VALUABLE COMPARATIVE EXAMPLE OF HIEROGLYPHIC AND HIERATIC FIGURES.
[2]. Herodotus. Melopemene, IV 131-133.
[3]. Confucius states, in the famous historical work, Gih King, that “In great antiquity knotted cords served them (the Chinese) for the administration of affairs; and that later, the saintly Fou Hi replaced these by writing.”
CHAPTER IV.
MANY eminent philologists suggest a time in the history of human speech when language was monosyllabic, when by a few simple utterances human beings were able to express many things, indicating by gesture or tone which of the words having the same sound was the thing expressed.
Later on we find language developed by the connection of two or three of these root words, agglutinated, or stuck together as one word, by which this obtained a broader meaning. This is the first stage in polysyllabism, and is known as the agglutinative stage. Later, human speech passed into the inflectional stage, where these agglutinated words having coalesced or melted into one, became so changed in time by phonetic corruption that finally it becomes impossible to determine which part was the original root and which the modifying element of the earlier stage.
Of the monosyllabic stage in language, the Chinese is a distinguished example. This language is referred to by many eminent philologists as the most primitive in structure of any living tongue. It is a language of monosyllabic roots, limited in number, these roots possessing neither inflections nor parts of speech. Each word is a root and each root is a word, which in turn may be used, according to its place in a sentence, as a verb, a noun, an adjective, a participle, or some other grammatical form.