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Show HINTS AND EXPLANATIONS. 57 bined to form one, no change being made in either. Words may be said to be agglutinated when the elementary words are changed but slightly, i. e., only to the extent that their original forms are not greatly obscured; and words may be said to be inflected when in thee ombination the oft-repeated element or formative part has been so changed that its origin is obscured. These inflections are used chiefly in the paradigmatic combinations. In the preceding statement it has been assumed that there can be recognized, in these combinations of inflection, a theme or root, as it is sometimes called, and a formative element. The formative element is used with a great many different words to define or qualify them, that is to indicate mode, tense, number, person, gender, etc., of verbs, nouns, and other parts of speech. When in a language juxtaposition is the chief method of combination, there may also be distinguished two kinds of elements, in some sense corresponding to themes and formative parts. The theme is a word the meaning of which is determined by the formative word placed by it; that is, the theme is a word having many radically different meanings; with which meaning it is to be understood is determined only by the formative word, which thus serves as its label. The ways in which the theme words are thus labeled by the formative word are very curious, but the subject cannot be entered into here. When words are combined by compounding, the formative elements cannot so readily be distinguished from the theme; nor for the purposes under immediate consideration can compounding be well separated from agglutination. When words are combined by agglutination, theme and formative part usually appear. The formative parts are affixes; and affixes may be divided into three classes, prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. These affixes are often called incorporated particles. In those Indian languages where combination is chiefly by agglutination, that is, by the use of affixes, i. e., incorporated particles, certain parts of the conjugation of the verb, especially those which denote gender, number, and person, are affected by the use of article pronouns; but in those |
