Again, as a result of his prolonged study of some of the most primitive forms of language still extant among the Bushmen of South Africa, Dr. Bleek entertains no doubt whatever that aboriginally the same word, without alteration, implied a substantival or a verbal meaning, and could be used indifferently also as an adjective, adverb, &c.[253] That is to say, primitive words were sentence-words, and as such were used by early man in just the same way as young children use their hitherto undifferentiated signs, _Byby_ = _sleep_, _sleeping_, _to sleep_, _sleeper_, _asleep_, _sleepy_, &c.; and, by connotative extension, _bed_, _bolster_, _bed-clothes_, &c.
Lastly, as already indicated, we are not left to mere inference touching the aboriginal state of matters with regard to predication. For in many languages still existing we find the forms of predication in such low phases of development, that they bring us within easy distance of the time when there can have been no such forms at all. Even Professor Max Müller allows that there are still existing languages “in which there is as yet no outward difference between what we call a root, and a noun or a verb. Remnants of that phase in the growth of language we can detect even in so highly developed a language as Sanskrit.” Elsewhere he remarks:—“A child says, ‘I am hungry,’ without an idea that _I_ is different from _hungry_, and that both are united by an auxiliary verb.... A Chinese child would express exactly the same idea by one word, ‘Shi,’ _to eat_, or _food_, &c. The only difference would be that a Chinese child speaks the language of a child, an English child the language of a man.”[254]
It is no doubt remarkable that the Chinese should so long have retained so primitive a form; but, as we know, the functions of predication have here been greatly assisted by devices of syntax combined with conventionally significant intonation, which really constitute Chinese a well-developed language of a particular type. Among peoples of a much lower order of mental evolution, however, we are brought into contact with still more rudimentary forms of predication, inasmuch as these devices of syntax and intonation have not been evolved. As previously stated, the most primitive of all actually existing forms of predication where articulate language is concerned, is that wherein the functions of a verb are undertaken by the apposition of a noun with what is equivalent to the genitive case of a pronoun. Thus, in Dayak, if it is desired to say, “Thy father is old,” “Thy father looks old,” &c., in the absence of verbs it is needful to frame the predication by mere apposition, thus:—“Father-of-thee, age-of-him.” Or, to be more accurate, as the syntax follows that of gesture-language in placing the predicate before the subject, we should translate the proposition into its most exact equivalent by saying, “His age, thy father.” Similarly, if it is required to make such a statement as that “He is wearing a white jacket,” the form of the statement would be, “He-with-white with-jacket,” or, as we might perhaps more tersely translate it, “He jackety whitey.”[255]