396 LANGUAGE AND EACE. 



as a further difference, Chinese is monosyllabic, whereas 

 they are polysyllabic. 



Again, the Hamitic group of tongues, which includes the 

 Ancient Egyptian, the Coptic, the Berber, etc., has consider- 

 able affinity with the Semitic group, and at the same time 

 with the old Accadian class of the Agglutinate languages.. 

 The language of the Basques, viz., Euskara, while having 

 many resemblances to the Ugro-Altaic tongues, is also in- 

 flected to a very noteworthy degree. The Dravidian group 

 of languages, spoken in South India, including Tamil, 

 Telugu, Santal, etc., is in a similar condition ; for while some 

 philologists have classed it with the inflectional Aryan, 

 others have included it in the Agglutinate group. A few 

 days ago I asked a friend, now living in Clifton, who was 

 in South India for many years, and who is now examiner in 

 Tamil for the Civil Service, his view of the question, and he 

 says it is a "very largely inflected" language, and inclines to 

 the opinion that it should be classed with the Aryan group. 



Not only are there intermediate forms between the three 

 chief groups, but different members of each group contrast 

 in character very markedly with each other. Thus the Ag- 

 glutinate group includes two sub-groups — the Polysynthetic 

 and the Incorporative — the former of • which comprises the 

 aboriginal languages of North and South America. In 

 them the parts of the sentence are fused together into a long 

 compound ; the several words of which it is built up being 

 abbreviated or cut down to root-forms, by the same kind of 

 accentual instinct which makes the French drop their final 

 letters in pronunciation, though each fragment still remains 

 an independent word of equal force with the rest. 



Thus, in Mexican, Si priest is addressed as notlazomahuiz- 

 teopixcatdtzin, made up of no — tlazontli — mahuiztic — teo- 

 pixqui — tatli^ i.e., my esteemed revered god-keeper father 



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