Of course, really to show the way in which these meaningless additions have been made and come to be amalgamated with the root, we should have to take examples from a great number of languages in different stages of development. But we have thought it easier, for mere explanation, to take only such languages as were likely to be familiar to the reader, and even to supplement these examples with imaginary ones—like ‘rock-on,’ ‘love-was-I,’ etc.—in English. For our object has been at first merely to give an intelligible account of how language has been formed, of the different stages it has passed through, and to leave to a future time the question as to which languages of the globe have passed through all these stages, and which have gone part of their way in the formation of a perfect language. Between the state of a language in which the meaning of all the separate parts of a word are recognized and that state where they are entirely lost, there is an immense gap, that indeed which separates the most from the least advanced languages of the world.
Monosyllabic
Language.
Every language that is now spoken on the globe has gone through the stage of forming meaningless words, and is therefore possessed of words of both classes. They no longer say ‘head-of-rock’ or ‘foot-of-rock,’ but ‘rock-on’ and ‘rock-under.’ But there are still known languages in which almost every syllable is a word, and where grammar properly speaking is scarcely needed. For grammar, if we come to consider it exactly, is the explanation of the meaning of those added syllables or letters which have lost all natural meaning of their own. If each part of the word were as clear and as intelligible as ‘rock-on’ we should have no need of a grammar at all. A language of this sort is called a monosyllabic or a radical language, not because the people only speak in monosyllables, but because each word, however compound, can be split up into monosyllables or roots, which have a distinctly recognizable meaning. ‘Ant-hill-on’ or ‘love-was-I,’ are like the words of such a language.
Agglutinative
language.
The next stage of growth is where the meaning of the added parts has been lost sight of, except when it is connected with the word which it modifies; but where the essential word has a distinct idea by itself, and without the help of any addition. Suppose, for instance, through ages of change the ‘was I’ in our imaginary example got corrupted into ‘wasi,’ where wasi had no meaning by itself, but was used to express the first person of the past tense. The first person past of love would be ‘love-wasi,’ of move ‘move-wasi,’ and so on, ‘wasi’ no longer having a meaning by itself, but ‘love’ and ‘move’ by themselves being perfectly understandable. Or, to take an actual declension from a Turanian language,—
| bakar-im | I regard, | bakar-iz | we regard, |
| bakar-sin | thou regardest, | bakar-siniz | you regard, |
| bakar | he regards, | bakar-lar | they regard, |
where, as we see, the root remains entirely unaffected by the addition of the personal pronoun.
A language in this stage is said to be in the agglutinative stage,[25] because certain grammatical endings (like ‘wasi’) are merely as it were glued on to a root to change its meaning, while the root itself remains quite unaffected, and means neither less nor more than it did before.
Inflected
language.
But, as ages pass on, the root and the addition get so closely combined that neither of them alone has, as a rule, a distinct meaning, and the language arrives at its third stage of grammar-formation. It is not difficult to find examples of a language in this condition, for such is the case with all the languages by which we are surrounded. All the tongues which the majority of us are likely to study, almost all those which have any literature at all, have arrived at this last stage, which is called the inflexional. For instance, though we might divide actionis into two parts actio and nis, and say that the former contains the essential idea, and the addition the idea implied by the genitive case, there are only a few Latin words with which such a process is possible, and even in the case of actio the separation is somewhat misleading. In homo the real root is hom, and the genitive is not homo-nis but hominis. So, again, though we were able to separate ‘asmi’ into two parts—‘as’ and ‘mi’—one expressing the idea of being, the other the person ‘I,’ this distinction is the refinement of the grammarian, and would never have been recognized by an ordinary speaker of Sanskrit, for whom ‘asmi’ simply meant ‘I am,’ without distinction of parts. In our ‘am’ the grammarian recognizes that the ‘a’ expresses existence, and the ‘m’ expresses I; but so completely have we lost sight of this, that we repeat the ‘I’ before the verb. Just the same in Latin. No Roman could have recognized in the ‘s’ of sum ‘am’ and in the ‘m’ ‘I;’ for him sum meant simply and purely ‘I am.’ It was no more separable in his eyes than the French êtes (Latin estis) in vous êtes is separable into a root ‘es,’ contracted in the French into ‘ê,’ meaning are, and an addition ‘tes’ signifying you. This, then, is the last stage upon which language enters. It is called the inflexional or inflected stage, because the different grammatical changes are not now denoted by a mere addition to an intelligible word, but by a change in the word itself. The root may in many cases remain and be recognizable in its purity, but very frequently it is unrecognizable, so that the different case-or tense-endings can no longer be looked upon as additions, but as changes. Take almost any Latin substantive, and we see this: homo, a man, the genitive is formed by changing homo into hominis, or, if we please, adding something to the root hom—which has in itself no meaning; musa changes into musæ; and so forth.