Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/359

IX.] inhabitants of China in mental activity and reach. Of indicative words, substitutes for the formative elements of more highly developed languages, they make an extended use. Such auxiliary and limiting words are in Siamese always put before, in Burmese always after, the principal root.

To the same general class of tongues, yet with sundry variations of type, even sometimes appearing to overstep the boundary which divides mere collocation from actual agglutination of elements, are deemed to belong the exceedingly numerous and not less discordant dialects which crowd the mountain valleys on both sides of the great range of the Himalayas, and that part of the plateau of central Asia which lies next north of the range. The linguistic student is lost, as yet, in the infinity of details presented by these dialects, and is unable to classify them satisfactorily. Most of them are known only by partial vocabularies, lists of words gathered by enterprising collectors, no penetrating investigation and clear exposition of their structure and laws of growth having yet been made. It were useless to detail here the names of the wild tribes to which they belong, or set forth the groupings which have been provisionally established among them. The only one which possesses any historical or literary importance is the Tibetan. Tibet was one of the early conquests of Buddhism, and has long been a chief centre of that religion. It has an immense Buddhist literature, in great part translated from the Sanskrit, and written in a character derived from that in which the Sanskrit is written. Though strictly a monosyllabic language, the Tibetan exhibits some very peculiar and problematical features—in its written but now unpronounced prefixes, and a kind of inflective internal change appearing in many of its words—which are a subject of much controversy among comparative philologists.

With the next great family, the Malay-Polynesian, or Oceanic, we shall not need to delay long. Those who speak its dialects fill nearly all the islands from the coasts of Asia southward and eastward, from Madagascar to the Sandwich