The view that the oldest language was composed of five or six hundred monosyllables, is now without value, though it had a certain force. It gave weight to several hypotheses whose absurdity was not at first evident. Yet nothing had ever been observed in any real language resembling an even unconscious reservoir of roots. Words are born of each other by derivation, coming into the world sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, than the original word. This derivation is always dominated by a real, living concrete sense. No man whose mind has not been spoiled by special studies, has the sense of roots. The ba, be, bi, bo, bu of the alphabets, are, according to the theory, so many roots; but a series of kindred meanings has not been attributed to each of these sounds. They are capable, even in the same language, of expressing them all, either by chance, or according to a logic whose laws are undeterminable.
The primitive element in speech is not the word but the phrase. Man's spoken phrase is instinctive, like the sung phrase of the bird, like the yelped phrase of the dog. The word is a product of analysis.
In order to give the word priority over the phrase, the older school started from this idea, namely, that the word is created after the thing has been perceived, man acting as a nomenclator, as a professor of botany who gives names to sprigs of moss. The reality is different. The child stammers words before knowing the objects of which these words are the signs. It is possible that man spoke--chattered--a long time before a fixed relation became established between things and the familiar sounds issuing from his mouth.
Thousands of languages can thus have been chattered successively on thousands of territories--languages lacking precision, essentially musical, a succession of phrases in which certain sounds only corresponded to realities; but these sounds, in spite of their importance, in spite of their utilitarian and representative value, may be supposed to have been at first almost as fugitive as the rest of the speech. An unwritten language never survives the generation which created it. Among savages each generation remakes its language so completely that the grandfather is a stranger among his own grandchildren.