Ethnology. in Two Parts; I. Fundamental Ethnical Problems. II. the Primary Ethnical Groups (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 edition. Excerpt: ...which naturalists kept with regard to the notion of 1species' before Darwin came1." It is argued that the transition from a significative term to a formative element is an unknown, or at least an extremely rare phenomenon, because but few particles in current languages have been traced back to notional words, so that most of them must be accepted as "meaningless affixes" from the first2. Not so This is rather a case in which it may safely be argued from the few to the many, for the process, so far from being a "rare phenomenon," inflection s normal m most languages, though arrested by revertsto various causes in cultivated idioms. The above gg u 1 'examples from English and Assamese show that reversions may take place from inflection to agglutination, which in fact is a general tendency amongst the Gaurian (Neo-Sanskritic) tongues of India, and also to a less extent in Italian and other NeoLatin tongues. Thus Italian incorporates both direct and indirect pronominal object, as in da(m)-mi-lo = give-to-me-it (sing.); dateme-lo = give-to-me-it (plur.); dando-me-lo = giving-to-me-it (pres. part). In the same way the whole of the Hindi conjugation except a solitary tense (the so-called "aorist") has become participial with gender and number but no person, as in so many 1 Progress in Language, 1894, p. 132. 8 According to Ludwig's "adaptation theory," as soon as the relations of words to each other in the sentence got to be understood, "pre-existing suffixes," no doubt floating about in circumambient space, were set apart to determine them. Thus the Greeks captured the suffix -s, which in --6J--r-ri and iroS-ia-wv (iroSuv) has no grammatical meaning, but which came to...