All this we have previously seen. My object in here recurring to the matter is to show that much additional light may be thrown upon it by the philological doctrine of “sentence-words,” which Professor Max Müller, in common with other philologists, fully accepts. Of all the writers on primitive modes of speech as represented by existing savages, no one is entitled to speak with so much authority as Bleek. Now, as a result of his prolonged and first-hand study of the subject, he is strongly of opinion that aboriginal words were expressive “not at all of an abstract or general character, but exclusively concrete or individual.” By this he means that primitive ideas were what I have called generic. For he says that had a word been formed from imitation of the sound of a cuckoo, for instance, it could not possibly have had its meaning limited to the name of that bird; but would have been extended so as to embrace “the whole situation so far as it came within the consciousness of the speaker.” That is to say, it would have become a generic name for the whole recept of bird, cry, flying, &c., &c., just as to our own children the word _Ba_=sheep, bleating, grazing, &c. Now, this process of comprising under one denotative term the hitherto undifferentiated perceptions of “a whole situation so far as it comes within the consciousness of the speaker,” is the very opposite of the process whereby a denominative term is brought to unify, by an act of “generalization,” the previously well-differentiated concepts between which some analogy is afterwards discovered. Therefore the absence of any parts of speech in primitive language is due to a generic order of ideation, whereas the unions of parts of speech in any languages which present them is due to the generalizing order of ideation. Or, as Bleek puts it while speaking of the comparatively undifferentiated condition of South African languages, “this differs entirely from the principle which prevails in modern English, where a word, without undergoing any change of form, may nevertheless belong to different parts of speech. For in English the parts of speech, though not always differing in sound, are always accurately distinguished in concept; while in the other case there was as yet no consciousness of any difference, inasmuch as neither form nor position had hitherto called attention to anything of the kind. For forms had not yet made their appearance, and determinate position [_i.e._ significance expressed by syntax], as, for example, in Chinese, could only arise in a language of highly advanced internal formation.”[269]