Without attempting to go thoroughly into the efforts of primitive speech to curtail its interest in the personnel of its world by gradually acquiring a stock of de-individualized words, let us glance at another aspect of the subject, because it helps to bring out the fundamental fact that language is a social product, a means of intersubjective intercourse developed within a society that hands on to a new generation the verbal experiments that are found to succeed best.  Payne shows reason for believing that the collective “we” precedes “I” in the order of linguistic evolution.  To begin with, in America and elsewhere, “we” may be inclusive and mean “all-of-us,” or selective, meaning “some-of-us-only.”  Hence, we are told, a missionary must be very careful, and, if he is preaching, must use the inclusive “we” in saying “we have sinned,” lest the congregation assume that only the clergy have sinned; whereas, in praying, he must use the selective “we,” or God would be included in the list of sinners.  Similarly, “I” has a collective form amongst some American languages, and this is ordinarily employed, whereas the corresponding selective form is used only in special cases.  Thus if the question be “Who will help?” the Apache will reply “I-amongst-others,” “I-for-one”; but, if he were recounting his own personal exploits, he says sheedah, “I-by-myself,” to show that they were wholly his own.  Here we seem to have group-consciousness holding its own against individual self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the more normal attitude of mind.

Another illustration of the sociality engrained in primitive speech is to be found in the terms employed to denote relationship.  “My-mother,” to the child of nature, is something more than an ordinary mother like yours.  Thus, as we have already seen, there may be a special particle applying to blood-relations as non-transferable possessions.  Or, again, one Australian language has special duals, “we-two,” one to be used between relations generally, another between father and child only.  Or an American language supplies one kind of plural suffix for blood-relations, another for the rest of human beings.  These linguistic concretions are enough to show how hard it is for primitive thought to disjoin what is joined fast in the world of everyday experience.

No wonder that it is usually found impracticable by the European traveller who lacks an anthropological training to extract from natives any coherent account of their system of relationships; for his questions are apt to take the form of “Can a man marry his deceased wife’s sister?” or what not.  Such generalities do not enter at all into the highly concrete scheme of viewing the customs of his tribe imposed on the savage alike by his manner of life and by the very forms of his speech.  The so-called “genealogical method” initiated by Dr. Rivers, which the scientific explorer now invariably employs, rests mainly on the use of a concrete type