"74 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [bdll. 46 



V. CHARACTERISTICS OF AMERICAN LANGUAGES 



In older treatises of the languages of the world, languages have 

 often been classified as isolating, agglutinating, polysynthetic, and 

 inflecting languages. Chinese is generally given as an example of an 

 isolating language. The agglutinating languages are represented by 

 the Ural-Altaic languages of northern Asia; polysynthetic languages, 

 by the languages of America; and inflecting languages, by the Indo- 

 European and Semitic languages. The essential traits of these four 

 groups are: That in the first, sentences are expressed solely by the 

 juxtaposition of unchangeable elements; in the agglutinating lan- 

 guages, a single stem is modified by the attachment of numerous 

 formative elements which modify the fundamental idea of the stem; 

 in polysynthetic languages, a large number of distinct ideas are 

 amalgamated by grammatical processes and form a single word, with- 

 out any morphological distinction between the formal elements in 

 the sentence and the contents of the sentence; and in the inflecting 

 languages, on the other hand, a sharp distinction is made between 

 formal elements and the material contents of the sentence, and stems 

 are modified solely according to the logical forms in which they appear 

 in the sentence. 



An example of what is meant by polysynthesis is given, for instance, 

 in the following Eskimo word: taJcusariaHorumagaluarnerpdf do you 



THINK HE REALLY INTENDS TO GO TO LOOK AFTER IT? {ta]LUSar[pd] he 



looks after it; -iartor[poq] he goes to; -uma[vog] he intends to; 

 -\g]alvxir[poq] he does so — but; -ner[poq] do you think he — ; -a, 

 interrogation, third person.) It will be recognized here, that there 

 is no correspondence between the suffixed elements of the funda- 

 mental stem and the formal elements that appear in the Indo- 

 European languages, but that a great variety of ideas are expressed 

 by the long series of suffixes. Another example of similar kind is 

 the Tsimshian word t-yuJc-ligi-lo-d^ sp-ddLEt he began to put it 

 DOWN somewhere INSIDE (t, he; yule to begin; ligi somewhere; lo in; 

 d'Ep down; ddL to put down; -t it). 



American languages have also been designated as incorporating 

 languages, by which is meant a tendency to incorporate the object of 

 the sentence, either nominal or pronominal, in the verbal expression. 

 Examples of this tendency are the Mexican ni-petla-tsiwa i make 

 mats (petla-tl mat) ; or the Pawnee tA-t-i'tka'wit i dig dirt (Ia- indie- 



