[…] the primitive root-condition of speech, where an utterance or two had to do the duty of a whole clause. Men thus began, not with parts of speech which they afterward learned to piece together into sentences, but with comprehensive utterances in which the parts of speech lay as yet undeveloped, sentences in the germ; a single word signifying a whole statement, as even yet sometimes with us: only then from poverty, as now from economy. To demand that “sentences,” in the present sense of that term, with subject and predicate, with adjuncts and modifiers, should have been the first speech, is precisely analogous with demanding that the first human abodes should have contained at least two stories and a cellar […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.301-302