Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1922-11-18
The Outline Of History H. G. Wells
/. The Romance of Mother Earth

32-THE PARENT. LANGUAGES OF EUROPE
TT is improbable that there was ever such a
| l thing a common human language. We
- know nothing of the language of Palace
! lthlc man; we do not even know whether
| PalaeOlithic man talked freely.
| We know that Palaeolithic man had keen
sense Of form and attitude, because of his
drawings; and it has been suggested that he
communicated his ideas very largely by ges-
| ture. Probably such words as the earlier men
used were mainly cries of alarm or passion or
names for concrete things, and in many
| cases they were probably initiative sounds
| made by or associated with the things named.
The first languages were probably small
collections of such words; they consisted of
Intersections and nouns. Probably the nouns
| were said in different intonations to convey
different meanings
If Palaeolithic man had a word for horse
or "bear," he probably showed by tone or
gesture whether he meant "bear is coming, -
! "bear is going "bear to be hunted" dead
BEAR" bear has been here" "beaf did this,'
and so on. Only very slowly did the human
mind develop methods of indicating action and
relationship in formal manner. Modern Ian
guages contain many thousands of words. but
the earlier languages could have consisted only
of few hundred. 1t is said that even mod
ern European peasants can get along with
something less than a thousand words, and it
is quite conceivable that so late as the early
Neolithic period that was the limit of the
available vocabulary. Probably men did not
indulge in those days in conversation or de-
scription. For narrative purposes they danced
and acted rather than told. They had 10
method of counting beyond method of indi-
eating two by a dual number; and some way
|>of expressing many.
The growth of speech was at first very
slow process, indeed, and grammatical forms
Al IF al pt Z
come very late in human history, perhaps only
400 or 500 generations ago.
The students of languages (philo1ogists) tell
that they are unable to trace with certain
ty and common features in all the languages
Of mankind. They cannot even find any ele-
ments common to all the Caucasian languages.
They find over great areas groups of Ian
"pages which have similar root words and
similar ways Of expressing the same idea, but
then they find in other areas languages which
appear to be dissimilar down to their funda-
mental structure, which express action and re-
lation by entirely dfssimilar devices and have
an altogether different grammatical scheme
MOTHER ALWAYS BEGINS WITH AN "M'
One great group Of languages. for example,
now covers nearly all Europe and stretches
out to India; it includes English, French Ger
man. Spanish, italian. Greek, Russian Arme-
man. Persian and various Indian tongues. It
is called the Indo-European or Aryan family
The same fundamental roots, the same gram
NAUTICAL ideas, are traceable through all this
family Compare, for example, English father,
mother; German water, mutter; Latin pater,
mater; Greek pater, meter; French pere,
mere Armenian hair, mair, Sanscrit pitar,
matar, etc., etc. In a similar manner the Ar
yam languages ring the changes on a great
number -of fundamental words, in the Ger
manic language becoming p in Latin, and so
on. They follow law of variation called
Grimms Law. These languages are not diff
ferent things, they are variations of one thing
The people who use these languages think in
the same way. @
At one time in the remote past, in the Neo-
lthtc Age, that is to/say, 5000 years or more