Jack London. Before Adam -
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his going--whether he was drowned in the river, or was
swallowed by a snake, or went into the stomach of old
Saber-Tooth, the tiger, is beyond my knowledge.
For know that I remember only the things I saw myself,
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.
Thus language grew. By the few sounds we possessed we were
enabled to think a short distance beyond those sounds; then