l899-'00 TRANSACTIONS 99 



or the phrase animum advertere, the prefix "ad" would have 

 been chosen to serve millions of people as the designation of 

 a business announcement in a newspaper ? I imagine that in 

 primitive times the prize of special and individual signification 

 was often carried off by a part of the sentence that had no more 

 claim to it than any other — no better claim than the syllable 

 "ad" has to express the sense of "advertisement" — a sense 

 which fully developed would be " an-announcement-designed-to- 

 cause - the - public - to - turn - their-attention-to-(Mr. So and So's) 

 goods. ' ' A syllable can stand for a good deal when once the lot 

 has fallen on it. 



The order in which the parts of speech emerged is an inter- 

 esting study. Our grammars place the interjection last, but 

 some writers hold that, if the parts of speech were treated in the 

 order of their development, the interjection would come first. 

 This was the opinion of the learned President De Brosses in the 

 middle of the i8th century. Sir John Stoddart also, in his 

 " Glossology " published somewhat over fifty years ago, declared 

 that " Since our emotions precede our judgments, the interjec- 

 tion instead of being the last object of examination should first 

 claim our notice. ' ' This is simply an anticipation of the modern 

 view already mentioned that the unit of expression is not the 

 word, but the sentence. Strictly speaking, instead of being a 

 " part of speech " at all, the interjection may be regarded as the 

 whole of speech, that is to say as a remnant or revival, as the case 

 may be, of the undifferentiated speech of primitive man. 

 There is much to be said in favor of M. Michel Br^al's theory 

 that the pronoun is really the oldest part of speech. The gram- 

 matical definition of a pronoun as a word which represents and 

 replaces a noun would not prepare us for this. How could there 

 be pronouns, we might ask, before there were nouns for them to 

 represent ? The answer is that signs of demonstration would be 

 almost the first need of primitive man in the way of language. 

 The strictly pronominal use of these words would follow the birth 

 of substantives. Whether nouns preceded verbs, or verbs nouns, 

 has been disputed. The more probable opinion would seem to be 

 that the verb, in its imperative form, came first. In a multitude of 

 cases the same word would alternately be used as substantive and 

 verb. To the thought of our rude ancestors — and here perhaps 

 they were not far from the true nature of things — there would not 



