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Updated: May 20, 2025
THE LANGUAGE. The Japanese is considered as belonging to the isolated languages, as philologists have thus far failed to classify it. It is agglutinative in its syntax, each word consisting of an unchangeable root and one or several suffixes.
It was highly agglutinative, and unlike any other form of speech, ancient or modern, with which we are acquainted. Perhaps the speakers of it, like the Hittites, had descended from the north, and occupied territory which had originally belonged to Aramaic tribes.
No language can be agglutinative without clinging with its roots to the underlying stratum of isolation." 'On the Stratification of Language, p. 20. It abounds in monosyllables, which are the foundations of the language.
And now comes the crowning triumph of this versatile term, as well as a happy illustration of what might be called its agglutinative and assimilating powers; for when horses and wagon have received their load of tent and equipments, and father, mother and the babies have filled up every available space, this whole establishment, this omnium gatherum of outfits, becomes neither more nor less than an "outfit."
It was customary not long ago to look upon these three types as steps in a process of historical development, the isolating representing the most primitive form of speech at which it was possible to arrive, the agglutinative coming next in order as a type evolved from the isolating, and the inflective as the latest and so-called highest type of all.
We now come to the difference between an "inflective" and an "agglutinative" language. As I have already remarked, the distinction is a useful, even a necessary, one, but it has been generally obscured by a number of irrelevancies and by the unavailing effort to make the terms cover all languages that are not, like Chinese, of a definitely isolating cast.
There are little burlesque manuals making merry with the language and its agglutinative prolixity, which I shall certainly not quote; and there are postal-cards representing Welsh dames drinking tea in tall witch-hats, with one of them saying: "I wass enjoying myself shocking, look you."
The Sumerian language was of agglutinative type, radically distinct both from the pure Semitic idioms and from Egyptian. The Babylonian elements of culture which the early Semitic invaders brought with them to Egypt were, then, ultimately of Sumerian origin.
Other scholars have detected signs of their origin in their language and system of writing, and, from the fact that they spoke an agglutinative tongue and at the earliest period arranged the characters of their script in vertical lines like the Chinese, it has been urged that they were of Mongol extraction.
This is also true of many languages of type B, the terms "agglutinative," "fusional," and "symbolic" applying in their case merely to the treatment of the derivational, not the relational, concepts. Such languages could be termed "agglutinative-isolating," "fusional-isolating" and "symbolic-isolating."
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