1888. ] 21 7 (Brinton. 
common source. Some writers maintain that sounds have a subjec- 
tive and fixed relation to ideas; others call such coincidences 
‘blind chance,’’ but these should remember that chance itself 
means merely the action of laws not yet discovered. 
You might suppose that this distinction, I mean that between se/f 
and other, between /, thou and he, is fundamental, that speech could. 
not proceed without it. You would be mistaken. American lan- 
guages furnish conclusive evidence that for unnumbered generations 
mankind got along well enough without any such discrimination. 
One and the same monosyllable served for all three persons and 
both numbers. The meaning of this monosyllable was undoubtedly 
‘‘any living human being.’’ Only after a long time did it become 
differentiated by the addition of locative particles into the notions, 
‘«T—living human being,’’. ‘‘ Thou—living human being,’’ ‘‘ He— 
living human being,’’ and so on. Even a language spoken by so 
cultured a people as the ancient Peruvians bears unmistakable 
traces of this process, as has been shown by Von Tschudi in his 
admirable analysis of that tongue; and the language of the Baures 
of Bolivia still presents examples of verbs conjugated without pro- 
nouns or pronominal affixes.* 
The extraordinary development of the pronouns in many Ameri- 
can languages—some have as many as eighteen different forms as 
the person is contemplated as standing, lying, in motion, at rest, 
alone, in company, etc., etc.—this multiplicity of forms, I say, is 
proof to the scientific linguist that these tongues have but recently 
developed this grammatical category. Wherever we find over- 
growth, the soil is new and the crop rank. 
In spite of the significance attached to the phonetic elements 
they are, in many American languages, singularly vague and fluctu- 
ating. If in English we were to pronounce the three words, /o//, 
nor, roll, indifferently as one or the other, you see what violence we 
should do to the theory of our alphabet. Yet analogous examples 
are constant in many American languages. Their consonants are 
‘‘alternating,’’ in large groups, their vowels ‘‘permutable.’’ M. 
* “Rs hat offenbar eine Zeit gegeben, in der ka alleiniges Pron. pers. fiir alle drei Perso- 
nen war, erst allmihlich entwickelten sich fio ka, ego, ka m, tu, ka y, ille.’ J.J. von 
Tschudi, Organismus der Khetsua Sprache, 8. 184 (Leipzig, 1884). In the language of the 
Baures of Bolivia when the verb takes the negative termination apico, the pronominal 
signs are discarded ; thus, era, to drink, a drink ; erapico =I, thou, he, we, you, they, do 
not drink, Magio, Arte de la Lengua de los Indios Baures, p. 82 (Paris, 1880). This reveals 
a time when both affirmative and negative yerbals dispensed with pronouns altogether. 
