NATIONAL ACADEMY BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS VOL. VIII 



that had previously ' served him as presidential address be- 

 fore the Anthropological Society of Washington in 1880. It 

 treats the specialization of the grammatic processes, the dif- 

 ferentiation of the parts of speech, and the integration of the 

 sentence, and affords profitable reading for persons of classical 

 training, because it opens up surprising possibilities in the way 

 of linguistic structure to which the languages of Europe are 

 strangers. "Many conditions and qualifications appear in the 

 verb [of the Indian languages] which in English and other 

 civilized languages appear as adverbs and adverbial phrases 

 and clauses." Again, Indian verbs often express a larger 

 meaning than we are accustomed to compress into a single 

 word; thus "the English verb to go may be represented [in an 

 Indian language] by a word signifying to go home; another, 

 go away from home; another, go to a place other than 

 home ; . . . one, to go up ; another, to go down ; . . . 

 another, go up a valley ; another, go up a river." But "it is in 

 the genders of the article pronouns that the greatest difficulty 

 may be found. The student must entirely free his mind of 

 the idea that gender is simply a distinction of sex. 

 Often by these genders all objects are classified by character- 

 istics found in their attributes or supposed constitution. Thus 

 we may have the animate and inanimate, one or both, divided 

 into the standing, the sitting, and the lying; or they may be 

 divided into the watery, the mushy, the earthy, the stony, the 

 woody, and the fleshy." 



The extracts quoted below indicate some of the chief con- 

 clusions reached, and at the same time point out Powell's prac- 

 tical view of linguistic evolution a view as natural in a man 

 of his surroundings and training as it would be unnatural in a 

 graduate of Eton and Oxford. "It is worthy of remark," he 

 writes, "that all paradigmatic inflection in a civilized tongue 

 is a relic of its barbarous condition. When the parts of speech 

 are fully differentiated and the process of placement fully 

 specialized, so that the order of words in sentences has its full 

 significance, no useful purpose is subserved by inflection' 5 

 (p. 15). He insisted that inflection is not economical, because 

 "the speaker is compelled, in the choice of a word to express 

 his idea, to think of a multiplicity of things which have no con- 



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