1S85.] '^*^^ [Brinton. 



am treated by bim ;" actually it is, " I, me, treats he." This is 

 not a passive, but simply the idea of the Ego connected with the 

 idea of another acting upon it. 



This is vastly below the level of inflected speech ; for it can- 

 not be too strenuously maintained that the grammatical relations 

 of spoken language are the more perfect and favorable to intel- 

 lectual growth, the more closely they correspond to the logical 

 relations of thought. 



Sometimes what appears as inflection turns out on examina- 

 tion to be merely adjunction. Thus in the Mbaya tongue there 

 are such verbal forms as daJadi, thou wilt throw, nilabuife, he 

 has spun, when the d is the sign of the future, and the n of the 

 perfect. These look like inflections; but in fact d,is simply a 

 relic of quide, hereafter, later, and n stands in the same relation 

 to quine, which means " and i>lso." 



To become true formal elements, all such adjuncts must have 

 completely lost their independent signification ; because if they 

 retain it, their material content requires qualification and rela- 

 tion just as any other stem word. 



A few American languages may have reached this stage. In 

 the Mexican there are the terminals ya or a in the imperfect, 

 the augment o in the preterit, and others in the future. In the 

 Tamanacathe present ends in c/, the preterit in e, the future in c 

 " There is nothing in either of these tongues to show that these 

 tense signs have independent meaning, and therefore there is no 

 reason why they should not„be classed with those of the Greek 

 and Sanscrit as true inflectional elements."* 



§ 13. Psychological Origin of Incorporation. 



This Incorporative plan, which may be considered as distinc- 

 tive of the American stock of languages, is explained in its psycho- 

 logical origin by Humboldt, as the result of an exaltation of 

 the imaginative over the intellectual elements of mind. By this 

 method, the linguistic faculty strives to present to the under- 

 standing the whole thought in the most compact form possible, 

 thus to facilitate its comprehension ; and this it does, because a 



* " Der Mexikanischen kann man am Verbum, in welchem die Zeif en durch 

 einzelne Endbuchstaben und zum Theil offenbar symbolisch bezeichnet wer- 

 den, Flexionen und ein gewisses Streben nach Sanskritischer Worteinheit 

 nicht absprechen." Ueber die Verschiedenheit, etc., Werke, Bd. vi, s. 176. 



