202 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters . 
said that the child does not distinguish self from others, the 
ego from the alter, until the terms “I,” “my,” “mine,” “you,” 
“yours,” “he,” “him,” “his,” begin to appear in his vocab¬ 
ulary, which most observers have found to be somewhere about 
the twenty-fifth month, though a few have not noticed it until 
the beginning of the third year. Ament detected it in the 
twenty-first month, Schultze in the nineteenth, and Mrs. Hall 
even in the seventeenth. It is suggestive in this connection to 
note that primitive languages show great confusion in the use 
of the pronoun. Brinton 1 maintains that in aboriginal American 
languages there is no distinction between persons in the pronoun* 
“I,” “thou,” and “he” are not discriminated, a single mono¬ 
syllable serving for all persons, and also for both singular and 
plural numbers. In some American languages, however, there 
is a great variety of pronouns, used to denote not only person 
and number, but various conditions and aspects of the person 
or persons designated, as that they are standing, sitting, or lying* 
alone or with others, moving or stationary, 2 3 and so on. Accord¬ 
ing to Powell, 3 4 4 The Indian of today is more accustomed to say 
this person or thing, that person or thing, than he, she or it. 
Among the free personal pronouns the student may find an 
equivalent of the pronoun 4 1,’ another signifying 4 1 and you/ 
perhaps another signifying 4 1 and he’ and one signifying 4 we/ 
more than two, including the speaker and those present, and 
another including the speaker and those absent. He will also 
find personal pronouns in the second and third person, perhaps 
with singular and dual forms.” The pronouns are not in all 
cases completely differentiated in these languages, but are in¬ 
corporated in the verb as prefixes or infixes or suffixes, and as 
such they designate the person, number, and gender of both sub¬ 
ject and object, and in the conjugation of the verb they play 
an important part. 
How is it now with the child ? Is pronominal function in his 
iSee his Essays of an Americanist (Philadelphia, 1890), p. 396. 
2 Powell says that in Indian languages genders are, not confined to 
sex, but are methods of classification primarily into animate and in¬ 
animate, which are again classified according to striking characteris¬ 
tics or attitudes or supposed constitution. 
3 Op. cit., p. 43. 
