346 PHYSIOLOGY CHAP. 



parts of speech. By combining gestures of the body, head, and 

 arms, they made long speeches, even making use of abbreviations, 

 just as in pictographic writing. 



We have no desire to encroach upon the domain of comparative 

 philology, and will therefore merely point out that the numberless 

 dialects and tongues spoken by man fall into three fundamental 

 linguistic groups, according to their structural characteristics : 

 (a) monosyllabic or isolant ; (b) agglutinant ; (c) inflected. 



In monosyllabic languages (peculiar to the Chinese, Indo- 

 Chinese, and Thibetan) each word is invariable ; there are neither 

 declensions nor conjugations, and the relative meaning of a word 

 depends upon its position in the sentence. Since there are many 

 homophonous words having different meanings, they are distin- 

 guished from one another by the way in which they are pronounced 

 or by their pitch. 



In agglutinant languages, which are those most commonly 

 spoken, the words are formed of several elements put together of 

 which one alone has a specific value of its own, whilst the others 

 merely serve to define it more closely, and have therefore a purely 

 relative meaning. The fundamental element is the so-called 

 root, the others are termed affixes (prefixes or suffixes, according to 

 whether they precede or follow the root), and are usually roots 

 which have become obsolete, have lost their original meaning, and 

 are only used as determinative particles. 



The difference between the inflected languages (spoken by 

 Indo Europeans) and those belonging to the agglutinant group 

 lies in the fact that in the former the root may be modified in 

 order to express special relations existing between it and other 

 roots. Sometimes the prefix or suffix undergoes this change, or 

 inflection, instead of the root. 



No less interesting is the study of the means devised by 

 different races for the communication of their ideas and psychical 

 and physiological conditions at a distance of space and time. 



We will not dwell upon the signals used by various primitive 

 races to communicate with one another beyond the range of the 

 human voice, but will confine our attention to some of the more 

 important points connected with the chief means of communi- 

 cation irrespective of space and time, writing, or the graphic 

 symbolic representation of the spoken language. 



Writing, as the symbolic representation of words (alphabetical 

 writing), may be regarded as a recent acquisition of civilised 

 nations. It was in all probability preceded by another non- 

 symbolical form of representation, the direct graphic representation 

 of things and objects, the so-called ideographic or pictographic 

 writing which is in use to this day amongst some of the lower 

 races. 



Pictography probably gave birth to the figurative hieroglyphic 



