202 GKAMMAK OF THE KLAMATH LANGUAGE. 



More diversity may be discovered in the morphologic stnicture than 

 in the phonetics of the languages of America. This variety is so bewilder- 

 ing, so disagreeing with our old-time notions of language, that the classify- 

 ing tendency of our age has endeavored to simplify this apparent chaos by 

 imagining a general category under which all American languages could 

 be classed. Fr. Lieber styled them holophrastic; Du Ponceau called them 

 incorporating, but applied this characteristic only to those languages of 

 America the verbal inflection of which he was able to investigate. The 

 truth is, that no general characteristic can be applied to them that would 

 clearly distinguish them from many other tongues spoken in both hemi- 

 spheres; like these, they are all agglutinative, many of them polysynthetic, 

 though in very different degrees; their transitive verb is governed by its 

 object, the intransitive by its subject; the distinction between noun and 

 verb is morphologically but an imperfect one, though this imperfect dis- 

 tinction varies in degrees between the various linguistic families. Many 

 American tongues do not possess any form for the plural in nouns, while 

 others liave one regular plural ending or a variety of such, or a distributive 

 form answering to some extent to a plural. Some languages have no ad- 

 jectives, strictly considered, but use participial forms instead; others possess 

 real adjectives, and to form their plural reduplicate the latter part of the 

 term. Synthesis is carried to an extreme wherever the verbal inflection 

 is no longer the vehicle of purely relational categories, but associates with 

 them material ideas as those of beginning, continuation, distance and prox- 

 imit}' of the object spoken of, negation, desire, approximation, and others 

 which do not properly belong to the sphere of verbal inflection. The verb 

 with its incorporated subject- and object-pronoun then becomes a whole 

 sentence, and its derivational affixes often accumulate in a degree which is 

 quite perplexing. Other languages run exactly in the opposite direction, 

 that of analytic development. They separate the pronouns from the verb 

 governing them, possess only two tenses, but very few modes and voices, 

 express by separate terms what other languages indicate by derivation, and 

 reject the apparent luxury of nominal cases, of the dual and of the various 

 forms for the plural. 



The diversity of American languages shows itself in their syntax not 



