COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY. 24; 



devices of intonation and syntax. It is probable that all 

 these empty words were once themselves full words, the 

 meanings of which gradually became obscured, until they 

 acquired a purely arbitrary^ use for the purpose of defining the 

 sense in which other words were to be understood — just as 

 our word " like," in its degenerated form of " ly," is now 

 employed to give adjectives the force of adverbs ; although, of 

 course, there is the difference that in isolating tongues the 

 empty or defining words are not fused into the full ones, but 

 themselves remain isolated. In the opinion of many philo- 

 logists, however, " the use of accessory words, in order to 

 impart the required precision to the principal terms, is the 

 path that leads from monosyllabic to the agglutinative 

 state." * 



This Agglutinative, or, as it is sometimes called, Agglo- 

 merative state belongs to languages of the second order. Here 

 the words which serve the purpose of modifying constants, 

 or marks of relationship, become fusible with the words which 

 they serve to modify or define, so as to constitute single 

 though polysyllabic compounds, as in the above example, 

 " un-cost-li-ness." I have already remarked that by long usage 

 many of these modifying constants have had their own 

 original meanings as independent words so completely 

 obscured as to baffle the researches of philologists. 



If all our words had been formed on the type of this 

 example un-cost-li-ness, English would have been an aggluti- 

 native language. But, as a matter of fact, English, like the 

 rest of the group to which it mainly belongs, has adopted the 

 device of inflecting many of its words (or, rather, has inherited 

 this device from some of its progenitors), and thus belongs to 

 the third order of languages which I have mentioned, namely, 

 the Inflective. Languages of this type are also often termed 

 Transpositive, because the words now admit of being shifted 

 about as to their relative positions in a sentence, without the 

 meaning being thereby affected. That is to say, relations 

 between words are now marked much less by syntax, and 



• Hovelacque, Science of Language, EnglLsh trans., p. yj. 



17 



