ABSTRACT
All over the world, in the languages of the simpler peoples, so far as the authors can test them, they find what they found in English and Latin, namely that the nouns are mainly derived from the verbs, the adjectives at first from the verbs direct and later from the nouns, and the adverbs at first from verbs, then from nouns and lastly from the adjectives; and the abstract nouns also mainly from the adjectives. It would be a tedious repetition to analyse the vocabularies of any great number of these languages and show these results. In some families of tongues, for example the Bantu and Semitic, some of these parts of speech are little developed, the adjective has not become differentiated on a large scale from the verb and the noun, and the adverbs are even fewer, and there is little more to be seen than the derivation, by and large, of the nouns from the verbs.
