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Bartlett, in his "Dictionary of Americanisms," pronounces to be the shibboleth of Bostonians. But such differences were orthoepic, and not syntactic. We regret Mr. White's glossological excursions the more because they are utterly supererogatory, and because they seem to imply a rashness of conclusion which can very seldom be laid to his charge as respects the text.
Even if, he says, we allow the Vedanta-texts to have a purport in so far as they are supplementary to injunctions of meditation, they cannot be viewed as valid means of knowledge with regard to Brahman. Do the texts referring to Brahman, we ask, occupy the position of valid means of knowledge in so far as they form a syntactic whole with the injunctions of meditation, or as independent sentences?
Whether I say agit dominus "the master acts" or sic femina agit "thus the woman acts," the net result as to the syntactic feel of the agit is practically the same. It is not so with such a word as the English act. Act is a syntactic waif until we have defined its status in a proposition one thing in "they act abominably," quite another in "that was a kindly act."
The primitive Aryan language has already been partly reconstructed for us; its grammatical forms and syntactic devices are becoming familiar to scholars; one great philologist has even composed a tale in it; yet in studying this long-buried dialect we are not much nearer the first beginnings of human speech than in studying the Greek of Homer, the Sanskrit of the Vedas, or the Umbrian of the Igovine Inscriptions.
In type A we distinguish in addition an isolating sub-type, characterized by the absence of all affixes and modifications of the radical element. In the isolating languages the syntactic relations are expressed by the position of the words in the sentence.
But the teacher was first and last a grammarian, and he would wax frantically enthusiastic over some subtle syntactic distinction which left Keith peevishly indifferent. Keith's progress in English showed that he was still capable of both interest and effort. This language was quite new to him, and the class had it only one hour a week.
Let us bear in mind, however, that it may be quite possible that a largely increased knowledge of the position which what used to be called Biblical Greek now occupies may be clearly recognized, and yet only comparatively few changes necessitated by it in syntactic details and renderings. But let us not anticipate.
Nothing could be more erroneous than to imagine that symbolic changes of the radical element, even for the expression of such abstract concepts as those of number and tense, is always associated with the syntactic peculiarities of an inflective language.
These are the Mixed-relational non-deriving languages or Simple Mixed-relational languages. D. Such as express concepts of groups I, II, and III; in other words, languages in which the syntactic relations are expressed in mixed form, as in C, and that also possess the power to modify the significance of their radical elements by means of affixes or internal changes.
If the thinning-out process continues long enough, we may eventually be left with a system of forms on our hands from which all the color of life has vanished and which merely persist by inertia, duplicating each other's secondary, syntactic functions with endless prodigality.
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