io2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



a pure and simple succession of isolated roots. It is evident that the 

 first process of elocution was of this character. Expression was found 

 in uttering, one after another, monosyllables which were sometimes 

 undoubtedly onomatopoetic imitations of noises, sounds, and cries. 



Existing monosyllabic languages have singularly improved upon 

 this primitive process, while they have still remained monosyllabic. 

 They have not created grammar, there being no structure in their 

 words, but they have created a syntax. This syntax consists in the 

 position in the phrase given to the different root-words. The place 

 which any monosyllable occupies in the phrase determines the mean- 

 ing of that monosyllable. The same process of syntactical arrange- 

 ment comes back into use in the existing analytical languages that are 

 most advanced in decadence. When, for example, we say in English, 

 " Peter likes John," we are obliged to put the word Peter at the be- 

 ginning of the phrase, and John at the end ; for both words have lost 

 every morphological distinction that could show which of them is the 

 subject and which the object. It is not so in the synthetical lan- 

 guages in which the subject and the object are distinguished by the 

 form of the word, and position in the phrase is of little importance. 

 Thus, to say in Latin that the Helvetians sent legates, we say indif- 

 ferently, Uelvetii legatos miserunt, or Legatos miserunt Helvetii ; the 

 form in which the two nouns are put defining their respective func- 

 tions. 



In Chinese, the root which is to be the subject, or nominative in a 

 phrase, takes its place before the root that has the significance of a 

 verb. By thus assigning to the subject-word a fixed place in the 

 phrase, the want of the grammatical elements which in Greek and 

 Latin characterize the nominative case is obviated. In a monosyllabic 

 language, in short, there is no grammar ; there are no substantive 

 forms, no verbal forms, or declensions, or conjugations, or gender, 

 moods, or tenses, nothing but syntax, or "putting together.'* This, 

 moreover, is what we shall more easily grasp in studying the transi- 

 tion from monosyllablism to agglutination, or the passage from the 

 first to the second linguistic phase. 



This transition or evolution takes place in a very simple way. 

 Some word-roots abdicate a part of their meaning and become simple 

 elements of relation, while others retain their full and independent 

 signification. In Chinese and in other existing monosyllabic lan- 

 guages, we find this division of words into "full" words (which we 

 may translate into English by a noun or a verb) and " vacant " words, 

 the primary sense of which has gradually become obscured, and which 

 have come to define more exactly or limit the broad sense of the " full" 

 words. It is an interesting fact that a similar process has been em- 

 ployed at a much later stage in languages which have reached a high 

 degree of development. Thus, in Latin, besides the word circus, 

 a circle, we find circum, around, a kind of vacant word, denoting 



