Of course innumerable other illustrations might be given; but these are enough to show what is meant by a “sentence-word.” The next thing we have to notice is the manner in which a young child particularizes the meanings of its sentence-words, so as to limit their highly generic significance _per se_, and thus to make them convey the special significance intended. Briefly, the one and only means which the child has of doing this is by the employment of tone and gesture. Here the suiting of the action to the word is a necessary condition to semiotic utterance; the more primitive forms of sign-making are the needful supplements to these commencements of higher forms. And not only so; they are likewise in large part the parents of these higher forms. It is by pointing (_i.e._ falling back on what I have called the earliest or “indicative stage” of language) that a child is able to signify the place, agent, instrument, &c., to which it requires a sentence-word to apply; and thus we catch our first glimpse of the highly important fact that the earliest indications of grammar are given by the simultaneous use of sentence-words and gesture-signs. It will now be my object to prove, that in the history of the race spoken language began in the form of sentence-words; that grammar is the child of gesture; and, consequently, that predication is but the adult form of the self-same faculty of sign-making, which in its infancy we know as indication. Being myself destitute of authority in matters philological, I will everywhere rely upon the agreement of recognized leaders of the science. Bunsen, I believe, was the first to point out that in Egyptian there is no formal distinction between noun, adjective, verb, or particle; such a word as _anh_, for instance, meaning indifferently, life, alive, to live, lively, &c.[222] Similarly, in Chinese “the word can still be used indifferently as a noun, a verb, an adverb, or the sign of a case, much like such English words as silver, and picture, and its place in the sentence alone determines in what sense it shall be construed. This is an excellent illustration of the early days of speech, when the sentence-words contained within themselves all the several parts of speech at once—all that was needed for a complete sentence; and it was only by bringing them into contact and contrast [i.e. _apposition_] with other sentence-words, that they came to be restricted in their meaning and use, and to be reduced to mere ‘words.’”[223]