THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE. 167 



their primitive processes, all of which is incontestably true. The only 

 remark we would offer hei'e is that the term Tnonosyllahic when 

 applied as above to existing languages should be qualified in some 

 way ; as we have no example on record of a purely monosyllabic 

 language and that to bring forward the Chinese, as he does, as an 

 example of this class is to talk about a matter we are ignorant of 

 and to put ourselves in conflict with the authoi-ity of those whose schol- 

 arship in that tongue is beyond dispute. I refer here, in particular, 

 to such men as Prof. Douglas, of British Museum, and Professor of 

 Chinese, at King's College, London, the author of an exceedingly 

 interesting History of the Chinese people, who in this connection 

 states that the Chinese language like most others has suffered loss 

 thi'ough phonetic decay. Even at the present day it is as I have 

 shown, he says, less purely a monos^'llabic language than has generally 

 been supposed, but in bygone ages there are evidences that it was 

 poly-syllahic. We find for instance many words with aspirates in 

 them which point to the loss of a syllable, for example, such a word 

 as K'an leads us to the conclusion that in all probability it was 

 originally Kahan. But thei-e are other combinations of characters 

 which are unmistakably representations of polysyllabic words, 

 and a close examinatioa of any of the dialects shows that 

 these words bear no inconsiderable propoi-tion to the entire 

 number of words. In Pekingese these polysyllabic words are very- 

 numerous, partly owing no doubt to the introduction of Manchu and 

 Mongolian words into the vocabulary. But there are also quite 

 enough native polysyllabic words to redeem the spoken language at 

 least from the charge of monosyllabism. A study of a few pages 

 also of Sir Thos. Wade's Tzu Erh Chi is instructive reading on this 

 head. But to retui-n. From this point Mons. Havelocque goes on to 

 show how the agglutinative stage is evolved out of the monosyllabic, 

 but confesses to a difliculty in the evolution of the agglutinative into 

 the flexional or synthetic, and as this has long been felt to b > a 

 difficulty we would beg to call attention here to the numerous tongues 

 of the American group or family of languages as offering and aflEbrding 

 the very evidence we need to show how the monosyllabic or agglu- 

 tinative or incorporative may pass into the flexional or synthetic. 



Humboldt who first called attention to this family believed 

 that we could clearly discover in them the origin of the tense and 



