There appears to be no doubt that one of the earliest parts of speech to become differentiated was the pronoun. Moreover, all the pronouns (or “pronominal elements”) as originally differentiated were indistinguishable from what we should now call adverbs; and they were all concerned with denoting relations of place.[229] No exception to this general statement can be made even as regards the personal pronouns. “_Hic_, _iste_, _ille_, are notoriously a sort of correlatives to _ego_, _tu_, _sui_, and, if the custom of the languages had allowed it, might, on every occasion, be substituted for them.”[230] Now, there is very good reason to conclude that these pronominal adverbs, or adverbial pronouns, were in the first instance what may be termed articulate translations of gesture-signs—_i.e._ of a pointing to place-relations. _I_ being equivalent to _this one_, _he_ or _she_ or _it_ to _that one_, &c., we find it easy to supply the indicative gestures out of which these denotative terms arose; and although we are not now able to supply the phonetic source of these highly ancient “pronominal” or “demonstrative elements,” it is easy to imagine that they may have arisen in the same apparently spontaneous way as very young children will now devise arbitrary sounds, both as proper names and as adverbs of position. That we should not err in thus comparing the grade of mental evolution exhibited by the earliest framers of spoken language with that of a young child, is rendered apparent by the additional and highly interesting fact, that, just as a young child begins by speaking of the _Ego_ in the third person, so it was with early man in his use of personal pronouns. “Man regarded himself as an object before he learnt to regard himself as a subject; and hence ‘the objective cases of the personal as well as of the other pronouns are always older than the subjective;’ and the Sanskrit _mâm_, _ma_ (Greek [Greek: me], Latin _me_) is earlier than _aham_ ([Greek: egôn] and _ego_).”[231]