with my own eyes, in those prehistoric days. If my
mother knew my father's end, she never told me. For
that matter I doubt if she had a vocabulary adequate to
convey such information. Perhaps, all told, the Folk
in that day had a vocabulary of thirty or forty sounds.

I call them SOUNDS, rather than WORDS, because sounds
they were primarily. They had no fixed values, to be
altered by adjectives and adverbs. These latter were
tools of speech not yet invented. Instead of qualifying
nouns or verbs by the use of adjectives and adverbs, we
qualified sounds by intonation, by changes in quantity
and pitch, by retarding and by accelerating. The
length of time employed in the utterance of a
particular sound shaded its meaning.

We had no conjugation. One judged the tense by the
context. We talked only concrete things because we
thought only concrete things. Also, we depended
largely on pantomime. The simplest abstraction was
practically beyond our thinking; and when one did
happen to think one, he was hard put to communicate it
to his fellows. There were no sounds for it. He was
pressing beyond the limits of his vocabulary. If he
invented sounds for it, his fellows did not understand
the sounds. Then it was that he fell back on
pantomime, illustrating the thought wherever possible
and at the same time repeating the new sound over and
over again.