Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/342

320 be conceded that the Scythian tongues have not clearly apprehended and fully worked out the distinction of these two fundamental parts of speech. Their conjugation, however, such as it is, is rich in temporal and modal distinctions. The root appears in its naked form as second person singular imperative.

Connectives and relational words are nearly unknown in the languages of this family. Where we should employ a clause, they set a case-form of a noun: for example, "while we were going" is rendered in Turkish by git-diy-imiz-de, 'in our act of going (wenting).' By means of gerundives and possessives, the different members of a period are twined together into a single intricate or lumbering statement, having the principal verb regularly at the end, and the determining word followed by the determined, often producing an inverted construction which seems very strange to our apprehension.

It must not fail to be observed that the different branches of this family are not a little discordant as regards the degree of their agglutinative development. The Ugrian dialects, especially the Hungarian and Finnish, are the highest in rank, being almost entitled to be reckoned as inflective. The eastern branches, the Mongolian and Tungusian, are in every way poorer and scantier, and the Manchu even verges upon monosyllabic stiffness, not having, for example, so much as a distinction of number and person in its predicative or verbally employed words. The Turkish, in rank as in geographical position, holds a middle place.

Whether the morphological correspondences thus set forth, along with others less conspicuous, which have been found to exist between Ugrian, Samoyed, Turkish, Mongol, and Tungusic languages, are of themselves sufficient to prove these languages genetically allied, branches of one original stock, may be regarded as still an open question. A wider induction, a more thorough grasp and comprehension of the resemblances and differences of all human speech, is probably needed ere linguistic science shall be justified in pronouncing a confident decision of a question so recondite. Whether, again, coincidences in the actual material of the