51. Classification of Languages by Types
A classification is widely prevalent which puts languages according to their structure into three types: inflective, agglutinating, and isolating. To this some add a fourth type, the polysynthetic or incorporating. While the classification is largely misrepresentative, it enters so abundantly into current thought about human speech that it is worth presenting, analyzing, and, so far as it is invalid, refuting.
Fig. 15. Some important linguistic families of South America: 1, Arawak; 2, Carib; 3, Tapuya; 4, Tupi; 5, Araucanian; 6, Aymara; 7, Quechua (Inca); 8, Chibcha. The white areas are occupied by about seventy smaller families, according to the usually accepted classification. (Based on Chamberlain.)
An inflecting language expresses relations or grammatical form by adding prefixes or suffixes which cannot stand alone, or if they stood alone would mean nothing; or that operates by internal modifications of the stem, which also can have no independent existence. The -ing of killing is such an inflection; so are the vowel changes and the ending -en in the conjugation write, wrote, written.
An isolating language expresses such relations or forms by separate words or isolated particles. English heart of man is isolating, where the Latin equivalent cor hominis is inflective, the per se meaningless suffix -is rendering the genitive or possessive force of the English word of.
An agglutinative language glues together into solid words elements for which a definite meaning of their own can be traced. English does not use this mechanism for purposes that are ordinarily reckoned as strictly grammatical, but does employ it for closely related purposes. Under-take, rest-less, are examples; and in a form like light-ly, which goes back to light-like, the force of the suffix which converts the adjective into the adverb is of a kind that in descriptions of most languages would be considered grammatical or formal.
Polysynthetic languages are agglutinative ones carried to a high pitch, or those that can compound words into equivalents of fair sized sentences. Steam-boat-propeller-blade might be called a polysynthetic form if we spoke or wrote it in one word as modern German and ancient Greek would.
Incorporating languages embody the object noun, or the pronoun representing it, into the word that contains the verb stem. This construction is totally foreign to English.[7]
Each of these classes evidently defines one or more distinctive linguistic processes. There are different mechanisms at work in kill-ing, of man, light-ly. The distinction is therefore both valid and valuable. Its abuse lies in trying to slap the label of one type on a whole language. The instances given show that English employs most of the several distinct processes. Obviously it would be arbitrary to classify English as outright of one type. This is also the situation for most other languages. There are a few languages that tend prevailingly in one direction or the other: Sanskrit and Latin and Hebrew toward the inflective structure, Turkish toward the agglutinative, Chinese toward the isolating. But they form a small minority, and most of them contain certain processes of types other than their predominating ones. Sanskrit, for instance, has polysynthetic traits, Hebrew incorporating ones. Therefore, so long as these concepts are used to picture a language in detail, with balanced recognition of the different processes employed by it, they are valuable tools to philological description. When on the other hand the concepts are degraded into catchwords designating three or four compartments into one of which every language is somehow to be stuffed, they grossly misrepresent most of the facts. The concepts, in short, apply usefully to types of linguistic processes, inadequately to types of languages.
Why then has the classification of human languages into inflecting, agglutinating, isolating, and polysynthetic or incorporating ones been repeated so often? First of all, because languages vary almost infinitely, and a true or natural classification, other than the genetic one into families, is intricate. The mind craves simplicity and the three or four supposedly all-embracing types are a temptation.
A second reason lies deeper. As philology grew up into a systematic body of knowledge, it centered its first interests on Latin and Greek, then on Sanskrit and the other older Indo-European languages. These happened to have inflective processes unusually well developed. They also happened to be the languages from which the native speech of the philologists was derived. What is our own seems good to us; consequently Indo-European was elevated into the highest or inflective class of languages. As a sort of after-thought, Semitic, which includes Hebrew, the language of part of our Scriptures, was included. Then Chinese, which follows an unusually simple plan of structure that is the opposite in many ways of the complex structure of old Indo-European, and which was the speech of a civilized people, was set apart as a class of the second rank. This left the majority of human languages to be dumped into a third class, or a third and fourth class, with the pleasing implication that they were less capable of abstraction, more materialistic, cruder, and generally inferior. Philologists are customarily regarded as extreme examples of passionless, dry, objective human beings. The history of this philological classification indicates that they too are influenced by emotional and self-complacent impulses.