OF LANGUAGES. 



7 



Here also must be mentioned the eminent services which 

 Professor August Friedrich Pott, 13 the Nestor of Com- 

 parative Philology, has rendered to this science, and the 

 new light which Professor H. Steinthal's labours have 

 thrown on the psychology of language. 14 



These short remarks contain, to a certain extent, the more 

 important modern systems of classifying languages. In the 

 same manner as these systems follow each other in time, they 

 clearly exhibit with the growth of knowledge the progress 

 which is being gradually made in linguistic researches. In 

 proportion as the material increases the views become 

 more expanded. Since the time when Hebrew was 

 regarded in Europe as the fountain language from which 

 every dialect has been derived, what strides have been made ! 



languages deal with their roots is strongly illustrative of their essential 

 spirit and distinctive character ; and it is chiefly with reference to their 

 differences in this particular that the languages of Europe and Asia admit 

 of being arranged into classes. Those classes are as follow : — (1) The 

 monosyllabic, uncompounded, or isolative languages of which Chinese is the 

 principal example, in which roots admit of no change or combination, and 

 in which all grammatical relations are expressed either by auxiliary words or 

 phrases, or by the position of words in a sentence. (2) The Semitic or 

 intromutative languages, in which grammatical relations are expressed by 

 internal changes in the vowels of dissyllabic roots. (3) The agglutinative 

 languages, in which grammatical relations are expressed by affixes or 

 suffixes added to the root or compounded with it. In the latter class I 

 include both the Indo-European and the Scythian groups of tongues. They 

 differ, indeed, greatly from one another in details, and that not only in their 

 vocabularies but also in their grammatical forms ; yet I include them both in 

 one class because they appear to agree, or to have originally agreed, in the 

 principle of expressing grammatical relation by means of the agglutination 

 of auxiliary words." 



(13) See especially: " Etymologische Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der 

 Indo-Germanischen Sprachen," von Aug. Friedrich Pott, Dr., Lemgo and 

 Detmold, 7 Vols., 1859-73. 



(14) See Dr. Steinthal's " Classification der Sprachen" and his " Charak- 

 teristik der hauptsachlichsten Typen des Sprachbaues." In this latter 

 work he proposes on page 327 a division of languages into those devoid of 

 form (formlose Sprachen) and those endowed with form (Formsprachen), 

 each admitting to be arranged into two classes, of which one is called 

 juxtapositing (nebensetzend) and the other inflectional (abwandelnd). 



