[Before Adam by Jack London]@TWC D-Link book
Before Adam

CHAPTER IV
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These latter were tools of speech not yet invented.

Instead of qualifying nouns or verbs by the use of adjectives and adverbs, we qualified sounds by intonation, by changes in quantity and pitch, by retarding and by accelerating.

The length of time employed in the utterance of a particular sound shaded its meaning.
We had no conjugation.

One judged the tense by the context.

We talked only concrete things because we thought only concrete things.


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