Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/381

X.] the principal idea, the other indicating its limitation, application, or relation; they possess no formally distinguished parts of speech. Usage may assign to some of their roots the offices which in inflectional tongues are filled by inflective endings, suffixes or prefixes; it may also stamp some as adjectives, others as nouns, as pronouns, as verbs, and so on: yet means of this sort can only partially supply their lack of the resources possessed by more happily developed languages; categories undistinguished in expression are but imperfectly, if at all, distinguished in apprehension; thought is but brokenly represented and feebly aided by its instrument. To the latter, or inflectional class, belong all the other languages of the world, which, whatever and however great their differences, have at least this in common, that their signs of category and relation are not always separate words, but parts of other words, that their vocables are, to some extent, made up of at least two elements, the one radical, the other formative. There can be, it is evident, no more fundamental difference in linguistic structure than this. And yet, it is not an absolute and determinate one. It lies in the nature of the case that, as the inflectional languages have grown out of a monosyllabic and non-inflecting stage, there should be certain tongues, as there are in other tongues certain forms, which stand so closely upon the line of division between the two stages, that it is hard to tell whether they are the one thing or the other. In our own tongue, there is no definite division-line to be drawn anywhere in the series of steps that conducts from a mere collocation to a pure form-word—from house floor to house-top, from tear-filled to tearful, from godlike to godly; and, in like manner, it is often a matter of doubt, in languages of low development, where isolation ends and where a loose agglutination begins. Thus, even the Chinese, the purest type of the isolating structure, is by some regarded as, in its colloquial forms, and yet more in some of its dialects, a language of compounded words; and the possession of one or two real formative elements has been claimed for the Burmese; while the Himalaya is likely to furnish dialects whose character, as isolated or agglutinative, will be much disputed.