wing the footsteps of Wilhelm
von Humboldt, had established a theory, according to which language is "not
created, but produced by the liberty of the human will;" and judging from
many of his Darwinistic utterances concerning the origin and development of
language, he had traced its development in such a way as to arrive at the
conclusion that artless simplicity in the unfolding of the senses is the
first period of its appearance.

The scientists divide all the languages of the earth into three great
groups: first, the monosyllabic, {96} isolating, radical, or asynthetic
languages; second, the agglutinant, terminational, or polysynthetic
languages; third, the inflectional languages. They are of the opinion that
even the languages of highest rank--the inflectional--very probably took a
starting-point from the asynthetic languages, and a course of development
through the agglutinants, and that in like manner the agglutinants have
behind them an asynthetic period. Thus they trace all the languages back to
certain _roots_, which are more or less common to the different groups of
languages.

To the question that now arises--_How did these roots originate?_--the
linguists give us three different answers. The onomatopoetic theory, called
by Max Mueller the Wow-Wow Theory, traces them to imitations of the sound
(W. Bleek, G. Curtius, Schleicher, Wedgewood, Farrar); the interjectional
theory, called by Max Mueller the Pooh-Pooh, or Pah-Pah Theory, traces them
to expressions of the senses (Condillac); a third theory declares the roots
to be phonetic types (Max Mueller, Lazar Geiger, Heyse, Steinthal); while it
is still an open question, whether the attempts at explanation of these
types must here come to a stand-still for the present, as Max Mueller
thinks, or whether, according to Lazar Geiger, we can trace the first
root-expressions especially to impressions of light and color.

The reasons from which Max Mueller, in his "Lectures on the Science of
Languages" (Vol. I, Lect. IX), rejects the first two theories and proves
the third, are quite convincing. Even if, in a purely hypothetical way, a
language could be thought of _in abstracto_, the roots of which only
consist in imitations of sounds or interjections, still in the _really
existing_ languages, {97} so far as we can trace back and uncover their
roots, the roots imitating sounds and the interjectional roots form only a
small and entirely isolated minority, which neither s