Take the inhabitants of that cheerless spot, Tierra del Fuego, whose culture is as rude as that of any people on earth. A scholar who tried to put together a dictionary of their language found that he had got to reckon with more than thirty thousand words, even after suppressing a large number of forms of lesser importance. And no wonder that the tally mounted up. For the Fuegians had more than twenty words, some containing four syllables, to express what for us would be either "he" or "she"; then they had two names for the sun, two for the moon, and two more for the full moon, each of the last named containing four syllables and having no elements in common.[2] [Footnote 2: _Ibid._, pp. 138-39.] It is easy to see how very little refinement or abstraction from experience could be made with such a cumbersome and inflexible vocabulary. The thirty thousand word vocabulary expressed a poverty of linguistic technique rather than a richness of ideas. At the other extreme stands a language like English, which is, to an extraordinary degree, an "analytic" language. It has comparatively no inflections. This means that words can be used and moved about freely in different situations and relations. Thus the dominant elements of an experience can be freely isolated. A noun standing for a certain object or relation is not chained to a particular set of accompanying circumstances. "Man" stands as a definite concept, whether it be used with reference to an ancient Greek, a wounded man, a brave, a wretched, a competent, or a tall man. We can give the accompanying circumstances by additional adjectives, which are again freely movable verbally and intellectually. Thus we can speak of a brave child and a tall tower as well as a brave man and a tall man. In Marett's words: The evolution of language then, on this view, may be regarded as a movement away from the holophrastic [compound] in the direction of the analytic. When every piece in your playbox of verbal bricks can be dealt with separately, because it is not joined on in all sorts of ways to the other pieces, then only can you compose new constructions to your liking. Order and emphasis, as is shown by English, and still more conspicuously by Chinese, suffice for sentence-building. Ideally, words should be individual and atomic. Every modification they suffer by internal change of sound, or by having prefixes or suffixes tacked on to them, involves a curtailment of their free use and a sacrifice of distinctness. It is quite easy, of course, to think confusedly, even whilst employing the clearest type of language.... On the other hand, it is not feasible to attain a high degree of clear thinking, when the only method of speech available is one that tends toward wordlessness--that is to say, one that is relatively deficient in verbal forms that preserve their identity in all contexts.[1] [Footnote 1: Marett: _loc. cit._, pp. 141-42.]