Page:Essays on the Chinese Language (1889).djvu/28

14 arrangement of words in sentences. He writes: "I think I can reduce the difference which exists between the Chinese and other languages to the single fundamental point that, in order to indicate the connection of words in its phrases, it does not base its grammar on the classification of words, but settles otherwise the relations of the elements of language in the concatenation of thought. The grammars of other languages have an etymological part and a syntactical part. Chinese grammar knows only this latter.

Then we have Schleicher's well-known three-fold division of languages, as Monosyllabic (Isolating), Confixative (Agglutinating), and Inflexive (Inflectional). In the first division are "Languages which are simply composed of invariable disjointed meaning-sounds, Monosyllabic, e.g., Chinese, Annamese, Siamese, Burmese." Schleicher's distribution has been followed by Professor Max Müller and others. It forms the basis of Pott's division of languages, which, however, is a four-fold one. Pott splits up the agglutinating into two classes, the Agglutinating and the Incorporating. In his first class, that of the Isolating Languages, in which matter and form remain perfectly separate, he places the Chinese and Indo-Chinese languages.

There are also other classifications of languages from the morphological point of view, as e.g., that of M. Lucien Adam. In this there are five classes, the first being that of the Isolating Languages, which are Chinese, Annamite, Siamese, Burmese, and Tibetan. Here, as in other classifications of languages on this principle, Chinese has a low place. Judged by its morphological constitution, Chinese is an inferior language. It and Sanskrit are at the two poles of the speech-world, and all other languages lie between them. In Chinese the words are units, they are not capable of attachment, and they are not related in any recognizable way as compounds or derivatives. They are not even roots, according to Bopp and some of his followers. Max Müller,