242 PHYSICAL INVESTIGATION. [PART I. 



guages, which, like the Chinese, in the absence of all separa- 

 tion of the parts of speech, express the relations by the position 

 of the words. To these languages belongs, probably, the idiom 

 of the Yebus in the west of Benin (d'Avezac) ; whether, also, 

 that of the Othomi in Central America is as yet doubtful. 1 



A language is, undoubtedly, more perfect in proportion as 

 all the relations of the individual ideas occurring in a sen- 

 tence may be easily recognized. The means of effecting this 

 are innumerable; such as the formation of the particular 

 word-forms added to substantive words designating a certain 

 modification of the sense of the latter : for instance, the future, 

 the past, the negation, the possibility of an action ; the varia- 

 tion in the sounds occurring in the words modifying their 

 sense and relation to others ; the combination of several words 

 in one word, etc. 



The American languages, which are called polysynthetic, 

 are so characterized that they usually consist of an agglomera- 

 tion of independent words : thus, in the Sahaptin, hi-tau-tuala- 

 wihnan-kau-na, means, he travels past in a rainy night ; hi, he; 

 tau, refers to something in the night ; tuala, to something that 

 is done in rain ; wihnan, from wihnasa, to travel on foot ; kau, 

 from kokauna, to pass by ; na designates the aorist and the 

 direction (Hale) . In the Dakota, b a, as a prefix of the verb 

 or adjective, designates that the action has been effected by 

 cutting ; bo, by shooting or blowing ; ka, by striking ; na, by 

 pressure or by the foot ; pa, by pushing ; ya, by the mouth 

 (Biggs). In a similar manner do the so-called agglutinated 

 languages, to which the Tartar, Turkish, and Finnish idioms 

 belong, express the relations of the chief idea to the subordi- 

 nate ones, by adding relatively substantive words to the un- 

 changed root of the word which designates the chief idea in a 

 sentence ; so that compound words are formed, in which the re- 

 lations of the chief idea are amalgamated. The Magyar language 

 has thus, for instance, twenty post-positions which can be com- 

 bined with the substantive noun. From sevmek (Turkish), " to 

 love," may be formed sev-dir-ish-e-mc-mek, to love mutually, 



1 Pott, p. 256. 



