idea
is vaguely conveyed through a single sound; as among the lower animals.
That human language ever consisted solely of exclamations, and so was
strictly homogeneous in respect of its parts of speech, we have no
evidence. But that language can be traced down to a form in which nouns
and verbs are its only elements, is an established fact. In the gradual
multiplication of parts of speech out of these primary ones--in the
differentiation of verbs into active and passive, of nouns into abstract
and concrete--in the rise of distinctions of mood, tense, person, of
number and case--in the formation of auxiliary verbs, of adjectives,
adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, articles--in the divergence of those
orders, genera, species, and varieties of parts of speech by which
civilised races express minute modifications of meaning--we see a change
from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. And it may be remarked, in
passing, that it is more especially in virtue of having carried this
subdivision of function to a greater extent and completeness, that the
English language is superior to all others.

Another aspect under which we may trace the development of language is
the differentiation of words of allied meanings. Philology early
disclosed the truth that in all languages words may be grouped into
families having a common ancestry. An aboriginal name applied
indiscriminately to each of an extensive and ill-defined class of things
or actions, presently undergoes modifications by which the chief
divisions of the class are expressed. These several names springing from
the primitive root, themselves become the parents of other names still
further modified. And by the aid of those systematic modes which
presently arise, of making derivations and forming compound terms
expressing still smaller distinctions, there is finally developed a
tribe of words so heterogeneous in sound and meaning, that to the
uninitiated it seems incredible that they should have had a common
origin. Meanwhile from other roots there are being evolved other such
tribes, until there results a language of some sixty thousand or more
unlike words, signifying as many unlike objects, qualities, acts.

Yet another way in which language in general advances from the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous, is in the multiplication of languages.
Whether as Max Mueller and Bunsen think, all languages have grown from
one stock, or whether, as some philologists say, they have grown f