Page:Tamil studies.djvu/174

Rh cation of the society but not of the individual. These will be explained fully with reference to Tamil in the following pages.

According to V. Huvelacque, Tamil is one of the five hundred principal languages spoken on the face of the globe at the present day. Morphologically, the existing languages are divided into four groups, viz. isolating, agglutinative, polysynthetic and inflectional. The morphological classification is based entirely on the form or manner in which the roots or the final elements of a language are put together to form words and sentences. In the isolating languages, like Chinese, the roots are used as words, each root preserving its full independence, unrestricted by any idea of person, gender, number, time or mood; and, in fact, languages of this kind do not require any grammar. This is called the radical stage. In Chinese, nan, male ; niu, female ; whence nan tse=son, niu tse= daughter, niu jin=woman. In the agglutinative languages when two roots join together to form a word, one of them loses its independence subjecting itself to phonetic corruption. This is called the terminational stage. In Tamil maga, issue, becomes by the addition of n and l (corruptions of avan and aval) magan=son and magal=daughter. When words blend together in a sentence by syncope and ellipsis, it is called polysynthesis. This is a feature peculiar to American languages. Thus in the Algonquin, the sentence Nadholineen=bring us the canoe, is made up of naten=bring, amochol=