INTRODUCTION. 205 



larity can however be claimed for the large majority of American languages 

 than for those of the Indo-European family, for the simple reason that the 

 former are of the agglutinative type, while the latter are built up after the 

 principles of the inflective tongues. This distinction is founded upon the 

 diiference in degree, by which the fusion of the affixes to the radix has 

 taken place in the earlier stages of linguistic evolution; a fusion which has 

 been much less energetic in agglutinative languages, as the name itself of 

 these latter purports. 



A "Grammar of the Klamath or M4klaks language of Southwestern 

 Oregon" must hence be defined as a scientific or systematic exposition of 

 the natural laws which have been active in forming and evolving the abov(! 

 Western American language, in its whole as well as in its two dialects, that 

 of the Klamath Lake and that of the Modoc people. 



The subject matter I divide as follows: 



The first and fundamental part treats of the Phonology; it enumerates 

 the sounds composing its phonetic material and expounds the laws presiding 

 over the composition and alteration of the sounds. 



The second part treats of the Morphology; it enters into a statement of 

 the laws, logical and conventional, observed in the inflection and deriva- 

 tion of words, and of the application of the phonetic laws to these elements 

 of speech. 



The third part deals with the Sgntax; it defines the laws according to 

 which words are arrayed into sentences or units of speech; it also explains 

 the relations of words among themselves and to the sentence, and of one 

 sentence to another. 



The abbreviations of the Grammar are those indicated on the first 

 pages of both dictionaries. 



