66 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



matical elements, it is to be noted that the unity formed by the two is 

 a very firm one, moreover that there is by no means a mechanical one- 

 to-one correspondence between concept and grammatical element. An 

 example from Latin, a typical inflective language, will illustrate the 

 difference between the agglutinative and inflective types. In a sen- 

 tence like video homines " I see the men," it is true that the verb form 

 video may be analyzed into a radical portion vide- and a personal end- 

 ing -o, also that the noun form homines may be analyzed into a radical 

 portion homin- and an ending -Ms which combines the concepts of 

 plurality with objectivity, that is, a concept of number with one of 

 case. But, and here comes the significant point, these words, when 

 stripped of their endings, cease to have even a semblance of meaning, 

 in other words, the endings are not merely agglutinated on to fully- 

 formed words, but form firm word-units with the stems to which they 

 are attached; the absolute or rather subjective form homo, "man," is 

 quite distinct from the stem homin- which we have obtained by analy- 

 sis. Moreover, it should be noted that the ending -6 is not mechan- 

 ically associated with the concept of subjectivity of the first person 

 singular, as is evidenced by such forms as vldl " I saw " and videam 

 " I may see"; in the ending -es of homines the lack of the mechanical 

 association I have spoken of is even more pronounced, for not only 

 are there in Latin many other noun endings which perform the same 

 function, but the ending does not even express a single concept, but, as 

 we have seen, a combined one. 



The term poly synthetic is often employed to designate a fourth 

 type of language 1 ^resented chiefly in aboriginal America, but, as has 

 been shown in another connection, it refers rather to the content of a 

 morphologic system than to its form, and hence is not strictly parallel 

 as a classificatory term to the three we have just examined. As a 

 matter of fact, there are polysynthetic languages in America which 

 are at the same time agglutinative, others which are at the same time 

 inflective. 



It should be carefully borne in mind that the terms isolating, agglu- 

 tinative and inflective make no necessary implications as to the logical 

 concepts the language makes use of in its grammatical system, nor is it 

 possible definitely to associate these three types with particular formal 

 processes. It is clear, however, that on the whole languages which 

 make use of word order only for grammatical purposes are isolating in 

 type, further, that languages that make a liberal grammatical use of 

 internal vowel or consonant change may be suspected of being inflective. 

 It was quite customary formerly to look upon the three main types of 

 morphology as steps in a process of historical development, the isolating 

 type representing the most primitive form of speech at which it was 

 possible to arrive, the agglutinative coming next in order as a type 



