VARIETIES OF HUMAN SPEECH SAPIE. 591 



road and underestimate, and indeed is found widely spread among the 

 most diverse linguistic stocks. In some languages, as in the Sioux 

 and Paiute of oui' own country, compounding of verb stems is fre- 

 quent, as illustrated by such forms as to eat-stand; that is, to eat while 

 standing; on the other hand, in not a few linguistic stocks, as the 

 widespread Athabascan stock of North America and in tho Semitic lan- 

 guages, compounding as a regular process is almost or entirely lacldng. 

 Perhaps the most commonly used formal method of all is affixing; that 

 is, the appending of grammatical elements to a word or to the body 

 or stem of a word; the two most common varieties of affixing are 

 prefixing and suffixing, examples of which have been already given 

 from English. Probably the majority of linguistic stocks make use 

 of both prefixes and suffixes, though they difler greatly as to the rel- 

 ative importance to be attached to these two classes of elements. 

 Thus, while both in Indogermanic and in the Bantu languages of 

 Africa prefixes and sulfixes are to be found, we must note that the 

 greater part of the grammatical machinery of Indogermanic is carried 

 on by its suffixes, wliile it is the prefixes that in Bantu take the lion's 

 share of grammatical work. There are also not a few linguistic stocks 

 in which suffixing as a process is greatly developed, wliile prefixing is 

 entirely unknown; such are Ural-Altaic, Esldmo, and the Kwakiutl 

 and Nootka languages of British Columbia. On tho other hand, lan- 

 guages in which prefixes are used, but no suffixes, seem to be quite 

 rare. A third variety of affixing, kno^\^l as infixing, consists in insert- 

 ing a grammatical element into the very body of a stem; though not 

 nearly so ^^idespread as either prefixing or suffixing, it is a well- 

 attested linguistic device in Malayan, Siouan, and elsewhere. Still 

 another wides{)rcad grammatical process is reduplication; that is, the 

 repetition of the whole or, generally, only part of the stem of a word ; 

 in Indogermanic we are familiar with this process in tho formation, 

 for instance, of the Greek pei'fect, while in many AnK^rican Indian 

 languages, though in far from all, the process is used to denote 

 repeated activity. Of a more subtle character than the grammatical 

 processes briefly reviewed thus far is internal vowel or consonant change. 

 The former of these has been already exemplified by the English words 

 feet and swam as contrasted with foot and swim; it attains perhaps its 

 greatest degree of development in the Semitic languages. The latter, 

 internal consonant change, is on the whole a somewhat rare phenom- 

 enon, yet finds an illustration in English in at least one group of cases. 

 Beside such nouns as house, mouse, and teeth, wo have derived verbs 

 such as to house, mouse around, and teeth; in other words a certain 

 class of verbs is derived from corres]:)onding nouns by tho changing 

 of the final voiceless consonants of the latter to the corresponding 

 voiced consonants. In several non-Indogermanic languages, as in 

 Takelma of southwestern Oregon and in Fulbc of the Soudan, such 



