COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY, 24$ 



tained upon the question of language-development. Or, to 

 borrow terms from another science, I will first deal with 

 the morphology of the main divisions of the language-king- 

 dom, and then proceed to consider the question of their 

 phylogeny. 



More than a thousand languages exist as "living" 

 languages, no one of which is intelligible to the speakers of 

 another. These separate languages, however, are obviously 

 divisible into families — all the members of each family being 

 more or less closely allied, while members of different families 

 do not present any such evidence of genetic affinity. The 

 test of genetic affinity is resemblance in structure, grammar, 

 and roots. Judged by this test, the thousand or more living 

 languages are classified by Professor Friedrich Miiller under 

 " about one hundred families." * Therefore, again to borrow 

 biological terms, we may say that there are about one 

 thousand existing "species" of language, which fall into 

 about one hundred "genera" — all the species in each genus 

 being undoubtedly connected by the ties of genetic affinity. 



But besides these species and genera of language, there 

 are what may be termed "orders" — or much larger divisions, 

 each comprising many of the genera. By philologists these 

 orders are usually called " groups," and whether or not there 

 is any genetic relation among them is still an unsettled 

 question. From the very earliest days of true linguistic 

 research, three of these groups have been recognized, and 

 called respectively, (i) the Isolating, (2) the Agglutinative, 

 and (3) the Inflectional. I will first explain the meaning 

 which these names are intended to bear, and then proceed to 

 consider the results of more recent research upon the question 

 of their phylogeny. 



In the Isolating forms of language every word stands by 

 itself, without being capable of inflectional change for 

 purposes of grammatical construction, and without admitting 



♦ Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, I. i. 77- This estimate is accepted by 

 Professor Sayce, Introduction to the Science of Lan^iage, vol. ii., p. 32. 



