mcgee] THE TREND OF HUMAN PROGRESS 443
strength ; but even in the lowest known examples of humanity, vocal utterance is articulated, differentiated into phonetic forms, diversified lexically and structurally, and supplemented by panto- mimic or graphic devices or by both. Commonly the languages of the more primitive living groups express ideas in terms of egocentric association, as in the kinship terminology which ex- presses relative position or rank throughout the group, while the languages of the higher groups are commonly richer and more definite in vocabulary, and more or less devoid of associative con- notation and structure ; so that it seems fair to measure linguistic growth by the development of words as definite symbols of dis- crete ideas, and by the concomitant elimination of inflexional and other associative devices. The sematic simplification of lan- guage is coupled with that phonetic simplification (the effect of intuitive economization) which distinguishes all higher tongues from lower — e. g., a highly developed language may be written phonetically in an alphabet of some forty characters or less, and all the strong modern languages may be written in twice as many, while it has been estimated (by Dorsey) that the aboriginal Amer- ican languages would require three hundred or more characters for adequate phonetic expression.
The primary function of language is the transmission of ideas, at first vague but ever increasing in definifreness with growth of knowledge, so that the quality of language is essentially collec- tive ; under primitive conditions the linguistic tie may be limited largely to the family-group, though the analogy of the sing- ing bird and roaring beast suggests a mating-motive extend- ing the vocal function from family to family in ever widening circles — certainly the vocal tie of savagery and barbarism warms into the most delicate and significant of intertribal bonds, bonds eventually fixed by endogamic and exogamic regulations and limited by community of faith. The vehicle of thought in every stage of development, language reacts on the mind and gives final shape to thought, howsoever rough-hewn ; thus it is the
�� �
