Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/64

42 of growth are well marked in the abstract, though we cannot point to any language which has gone through all the stages within historical times. The first stage is that in which all words are monosyllables without inflections or power of internal modification; and when strung together to make sentences, the same word is at one time a verb, at another a noun, at a third a particle, according to its place in the sentence. This is the syntactical stage, and is exemplified by Chinese.

The second stage is that in which some words have lost their power of being used as nouns or verbs, and can only be employed as particles, in which capacity they are added to nouns to form case-endings, and to verbs to form tense- and person-endings. This is the agglutinative stage, so called because these particles are agglutinated, or glued on, to the word which they modify. Turkish is such a language.

The third stage is that in which the aforesaid particles are no longer separable, but have become incorporated into the word which they modify, merely producing the result of varying the terminal syllable or syllables. This is the synthetical or inflectional stage, and is seen in Sanskrit.

The fourth stage is that in which the particles are not even recognizable as constituent elements of the word with which they were incorporated, but, from long use, have been worn away, so that the word stands almost bare and without terminations, as in the first stage, and new auxiliary words have to be brought in to express the necessary modifications of sense. This is the analytical stage, the stage in which English and French are at present.

It will be observed that the fourth stage comes round again to the second in some respects, notably in that the words are not altered in any way, but merely have the subsidiary particle placed before or after them, so that position in the sentence becomes once more the guide in many instances to the meaning of the individual word. Thus the English words of, to, in, for,