to something I can comfortably take in, by leaving out a
lot of unnecessary detail--for instance, that I was hungry, in a hurry,
doing it for the benefit of others as well as myself, and so on. Well,
American languages of the ruder sort, by running a great number of
sounds or syllables together, manage to utter a portmanteau
word--"holophrase" is the technical name for it--into which is packed
away enough suggestions to reproduce the situation in all its detail,
the cutting, the fact that I did it, the object, the instrument, the
time of the cutting, and who knows what besides. Amusing examples of
such portmanteau words meet one in all the text-books. To go back to
the Fuegians, their expression _mamihlapinatapai_ is said to mean "to
look at each other hoping that either will offer to do something which
both parties desire but are unwilling to do." Now, since exactly the
same situation never recurs, but is partly the same and partly
different, it is clear that, if the holophrase really tried to hit
off in each case the whole outstanding impression that a given
situation provoked, then the same combination of sounds would never
recur either; one could never open one's mouth without coining a new
word. Ridiculous as this notion sounds, it may serve to mark a downward
limit from which the rudest types of human speech are not so very far
removed. Their well-known tendency to alter their whole character in
twenty years or less is due largely to the fluid nature of primitive
utterance; it being found hard to detach portions, capable of repeated
use in an unchanged form, from the composite vocables wherein they
register their highly concrete experiences.

Thus in the old Huron-Iroquois language _eschoirhon_ means
"I-have-been-to-the-water," _setsanha_ "Go-to-the-water,"
_ondequoha_ "There-is-water-in-the-bucket," _daustantewacharet_
"There-is-water-in-the-pot." In this case there is said to have been
a common word for "water," _awen_, which, moreover, is somehow
suggested to an aboriginal ear as an element contained in each of these
longer forms. In many other cases the difficulty of isolating the
common meaning, and fixing it by a common term, has proved too much
altogether for a primitive language. You can express twenty different
kinds of cutting; but you simply cannot say "cut" at all. No wonder
that a large vocabulary is found necessary, when, as in Zulu, "my
father," "thy father," "his-or-her-father," are separate
poly