1885.] 57 [Brinton. 



and overturned the thesis of Duponceau, Humboldt, and Stein- 

 thal, to the effect that there is a process called incorporative or 

 poly synthetic which can be traced in all American languages, and 

 though not in all points confined to them, may fairly and profit- 

 ably be taken as characteristic of them, and indicative of the 

 psychological processes which underlie them. This opinion M. 

 Adam speaks of as a " stereotyped phrase which is absolutely 

 false."* 



So rude an iconoclasm as this must attract our careful con- 

 sideration. Let us ask what M. Adam understands by the terms 

 poly synthesis and incorporation. To our surprise, we shall find 

 that in two works published in the same year, he advances defi- 

 nitions by no means identical. Thus, in his " Examination of 

 Sixteen American Languages," he says, " p>oly synthesis consists 

 essentially in the affixing of subordinate personal pronouns to 

 the noun, the postposition and the verb." In his " Study of Six 

 Languages," he writes : " By polysynthesis I understand the ex- 

 pression in one word of the relations of cause and effect, or of 

 subject and object, "f 



Certainly these two definitions are not convertible, and we are 

 almost constrained to suspect that the writer who gives them 

 was not clear in his own mind as to the nature of the process. 

 At any rate, they differ widely from the plan or method set 

 forth by Humboldt and Steinthal as characteristic of American 

 languages. M. Adam in showing that polys3 r nthesis in his un- 

 derstanding of the term is not confined to or characteristic of 

 American tongues missed the point, and fell into an iynoratio 

 elenchi. 



* " Je suis done autoris6 a conclure qu'il faut tenirpour absolument fausse 

 cette proposition devenue faute d'y avoir regards de pres, une sorte de cliche : 

 que si les langues Americaines different entre elles par la lexique, elles posse- 

 dent neanmoin's en commun une seule et meme grainmaire." Examen gram- 

 matical compare de seize langues Americaines, in the Compte-rendu of the Con- 

 gres international des Americanistes, 1877, Tome ii, p. 242. As no one ever main- 

 tained the unity of American grammar outside of the Einverleibungssystem, it 

 must be to this theory only that M. Adam alludes. 



t Etudes sur Six Langues Americaines, p. 3 (Paris, 1878) ; and compare his Ex- 

 amen Grammatical above quoted, p. 24, 243. 



PROC. AMER. PHTLOS. SOC. XXIII. 121. H. PRINTED OCTOBER 17, 1885. 



