1. Man and Religion in Relation to Nature.

...have remained at earlier stages of human evolutionary history. Like children, the Brazilian Indians always speak in the infinitive, usually without a pronoun or noun. The inadequacy of such a language must then be helped toward understandable expression by certain signs with the hand, the mouth, or other gestures. "If the Indian wants to say, for example: 'I want to go into the forest,' he speaks 'forest-going' and points with his mouth, pushed forward like a trunk, toward the area he means." ¹ The author reflects 19th-century anthropological views, which often compared the languages of indigenous peoples to the developmental stages of childhood. "The Greenlanders, especially the women, accompany many words not only with a special accent but also with facial expressions and winks, so that someone who does not perceive them well easily misses the meaning. If they affirm something with pleasure, for instance, they slurp the air down through the throat with a certain sound. If they deny something with contempt and disgust, they wrinkle their noses and emit a fine sound through it, just as they let it be guessed through gestures when they are out of sorts." ²

Just as self-conscious activity—thinking in the broader sense—receives its first starting point from sensory impressions, language also initially chooses such sounds that produce a corresponding impression on the ear. ³ These are the so-called OnomatopoëticaOnomatopoeia: words that phonetically imitate, resemble, or suggest the sound that they describe., such as every language has; for example, in our word "rigid" original: "starr" — the author suggests the sharp 'st' sound mimics the feeling of resistance the impression of something resistant, in "wind" the sense of movement, and in "whirl" original: "Wirr" — used to describe confusion or things tangled together the sense of things going through each other can hardly remain unnoticed, and so forth.

As long as thinking occurs only in sensory representations and ideas take on physical shapes, only that which is sensory-perceptible can find its expression, whereas the conceptual is absorbed and expressed through circumlocution The use of many words where fewer would do, particularly using physical descriptions to explain abstract thoughts.. This gives these ways of speaking an overflowing pomp and picturesque splendor, of which Bastian ⁴ cites striking examples from the language of the Indians. In the materia- The word is cut off at the end of the page, likely intended to be "materialism" or "material world." which lacks all abstract concepts—

¹ Spix and Martius in Bastian, I, 427. Johann Baptist von Spix and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius were famous German explorers of Brazil.
² Ibid., p. 430.
³ Cf. W. v. Humboldt, On the Kawi Language, p. 94 ff. Wilhelm von Humboldt was a pioneer of linguistic philosophy; his work on the Kawi language of Java is a foundational text in the field.
⁴ I, 426.