64 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



languages. As a process of definite grammatical significance, how- 

 ever, musical accent is not so wide-spread. It is found, to give but one 

 example, in the earlier stages of Indogermanic, as exemplified, among 

 others, by classical Greek and by Lithuanian. 



Having thus briefly reviewed the various grammatical processes 

 used by different languages, we may ask ourselves whether the map- 

 ping out of the distribution of these processes would be of more serv- 

 ice to us in our quest of the main types of language than we have 

 found the grammatical treatment of logical concepts to be. Here a 

 difficulty presents itself. If each linguistic stock were characterized 

 by the use of just one or almost entirely one formal process, it would 

 not be difficult to classify all languages rather satisfactorily on the 

 basis of form. But there are great' differences in this respect. A 

 minority of linguistic stocks content themselves with a consistent and 

 thoroughgoing use of one process, as does Eskimo with its suffixing 

 of grammatical elements, but by far the larger number make use of 

 so many that their classification becomes difficult, not to say arbitrary. 

 Thus in Greek alone every one of the processes named above, excepting 

 consonant change, can be exemplified. Even if we limit ourselves to a 

 consideration of grammatical processes employed to express the rela- 

 tional concepts, we shall find the same difficulty, for the same language 

 not infrequently makes use of several distinct processes for concepts 

 of this class. 



On a closer study of linguistic morphology, however, we find that 

 it is possible to look at the matter of form in language from a differ- 

 ent, at the same time more generalized, point of view than from that 

 of the formal processes employed themselves. This new point of view 

 has regard to the inner coherence of the words produced by the opera- 

 tion of the various gramm .acal processes, in other words, to the rela- 

 tive degree of unity which the stem or unmodified word plus its vari- 

 ous grammatical increments or modifications possesses, emphasis being 

 particularly laid on the degree of unity which the grammatical proc- 

 esses bring about between the stem and the increments which express 

 relational concepts. On the basis of this formal criterion we may 

 classify languages, at least for the purposes of this paper, into the 

 three main types of linguistic morphology generally recognized. The 

 first type is characterized by the use of words which allow of no gram- 

 matical modification whatever, in other words the so-called isolating 

 type. In a language of this type all relational concepts are expressed 

 by means of the one simple device of juxtaposing words in a definite 

 order, the words themselves remaining unchangeable units that, ac- 

 cording to their position in the sentence, receive various relational 

 values. The classical example of such a language is Chinese, an illus- 

 tration from which will serve as an example of the isolating type of 



