Note 107 — Chapter XXI · THE ORIGIN OF SPEECH

It may not be superfluous expressly to point out that there is no contradiction between what is said here on the disappearance of tones and the remarks made above (Ch. XIX § 4) on Chinese tones. There the change wrought in the meaning of a word by a mere change of tone was explained on the principle that the difference of meaning was at an earlier stage expressed by affixes, the tone that is now concentrated on one syllable belonging formerly to two syllables or perhaps more. But this evidently presupposes that each syllable had already some tone of its own—and that is what in this chapter is taken to be the primitive state. Word-tones were originally frequent, but meaningless; afterwards they were dropped in some languages, while in others they were utilized for sense-distinguishing purposes.