264 



view would be deficient in accuracy, if it were 

 supposed, that there exist polysyllabic idioms 

 without any inflexion, or that those, which 

 are organically developed as by interior germes, 

 admit no external increase by means of suffixes 

 and affixes*-, an increase which we have al- 

 ready mentioned several times under the name 

 of agglutination or incorporation. Many things, 

 which appear to us at present inflexions of a 

 radical, have perhaps been in their origin af- 

 fixes, of which there have barely remained one 

 or two consonants. In languages, as in every 

 thing in nature that is organized, nothing is 

 entirely isolated, or unlike. The farther we 

 penetrate into their internal structure, the more 

 do contrasts and decided characters disappear. 



* Even in the Sanscrit several tenses are formed by aggre- 

 gation ; for example, in the first future, the substantive verb 

 to be is added to the radical. In a similar manner we find in 

 the Greek mach-eso, if the s be not the effect of inflection, 

 and in Latin pot-ero (Bopp, p. 26 and 66). These are ex- 

 amples of incorporations and agglutinations in the gram- 

 matical system of languages, which are justly cited as mo- 

 dels of an interior developement by inflection. In the gram- 

 matical system of the Americans, for example in the Tama- 

 nack, tarecschi, I will carry, is equally composed of the 

 radical ar (infin. jareri, to carry) and of the verb substantive 

 ecschi (infin. nocschiri, to be). There hardly exists in the 

 American languages a triple mode of aggregation, of which 

 we cannot find a similar and analogous example in some 

 other language, that is supposed to develope itself only by 

 inflexion. 



