Thus in the old Huron-Iroquois language eschoirhon means “I-have-been-to-the-water,” setsanha “Go-to-the-water,” ondequoha “There-is-water-in-the-bucket,” daustantewacharet “There-is-water-in-the-pot.”  In this case there is said to have been a common word for “water,” awen, which, moreover, is somehow suggested to an aboriginal ear as an element contained in each of these longer forms.  In many other cases the difficulty of isolating the common meaning, and fixing it by a common term, has proved too much altogether for a primitive language.  You can express twenty different kinds of cutting; but you simply cannot say “cut” at all.  No wonder that a large vocabulary is found necessary, when, as in Zulu, “my father,” “thy father,” “his-or-her-father,” are separate polysyllables without any element in common.

The evolution of language, then, on this view, may be regarded as a movement out of, and away from, the holophrastic in the direction of the analytic.  When every piece in your play-box of verbal bricks can be dealt with separately, because it is not joined on in all sorts of ways to the other pieces, then only can you compose new constructions to your liking.  Order and emphasis, as is shown by English, and still more conspicuously by Chinese, suffice for sentence-building.  Ideally, words should be individual and atomic.  Every modification they suffer by internal change of sound, or by having prefixes or suffixes tacked on to them, involves a curtailment of their free use and a sacrifice of distinctness.  It is quite easy, of course, to think confusedly, even whilst employing the clearest type of language; though in such a case it is very hard to do so without being quickly brought to book.  On the other hand, it is not feasible to attain to a high degree of clear thinking, when the only method of speech available is one that tends towards wordlessness—­that is to say, is relatively deficient in verbal forms that preserve their identity in all contexts.  Wordless thinking is not in the strictest sense impossible; but its somewhat restricted opportunities lie almost wholly on the farther side, as it were, of a clean-cut vocabulary.  For the very fact that the words are crystallized into permanent shape invests them with a suggestion of interrupted continuity, an overtone of un-utilized significance, that of itself invites the mind to play with the corresponding fringe of meaning attaching to the concepts that the words embody.

It would prove an endless task if I were to try here to illustrate at all extensively the stickiness, as one might almost call it, of primitive modes of speech.  Person, number, case, tense, mood and gender—­all these, even in the relatively analytical phraseology of the most cultured peoples, are apt to impress themselves on the very body of the words of which they qualify the sense.  But the meagre list of determinations thus produced in an evolved type of language can yield