问答题 People thinking about the origin of language for the first time usually, arrive at the conclusion that it developed gradually as a system of grunts, hisses and cries and must have been a very simple affair in the beginning. However, when we observe the language behavior of what we regard as primitive cultures, we find it surprisingly complicated. It was believed that an Eskimo must have at the tip of his tongue a vocabulary of more than 10, 000 words so as to get along reasonable well, much larger than the active vocabulary of an average businessman who speaks English. Moreover, these Eskimo words are far more highly inflected than those of any of the well-known European languages, for a single noun can be spoken or written in some hundred different forms, each having a precise meaning different from that of any other. The forms of the verbs are even more multiple. The Eskimo language is, therefore, one of the most difficult in the world to learn, with the result that almost no traders or explorers have even tried to learn it. Consequently, there has grown up, in communication between Eskimos and whites, a jargon similar to the pidgin English used in Old China, with a vocabulary of from 300 to 600 uninflected words. Most of them are derived from Eskimo but some are derived from English, Danish, Spanish, Hawaiian and other languages. It is this jargon that is usually referred to by travelers as the Eskimo language.无