514 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



The Phonograph 



Great hopes have often been placed in the phonograph, but except 

 as an indirect accessory, the instrument has proved of no service at all 

 to the student of Indian languages, invaluable though it may be for 

 recording aboriginal music. The phonograph still reproduces sound 

 with too great imperfection. When we hear a record in our own lan- 

 guage we do not observe this fact, because we are listening for what we 

 can recognize rather than for those parts of the diction which we fail 

 to recognize. Just as we can understand a person who mutters or 

 whispers or speaks with indistinct articulation, simply because we suc- 

 ceed in hearing the majority of the sounds which he utters, and our 

 imagination and familiarity with the language enable us to supply the 

 missing sounds, until we think we have actually heard the whole — so 

 we do in listening to a speech record from the phonograph. We can 

 follow the whole of a record made in our own language, even if it is 

 mechanically only tolerable; but we can hardly write down correctly 

 a single word of a record made in an entirely foreign language. This 

 may seem strange, but can easily be verified by experiment. 



The only value of the phonograph to the student of Indian lan- 

 guages is the indirect one of assisting him in the procuring of texts. 

 The Indian informant has every opportunity to speak as naturally and 

 rapidly as he wishes. When a body of such records has been obtained, 

 they can be gone over sentence by sentence, and if need be, word for 

 word, with an interpreter, who speaks as slowly as may be necessary 

 for correct dictation. By this double method the most satisfactory texts 

 can be obtained. Though the labor is increased, and the instrument 

 serves only for the first step of the process, the final product is a perfect 

 written text. 



" Gluing Together " 



Many attempts have been made to describe briefly and generally the 

 grammatical structure of Indian languages. It has been commonly 

 said that the languages, as a class, are agglutinating, tliat they " glue " 

 one element to another to form words. But just such pasting together 

 of word elements into words occurs in many of the Aryan languages, 

 in fact in forms of speech all over the world. It is hard to see why on 

 account of some subsidiary difference the same process should be called 

 " inflection " when it takes place in our own language, and " agglutina- 

 tion " when it occurs in Indian or other idioms. It is probably only a 

 desire to set off ourselves from all other people that is at the bottom of 

 the distinction between " inflecting " and " agglutinating " languages. 



POLYSYNTHESIS 



A different description of American languages is contained in the 

 word " polysynthetic," meaning a high degree of combination. There 



