LANGUAGE AND EACE. 401 



Here perliaps is the most sriitable place to mention the 

 fact that in all languages, and most markedly in inflectional 

 ones, there are two stages — a Synthetic and an Analytic. 

 First there is a tendency to the building up of words from 

 simpler forms : this is most marked in inflectional tongues, 

 which express different relations, by additions or changes of 

 sounds, within or at the end of the words. But most primi- 

 tive grammars, such as the agglutinate Eskimo, show very 

 considerable synthetic complexity. As the language grows 

 older, there follows a tendency for the additions to become 

 broken down and wasted ; this is the Analytic stage, in 

 which the attenuated compounds are used to express singly, 

 b}^ the aid of position, the various relations into which a 

 sentence may be resolved, and the words tend to become 

 monosyllabic. At first sight it might be thought that the 

 result of analysis would be to reduce an inflectional to the 

 condition of an isolating tongue ; but this is not so. Perhaps 

 the best illustration of the difference between the analytical 

 and isolating forms is a sentence taken from Schleicher's 

 "Languages of Europe " : — " The king spoke : Sage ! Since 

 thou dost not count a thousand miles far to come, wilt thou 

 not also have brought something for the welfare of my king- 

 dom ? " This, when expressed in Chinese, presents the 

 following unintelligible form : — " King, speak : Sage ! Not 

 for a thousand mile and come; also will have use gain me 

 kingdom, hey ? " When an inflectional language has become 

 analytic, the relations of the various words in a sentence is 

 expressed chiefly by the aid of little words, such as fo, q/", 

 for^ etc. 



Up to about 1100 A.D. English was a synthetic language, 

 but since then it has been gradually becoming analytic ; and 

 this character it now possesses in a greater degree than any 

 other tongue. Persian, French, and Danish are also mainly 



