The Languages of the Pacific' 



By J. Macmillan Brown 



One of the fallacies that (lo,y the science of language is that 

 there are three types of language, isolating, agglutinative and 

 inflectional, separated strictly from one another. It was one of 

 the too early generalisations of ]\Iax Midler wln^, coming from 

 Germany with a knowledge of Sanskrit, ruled with absolute author- 

 ity the science of philology in the English speaking world during 

 the latter part of the nineteenth century. This theory together 

 with the idea that all classical myths have a philological origin, is 

 now discounted. It is found that almost all languages have some 

 trace or relic of each type. 



The Chinese is taken as the typical instance of the isolating 

 language ; each word may be used in various grammatical relations 

 without any formal element to indicate these relations. But modern 

 English has become practically an isolating language with only 

 particles to indicate these relationships and a few relics in the 

 pronouns of the old inflectional system. Polynesian is on the same 

 footing; a worrl may be a noun, a verb or an adjective without any 

 distinctive formal mark : and particles indicate the relationship, 

 whilst in the pronouns, as in English, there remains a few relics 

 of inflection. The Japanese is the Pacific (^cean language that best 

 illustrates the agglutinating t}-pe. The formal elements retain so 

 much of their original indei)endence that a(lverl),s and honorific 

 words may he thrust in between them and the words they pilot 

 grammatically. Ihit the language has nnich that may be said to be 

 inflectional and has some trace of the isolating. English, likewise, 

 shows a tendency to the agglutinative in, for example, the frequent 

 separation of the formal to of the infinitive by an adverb, or even a 

 phrase, from the verb. So in Polynesian the ia, a. that added to the 

 verb makes the passive, shows in some groups a tendency to assert 



Lecture delivered before The Hawaiian Historical Society September 5, 1918. 



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