70 INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF INDIAN LANGUAGES. 
in many of the dissertations on Indian languages found in the literature of 
the subject. 
The assumed superiority of the Greek and Latin languages to the Eng- 
lish and other modern civilized tongues, has in part been the cause of the 
many erroneous conceptions of the rank of Indian tongues. When the 
student discovers that many of the characteristics of the classic languages 
appear in the Indian which are to a greater or less extent lost in the mod- 
ern civilized languages, he has at once assumed the superiority of the Indian 
tongue ; and when he has further discovered that some of these character- 
istics are even more highly developed than in the classic ones he has been 
led to still further exalt them. This exaggeration has still another cause. 
The many curious linguistic devices by which great specification of expres- 
sion is attained has led some scholars into undue admiration, as they have 
failed to appreciate the loss in the economy and power which these pecul- 
iar methods entail. 
It is proposed to set forth the rank of Indian languages by briefly com- 
paring them with the English and incidentally with some other languages. 
In the comparison we have but fragmentary materials for use. Any 
extended discussion, therefore, would be out of place, but it is believed 
that a brief statement of the matter will result in clearing away the errors 
into which some persons have fallen. 
This leads us to speak of language as organized. 
By the grammatie processes mentioned in the last section, language 
is organized. Organization postulates the differentiation of organs and 
their combination into integers. The integers of language are sentences, 
and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, 
consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of 
the sentence. For example, let us take the words, John, father, and love. 
John is the name of an individual; love is the name of a mental action, 
and father the name of a person. We put them together, John loves father, 
and they express a thought; John becomes a noun, and is the subject of 
the sentence; love becomes a verb, and is the predicant; father a noun, and 
is the object; and we now have an organized sentence. A sentence requires 
