THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE. 167 



their primitive processes, all of which is incontestably true. The only 

 i-emark we would offer here is that the term monosyllabic when 

 applied as above to existing languages should be qualified in some 

 way ; as we have ?to example on record of a purely monosyllabic 

 language and that to bring forward the Chinese, as he does, as an 

 example of this class is to talk about a matter we are ignorant of 

 and to put ourselves in conflict with the authority of those whose schol- 

 arshi]) in that tongue is beyond dispute. I refer here, in particular, 

 to such men as Prof. Douglas, of British Museum, and Professor of 

 Chinese, at King's College, London, the author of an exceedingly 

 interesting History of the Chinese people, who in this connection 

 states that the Chinese language like most others has suffered loss 

 through phonetic decay. Even at the present day it is as I have 

 shown, he says, less purely a monosyllabic language than has generally 

 been supposed, but in bygone ages there are evidences that it w^as 

 poly -syllabic. We find for instance many words with aspirates in 

 them which point to the loss of a syllable, for example, such a woid 

 as K'an leads us to the conclusion that in all probability it wa.'* 

 originally Kahan. But there are other combinations of characters 

 which are unmistakably representations of polysyllabic words, 

 and a close examination of any of the dialects shows that 

 these words bear no inconsiderable proportion to the entire 

 number of words. Tn Pekingese these pc s'syllabic woi'ds are very 

 numerous, partly owing no doubt to the introduction of Manchu and 

 Mongolian words into the vocabulai-y. But there are also quite 

 enough native polysyllabic words to redeem the spoken language at 

 least from the charge of monosyllabism. A study of a few pages 

 also of Sir Thos. Wade's Tzu Erh Chi is instructive reading on this 

 head. But to return. From this point Mons. Havelocque goes on to 

 show how the agglutinative stage is evolved out of the monosyllabic,, 

 but confesses to a difficulty in the evolution of the agglutinative into 

 the flexional or synthetic, and as this has long been felt to 1) ■ a 

 difficulty we would beg to call attention here to the numerous tongues 

 of the American group or family of languages as offering and affording 

 the very evidence we need to show how the monosyllabic or agglu- 

 tinative or incorporative may pass into the flexional or synthetic. 



Humboldt who first called attention to this family believed 

 that we could clearly discover in them the origin of the tense and 



