mitive forms of speech. The most savage of
the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining
words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain
instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the
living traces of the earlier method of speech from which they emerged.

It is to the ability to think abstractly and to form words with an
abstract significance that human language owes much of its high
development. But this ability is largely confined to civilized mankind,
savages being greatly or wholly lacking in it. This deficiency is
indicated in their modes of speech. Thus a native of the Society
Islands, while able to say "dog's tail," "sheep's tail," etc., has no
separate word for tail. He cannot abstract the general term from its
immediate relations. In the same way the uncivilized Malay has twenty
different words to express striking with various objects, as with thick
or thin wood, a club, the fist, the palm, etc., but he has no word for
"striking" as an isolated thought. We find the same deficiency in the
speech of the American Indians. A Cherokee, for instance, has no word
for "washing," but can express the different kinds of washing by no less
than thirteen distinct words.

All this indicates a primitive stage in the evolution of language, one
in which every word had its immediate and local application, while in
each word a whole story was told. The power of dividing thought into its
separate elements was not yet possessed. As thought progressed men got
from the idea of "dog" to that of "dog's tail." They could not think of
the part without the whole. Then they reached a word for "dog's tail
wags." But the idea of "wags" as an abstract motion was beyond their
powers of thought. They could not think of action, but only of some
object in action. The language of the American Indians was an immediate
derivation from this mode of word formation, every proposition, however
intricate it might be, constituting a single word, whose component parts
could not be used separately. The mode of speech here indicated is one
form of development of the root. Other forms are the compounding of the
Chinese and the Mongolian and the inflection of the Aryan and the
Semitic, all pointing directly back to the root form as their unit of
growth.

The inference to be drawn from all this is that the language of
primitive man consisted of isolated words, sounds which may originally