products of the earth and the plants producing 

 them, to the beasts and implements of the chase, we should be able to 

 infer the principles on which primitive language was formed; and, as. 

 we have disposed of the why, we now come to the consideration of 

 the question : What manner of language was it that primitive man 

 made use of? 



The answer to this_ question must be obtained in the same way as 

 we arrive at the determination of primitive man's intellectual, moral 

 and social condition, viz., by the comparative method, by an inquiry 

 into the mature of language as we find it spoken at the present day. 

 'Nov will it be necessary to have recourse for this purpose to the lan- 

 guages of savage nations, since the qualities most essential towards the 

 determination of the present problem are, as we shall see, inherent 

 in all language by its very nature, and are intensified in proportion 

 to the degradation of the users of language in the scale of culture. 

 In illustrating the following argument, I shall confine myself almost 

 entirely to ground familiar, more than any other, to the general 

 student of language, viz., the Aryan roots. 



* Early Village Communities, Lecture iii. 



