1S85.] ®& [Brinton. 



the object and subject of the verb, thus subordinating them to 

 the notion of action. It is " an indispensable basis " of this 

 system that there should be a difference in the form of words 

 when incorporated and when not. This applies in a measure to 

 nouns and verbals, but especially to pronouns, and Humboldt 

 names it as "the characteristic tendency" of American lan- 

 guages, and one directly drawn from their incorporative plan, 

 that the personal pronouns, both subjective and objective, used 

 in connection with the verbs, are of a different form from the 

 independent personal pronouns, either greatly abbreviated or 

 from wholly different roots. Outside of the verbal thus formed 

 as the central point of the sentence, there is no syntax, no in- 

 flections, no declension of nouns or adjectives.* 



Humboldt was far from saying that the incorporative system 

 was exclusively seen in American languages, any more than that 

 of isolation in Chinese, or flexion in Aryan speech. On the con- 

 trary, he distinctly states that every language he had examined 

 shows traces of all three plans ; but the preponderance of one 

 plan over the other is so marked and so distinctive that they 

 afford us the best means known for the morphological classifica- 

 tion of languages, especially as these traits arise from psycho- 

 logical operations widely diverse and of no small influence on 

 the development of the intellect.^ 



Dr. Francis Lieber, in an essay on " The Plan of Thought in 

 American Languages,"! objected to the terms poly synthesis and 

 incorporation that " they begin at the wrong end ; for these names 

 indicate that that which has been separated is put together, as if 

 man began with analysis, whereas he ends with it." He there- 

 fore proposed the noun holophrasis with its adjective holophras- 



* See Ueoer die Verschiedenheit, etc., pp. 170-173, 323-6, etc. 



t Ibid, p. 167. All references are to the edition of 1818. For a full discussion of 

 Wilhelm von Humboldt's views on this and allied topics see the work above 

 referred to, The Philosophic Grammar of American Languages as set forth by Wil- 

 helm von Humboldt ; with the Translation of an unpublished Memoir by Mm on the 

 American Verbs (Philadelphia, 1885). 



X Published in H. R. Schoolcraft's History and Statistics of the Indian Tribes of 

 th: United Stales. Vol. ii, pp. 316-310 (Washington, 1S53). 



