Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/307

from it that "the idea expressed itself at the beginning with its whole array of determinatives and in a perfect unity," and that hence, "in the history of languages, synthesis is primitive, and analysis, far from being the natural form of the human mind, is only the low result of its development," we shall be conducted to a precisely contrary conclusion. The synthetic forms which we are asked to regard as original have not the character of something indistinctly heaped together; they contain the clear and express designation of the radical idea and of its important relations; they represent by a linguistic synthesis the results of a mental analysis. The idea is, indeed, conceived in unity, involving all its aspects and relations; but these cannot be separately expressed until the mind has separated them, until practice in the use of language has enabled it to distinguish them, and to mark each by an appropriate sign. In amabor, the (Latin) word cited as an example of synthesis, are contained precisely the same designations as in the equivalent English analytic phrase, 'I shall be loved:' ama expresses 'loving;' bo unites future-sign and ending designating the first person; and the r is the sign of passivity. Who can possibly maintain that a system of such forms, gathered about a root, exhibits the results of experience, of developed acuteness, in thought and speech, any less clearly than the analytic forms of our English conjugation? The two are only different methods of expressing the same "array of determinatives." The first synthetic mental act, on the contrary, is truly represented by the bare root: there all is, indeed, confused and indiscrete. The earliest radical words, when first uttered, stood for entire sentences, expressed judgments, as undeniably as the fully elaborated phrases which we now employ, giving every necessary relation its proper designation. It is thus that, even at present, children begin to talk; a radical word or two means in their mouths a whole sentence: up signifies 'take me up into your lap;' go walk, 'I want to go out to walk,' or 'I went to walk,' or various other things, which the circumstances sufficiently explain; but forms, inflections, connectives, signs of tense and mode and condition, they do not learn to use until later, when their minds have acquired