Differences in grammar of unallied languages.
The proposition or sentence is the unit and starting-point of speech, and grammar, as we have seen, consists in the relations of its several parts one to another, together with the expression of them. These relations may be regarded from various points of view. In the polysynthetic languages of America the sentence is conceived as a whole, not composed of independent words, but, like the thought which it expresses, one and indivisible. What we should denote by a series of words is consequently denoted by a single long compound--_kuligatchis_ in Delaware, for instance, signifying "give me your pretty little paw," and _aglekkigiartorasuarnipok_ in Eskimo, "he goes away hastily and exerts himself to write." Individual words can be, and often are, extracted from the sentence; but in this case they stand, as it were, outside it, being represented by a pronoun within the sentence itself. Thus, in Mexican, we can say not only _ni-sotsi-temoa_, "I look for flowers," but also _ni-k-temoa sotsitl_, where the interpolated guttural is the objective pronoun. As a necessary result of this conception of the sentence the American languages possess no true verb, each act being expressed as a whole by a single word. In Cherokee, for example, while there is no verb signifying "to wash" in the abstract, no less than thirteen words are used to signify every conceivable mode and object of washing. In the incorporating languages, again, of which Basque may be taken as a type, the object cannot be conceived except as contained in the verbal action. Hence every verbal form embodies an objective pronoun, even though the object may be separately expressed. If we pass to an isolating language like Chinese, we find the exact converse of that which meets us in the polysynthetic tongues. Here each proposition or thought is analysed into its several elements, and these are set over against one another as so many independent words. The relations of grammar are consequently denoted by position, the particular position of two or more words determining the relation they bear to each other. The analysis of the sentence has not been carried so far in agglutinative languages like Turkish. In these the relations of grammar are represented by individual words, which, however, are subordinated to the words expressing the main ideas intended to be in relation to one another. The defining words, or indices of grammatical relations, are, in a large number of instances, placed after the words which they define; in some cases, however, as, for example, in the Bantu languages of southern Africa, the relation is conceived from the opposite point of view, the defining words being prefixed. The inflexional languages call in the aid of a new principle. The relations of grammar are denoted symbolically either by a change of vowel or by a change of termination, more rarely by a change at the beginning of a word. Each idea, together with the relation which it bears to the other ideas of a proposition, is thus represented by a single word; that is to say, the ideas which make up the elements of a sentence are not conceived severally and independently, as in Chinese, but as always having a certain connexion with one another. Inflexional languages, however, tend to become analytical by the logical separation of the flexion from the idea to which it is attached, though the primitive point of view is never altogether discarded, and traces of flexion remain even in English and Persian. In fact, there is no example of a language which has wholly forsaken the conception of the sentence and the relation of its elements with which it started, although each class of languages occasionally trespasses on the grammatical usages of the others. In language, as elsewhere in nature, there are no sharp lines of division, no sudden leaps; species passes insensibly into species, class into class. At the same time the several types of speech--polysynthetic, isolating, agglutinative and inflexional--remain clear and fixed; and even where two languages belong to the same general type, as, for instance, an Indo-European and a Semitic language in the inflexional group, or a Bantu and a Turkish language in the agglutinative group, we find no certain example of grammatical interchange. A mixed grammar, in which the grammatical procedure of two distinct families of speech is intermingled, is almost, if not altogether, unknown.