Having thus briefly considered the philology of predicative words, we must next proceed to the not less important matter of the philology of predication itself. And here we shall find that the evidence is sufficiently definite. We have already seen good reason for concluding that what Grimm has called the “antediluvian” pronominal roots were the phonetic equivalents of gesture-signs—or rather, that they implied accompanying gesture-signs for the conveyance of their meaning. Now, it is on all hands allowed that these pronominal roots, or demonstrative elements, afterwards became attached to nouns and verbs as affixes or suffixes, and so in older languages constitute the machinery both of declension and conjugation. Thus, we can trace back, stage by stage, the form of predication as it occurs in the most highly developed, or inflective, languages, to that earliest stage of language in general, which I have called the indicative. In order to show this somewhat more in detail, I will begin by sketching these several stages, and then illustrate the earliest of them that still happen to survive by quoting the modes of predication which they actually present. As we thus trace language backwards, its structure is found to undergo the following simplification. First of all, auxiliary words, suffixes, affixes, prepositions, copulas, particles, and, in short, all inflections, agglutinations, or other parts of speech which are concerned in the indication of _relationship_ between the other component parts of a sentence, progressively dwindle and disappear. When these, which I will call relational words, are shed, language is left with what may be termed object-words (including pronominal words), attributive-words, action-words, and words expressive of states of mind or body, which, therefore, may be designated condition-words. Roughly speaking, this classification corresponds with the grammatical nouns, pronouns, adjectives, active verbs, and passive verbs; but as our regress through the history of language necessitates a total disregard of all grammatical forms, it will conduce to clearness in my exposition if we consent to use the terms suggested. The next thing we notice is that the distinction between object-words and attributive-words begins to grow indistinct, and eventually all but disappears: substantives and adjectives are fused in one, and whether the resulting word is to be understood as subject or predicate—as the name of the object or the name of a quality—depends upon its position in the sentence, upon the tone in which it is uttered, or, in still earlier stages, upon the gestures by which it is accompanied. Thus, as Professor Sayce remarks, “the apposition of two substantives [and, _a fortiori_, of two such partly or wholly undifferentiated words as we are now contemplating] is the germ out of which no less than three grammatical conceptions have developed—those of the genitive, of the predicate, and of the adjective.”[249]