The sounds that make up spoken words can be resolved into a single element with its modifications; this basic element is the brute-like call or shout made with the mouth and throat opened wide—­a sound we may have heard uttered by men under the stress of pain or terror.  All of the various vowels are simply modifications of this element by altering the shape of the mouth cavity and orifice, while the consonants are produced by interrupting the sound-waves with the palate or lips or tongue.  Like the cell as a unit of structure throughout the organic world, this elemental utterance proves to be the basic unit of all human languages, which vary so widely among races of to-day no less than they have in the history of any single people.

One of the first steps in the making of spoken words was taken by human beings when they imitated the calls or other sounds produced by living things, and tacitly agreed to recognize the imitation as a symbol of the creature making it.  Thus the names for the cuckoo and the crow in many languages besides our own are simply copies of the calls uttered by these birds; a Tahitian calls a cat mimi; the name for a snake almost invariably includes the hissing attributed to that creature.  After a time words which were at first simply imitations and which referred only to the things that made these sounds came to refer to certain qualities of the things imitated, so that the naming of other than natural objects, such as qualities, began, leading ultimately to the use of words for qualities belonging to many and different objects in the way of abstractions.

Much light upon the evolution of language is obtained when we treat the speech of various races as we did the skeletal structures of cats and seals and whales.  When we compare the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French languages, they reveal the same general structure in thousands of their words,—­a common basis which in these cases is due to their derivation from the same ancestor, the Latin tongue.  The Latin word for star is stella, and the Italian word of to-day is an identical and unchanged descendant, like a persistent type of shark which lives now in practically the same form as did its ancestor in the coal ages.  The Spanish word is estrella, a modified derivative, but still one that bears in its structure the marks of its Latin origin; the French word etoile is a still more altered product of word evolution.  Even in the German stern, Norse stjern, Danish starn, and English star we may recognize mutual affinities and common ancestral structure.  Choosing illustrations from a different group, the Hebrew salutation “Peace be with you,” Shalom lachem, proves to be a blood cousin of the Arabic Salaam alaikum, indicating the common ancestry of these diverse languages.  Among Polynesian peoples the Tahitian calls a house a fare, the Maori of New Zealand uses whare,