Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/383

X.] qātala, 'he tried to kill,' aqtala, 'he caused to kill,' and the like, are not explainable by any composition of roots and loss of their independence, even though the somewhat analogous differences of man and men, lead and led, sing and sang, sit and set, do admit of such explanation. In the second place, it is liable to something of the same reproach of one-sidedness which lies against the former, the double method of classification. It puts into a separate class, as inflective languages, only two families, the Indo-European and the Semitic: these are, to be sure, of wide extent and unapproached importance; yet the mass of spoken tongues is still left in one immense and heterogeneous body. And finally, a yet more fundamental objection to the scheme is this heterogeneity, which characterizes not its middle class alone, but its highest also. It classes Indo-European and Semitic speech together, as morphologically alike, while yet their structural discordance is vastly greater than that which separates Indo-European from many of the agglutinative tongues—in some respects, even greater than that which separates Indo-European from the generality of agglutinative and from the isolating tongues. Not only are the higher Scythian dialects, as the Finnish and Hungarian, almost inflective, and inflective upon a plan which is sufficiently analogous with the Indo-European, but, from a theoretical point of view (however the case may be historically), Chinese, Scythian, and Indo-European are so many steps in one line and direction of progress, differing in degree but not in kind: Semitic speech, on the other hand, if it started originally from the same or a like centre, has reached an equally distant point in a wholly different direction. The two inflective families may lie upon the same circumference, but they are separated by the whole length of the diameter, being twice as far from one another as is either from the indifferent middle. A less fundamental discordance, perhaps, but an equal variety of structure, belongs to those tongues which are classed together as agglutinative. The order includes such extremes in degree of agglutination as the barren and almost isolating Manchu or Egyptian, on the one hand, and, on the other, the exuberantly aggregative