Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/384

Turkish and the often excessively agglomerative American or Basque; it includes such differences in the mode of agglutination as are presented by the Scythian, which makes its combinations solely by suffixes, and the Malay or South-African, which form theirs mainly by prefixes. Here, again, it may be made a question whether the morphological relationship of Scythian and Indo-European be not closer than that of Scythian and Malay. The principle which divides the two former is, it is true, reasonably to be regarded as of a higher order than that which divides the two latter; yet it is more teleological than morphological; it concerns rather the end attained than the means of attainment. The reach and value, too, of the distinctively inflective principle, as developed in Indo-European language, is, as I cannot but think, not infrequently overrated. In no small part of the material of our own tongue, for example, the root or theme maintains its own form and distinction from the affixes, and these their distinction from one another, not less completely than is the case in Scythian. All the derivatives of love, as love-d, lov-ing, lov-er, love-ly; the derivatives of true, as tru-ly, tru-th, tru-th-ful, tru-th-ful-ly, un-tru-th-ful-ly—these, and the host of formations like them, are strictly agglutinative in type: but we do not recognize in them any inferiority as means of expression to those derivatives in which the radical part has undergone a more marked fusion, or disguising change. Loved from love is as good a preterit as led from lead, or sang from sing; truth from true is as good an abstract as length from long, or filth from foul; nor is the Latin lædo-r, 'I am hurt,' from lædo, 'I hurt,' inferior to the nearly equivalent Arabic qutila, from qatala. The claim might plausibly enough be set up that the unity which the Scythian gives to its derivative words by making the vowels of their suffixes sympathize with that of the principal or radical element, is at least as valuable, in itself considered, as the capacity of an Indo-European root to be phonetically affected by the ending that is attached to it—a subjection of the superior to the inferior element. Not that the actual working-out of the latter principle in the tongues of our family has not produced results of higher value than the