d more
than twenty such separate pronouns into being.

Without attempting to go thoroughly into the efforts of primitive
speech to curtail its interest in the personnel of its world by
gradually acquiring a stock of de-individualized words, let us glance
at another aspect of the subject, because it helps to bring out the
fundamental fact that language is a social product, a means of
intersubjective intercourse developed within a society that hands on
to a new generation the verbal experiments that are found to succeed
best. Payne shows reason for believing that the collective "we"
precedes "I" in the order of linguistic evolution. To begin with, in
America and elsewhere, "we" may be inclusive and mean "all-of-us,"
or selective, meaning "some-of-us-only." Hence, we are told, a
missionary must be very careful, and, if he is preaching, must use
the inclusive "we" in saying "we have sinned," lest the congregation
assume that only the clergy have sinned; whereas, in praying, he must
use the selective "we," or God would be included in the list of sinners.
Similarly, "I" has a collective form amongst some American languages,
and this is ordinarily employed, whereas the corresponding selective
form is used only in special cases. Thus if the question be "Who will
help?" the Apache will reply "I-amongst-others," "I-for-one"; but,
if he were recounting his own personal exploits, he says _sheedah_,
"I-by-myself," to show that they were wholly his own. Here we seem
to have group-consciousness holding its own against individual
self-consciousness, as being for primitive folk on the whole the more
normal attitude of mind.

Another illustration of the sociality engrained in primitive speech
is to be found in the terms employed to denote relationship.
"My-mother," to the child of nature, is something more than an ordinary
mother like yours. Thus, as we have already seen, there may be a special
particle applying to blood-relations as non-transferable possessions.
Or, again, one Australian language has special duals, "we-two," one
to be used between relations generally, another between father and
child only. Or an American language supplies one kind of plural suffix
for blood-relations, another for the rest of human beings. These
linguistic concretions are enough to show how hard it is for primitive
thought to disjoin what is joined fast in the world of everyday
experience.

No wonder that it is usually found impracticable by the Euro