Since then, no other grammatical system has ever come into existence, but only novel derivatives of what was already there. Of these _authentic_ primitive languages and their structure and sound we know nothing. As far as our backward look takes us, we see only complete and developed linguistic systems, used by everyone, learned by every child, as something perfectly natural. And we find it more than difficult to imagine that once upon a time things may have been different, that perhaps a shudder of fear accompanied the hearing of such strange and enigmatic language--an awe like that which in historic times has been and still is excited by script. And yet we have to reckon with the possibility that at one time, in a world of wordless communication, verbal language constituted an aristocratic privilege, a jealously preserved class-secret. We have a thousand examples--the diplomats with their French, the scholars with their Latin, the priests with their Sanskrit--to suggest that there may have been such a tendency. It is part of the thoroughbred’s pride to be able to speak to one another in a way that outsiders cannot understand--a language for everybody is a vernacular. To be “on conversational terms with” someone is a privilege or a pretension. So, too, the use of literary language in talking with educated people, and contempt for dialect, mark the true bourgeois pride. It is only we who live in a Civilization wherein it is just as normal for children to learn to write as to learn to walk--in all earlier Cultures it was a rare accomplishment, to which few could aspire. And I am convinced that it was just so once with verbal language. The tempo of linguistic history is immensely rapid; here a mere century signifies a great deal. I may refer again to the gesture-language of the North Indians,[198] which became necessary because the rapidity of changes in the tribal dialects made intertribal understanding impossible otherwise. Compare, too, the Latin of the recently discovered Forum inscription[199] (about 500) with the Latin of Plautus (about 200) and this again with the Latin of Cicero (about 50). If we assume that the oldest Vedic texts have preserved the linguistic state of 1200 B.C., then even that of 2000 may have differed from it far more completely than any Indogermanic philologists working by _a posteriori_ methods can even surmise.[200] But _allegro_ changes to _lento_ in the moment when script, the language of duration, intervenes and ties down and immobilizes the systems at entirely different age-levels. This is what makes this evolution so opaque to research; all that we possess is remains of written languages. Of the Egyptian and Babylonian linguistic world we do possess originals from as far back as 3000, but the oldest Indogermanic relics are _copies_, of which the linguistic state is much younger than the contents.