HUMAN SPEECH 63 



they differ greatly as to the relative importance to be attached to these 

 two classes of elements. Thus, while both in Indogermanic and in the 

 Bantu languages of Africa prefixes and suffixes are to be found, we 

 must note that the greater part of the grammatical machinery of Indo- 

 germanic is carried on by its suffixes, while it is the prefixes that in 

 Bantu take the lion's share of grammatical work. There are also not 

 a few linguistic stocks in which suffixing as a process is greatly de- 

 veloped, while prefixing is entirely unknown; such are Ural-Altaic, 

 Eskimo, and the Kwakiutl and Nootka languages of British Columbia. 

 On the other hand, languages in which prefixes are used, but no suf- 

 fixes, seem to be quite rare. A third variety of affixing, known as in- 

 fixing, consists in inserting a grammatical element into the very body 

 of a stem; though not nearly so wide-spread as either prefixing or 

 suffixing, it is a well-attested linguistic device in Malayan, Siouan, 

 and elsewhere. Still another wide-spread grammatical process is re- 

 duplication, that is, the repetition of the whole or, generally, only 

 part of the stem of a word; in Indogermanic we are familiar with this 

 process in the formation, for instance, of the Greek perfect, while in 

 many American Indian languages, though in far from all, the process 

 is used to denote repeated activity. Of a more subtle character than 

 the grammatical processes briefly reviewed thus far is internal vowel or 

 consonant change. The former of these has been already exemplified 

 by the English words feet and swam as contrasted with foot and 

 swim; it attains perhaps its greatest degree of development in the 

 Semitic languages. The latter, internal consonant change, is on the 

 whole a somewhat rare phenomenon, yet finds an illustration in Eng- 

 lish in at least one group of cases. Beside such nouns as house, mouse, 

 and teeth we have derived verbs such as to house, mouse around, and 

 teeth; in other words a certain class of verbs is derived from corre- 

 sponding nouns by the changing of the final voiceless consonants of 

 the latter to the corresponding voiced consonants. In several non- 

 Indogermanic linguistic stocks, as in Takelma of southwestern Oregon 

 and in Eulbe of the Soudan, such grammatical consonant changes 

 play a very important part. As the last formal grammatical process 

 of importance may be mentioned accent, and here we have to distin- 

 guish between stress accent and musical or pitch accent. An excellent 

 example of the grammatical use of stress accent is afforded in Eng- 

 lish by such pairs of words as conflict and conflict, object and object, 

 the verb being accented on the second syllable, the noun on the first. 

 Musical accent is a far more prevalent phonetic characteristic than is 

 perhaps generally supposed; it is by no means confined to Chinese and 

 neighboring languages of eastern Asia, but is found just as well in 

 many languages of Africa and, as has been recently discovered by Mr. 

 J. P. Harrington and the writer, in a few North American Indian 



