594 ANNUAL EEPOKT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1912. 



rency of meaning. The verb form gel-ir-ler, which may be roughly 

 translated as "they come," is also instructive from our present point 

 of view; the ending -ler or -lar is quite mechanically used to indicate 

 the concept of plurality, whether in noun or verb, so that a verb form 

 "they come," really " come-plural," is to some extent parallel to a 

 noun form like "books," really "book-plural." Here we see clearly 

 the mechanical regularity with which a logical concept and its corre- 

 sponding grammatical element are associated. 



In the third, the inflective, type of language, while a word may be 

 analyzed into a radical portion and a number of subordinate gram- 

 matical elements, it is to be noted that the unity formed by the two is 

 a very firm one, moreover that there is by no means a mechanical one- 

 to-one correspondence between concept and grammatical element. 

 An example from Latin, a typical inflective language, will illustrate 

 the difference between the agglutinative and inflective types. In a 

 sentence like video homines "I see the men," it is true that the verb 

 form video may be analyzed into a radical portion vide- and a personal 

 ending -o, also that the noun form Tiomines may be analyzed into a rad- 

 ical portion Jiomin- and an ending -es which combines the concepts of 

 plurality with objectivity; that is, a concept of number with one of 

 case. But, and here comes the significant point, these words, when 

 stripped of their endings, cease to have even a semblance of meaning, 

 in other words, the endings are not merely agglutinated on to fidly 

 formed words, but form firm word-units with the stems to which they 

 are attached; the absolute or rather subjective form homo, "man," is 

 quite distinct from the stem homin- which we have obtained by analy- 

 sis. Moreover, it should be noted that the ending -o is not mechani- 

 cally associated with the concept of subjectivity of the first person 

 singular, as is evidenced by such forms as vidi "I saw" and videam 

 "I may see"; in the ending -es of homines the lack of the mechanical 

 association I have spoken of is even more pronounced, for not only 

 are there in Latin many other noun endings which perform the same 

 fimction, but the ending does not even express a single concept, but, 

 as we have seen, a combined one. 



The term polysynthetic is often employed to designate a fourth 

 type of language represented chiefly in aboriginal America, but, as has 

 been shown in another connection, it refers rather to the content of a 

 morphologic system than to its form, and hence is not strictly parallel 

 as a classificatory term to the three we have just examined. As a 

 matter of fact, there are iioly synthetic languages in America which 

 are at the same time agglutinative, others which are at the same time 

 inflective. 



It should be carefull}^ borne in mind that the terms isolating, agglu- 

 tinative, and inflective make no necessary implications as to the logical 

 concepts the language makes use of in its grammatical system, nor is 



