HINTS AND EXPLANATIONS. 57 
bined to form one, no change being made in either. Words may be said 
to be agglutinated when the elementary words are changed but slightly, 
i. e., only to the extent that their original forms are not greatly obscured; 
and words may be said to be inflected when in thec ombination the oft- 
repeated element or formative part has been so changed that its origin is 
obscured. These inflections are used chiefly in the paradigmatic combina- 
tions. 
In the preceding statement it has been assumed that there can be 
recognized, in these combinations of inflection, a theme or root, as it is 
sometimes called, and a formative element. The formative element is used 
with a great many different words to define or qualify them, that is to 
indicate mode, tense, number, person, gender, etc., of verbs, nouns, and 
other parts of speech. 
When in a language juxtaposition is the chief method of combination, 
there may also be distinguished two kinds of elements, in some sense cor- 
responding to themes and formative parts. The theme is a word the mean- 
ing of which is determined by the formative word placed by it; that is, 
the theme is a word having many radically different meanings; with which 
meaning it is to be understood is determined only by the formative word, 
which thus serves as its label. The ways in which the theme words are 
thus labeled by the formative word are very curious, but the subject can- 
not be entered into here. 
When words are combined by compounding, the formative elements 
cannot so readily be distinguished from the theme; nor for the purposes 
under immediate consideration can compounding be well separated from 
agglutination. 
When words are combined by agglutination, theme and formative part 
usually appear. The formative parts are affixes; and affixes may be 
divided into three classes, prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. These affixes are 
often called incorporated particles. 
In those Indian languages where combination is chiefly by agglutina- 
tion, that is, by the use of affixes, 7. ¢., incorporated particles, certain parts 
of the conjugation of the verb, especially those which denote gender, num- 
ber, and person, are affected by the use of article pronouns; but in those 
