[…] ‘bow-how’ is a type, a normal example, of the whole genus “root.”
- Whitney (1875), a pag.299

[…] any of the elements now generally regarded as roots are of composite structure, containing a formative element fused with a root […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.200

[…] if all the rest [other languages] have started from pronounceable roots, composed of a combination of consonant and vowel, and have grown by external accretion of other similar elements to these, then it is not lightly to be believed that the Semitic has not done the same.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.252

In each single root was present at the outset- as may be present in a single interjectional monosyllable now- a whole assertion, or inquiry, or command, to which the tone and accompanying gesture, or the mere circumstances of its utterance, furnished the sufficient interpretation: just as in the stick or stone was present- and may, on an emergency, be made present still- a variety of instruments or weapons.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.227

Nor are these words [Chinese words], like English monosyllables, worn-out relics of a formerly inflected condition of speech; there is no good reason to doubt their being the actual undeveloped roots of the language […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.237

The analogue of the root is the stick or the stone which was indubitably man’s first instrument: a crude tool or weapon, used for a variety of purposes to which we now adapt a corresponding variety of much more intricate and shapely tools.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.226

The Indo-European roots […] are the elements of speech which existed prior to the whole development of the means of grammatical distinction, before the growth of inflection, before the separation of the parts of speech.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.201

The lines of development of all families of languages do point back to one original common condition of formless roots; and precisely what these roots were, in shape and meaning, we cannot in most families even begin to trace out; we cannot, then, deny that they may have been the same for all. We may talk of probabilities as much as we please; but of impossibility there is actually nothing in the assumption of identity of origins.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.270

What we call the Semitic root, namely is (except in the pronouns and a wholly insignificant number of other cases) a conglomerate of three consonants, no more and no less […] By this is not meant, of course, that such conglomerates were, like the Indo-European roots, the historical germs of a body of derivative forms; but, as we arrive at the root in Indo-European by taking off the variously accreted formative elements, we arrive at such a Semitic root by removing its formative elements. The latter includes no vowel that has an identity to preserve; the addition of any vowel makes a form.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.248

Why should the germs of speech be what we have called roots, elements indicative of such abstract things as acts and qualities? Surely concrete objects are soonest and most easily apprehended by the mind.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.298