6 ON THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE.

HI – THE PROCESS BT INTONATION.

In English, new words are not formed by this method, yet words are

intoned for certain purposes, chiefly rhetorical. We use the rising in-

tonation (or inflection, as it is usually called) to indicate that a question

is asked, and various effects are given to speech by the varions intona-

tions of rhetoric. But this process is used in other languages to form

new words with which to express new ideas. In Chinese eight distinct

intonations are found, by the use of which one word may be made to

express eight different ideas, or perhaps it is better to say that eight

words may be made of one.

XV.– THE PROCESS BY PLACEMENT.

The place or position of a word may affect its significant use. Thus

in English we say JoTm strudlc James. By the position of those words

to each other we know that John is-the actor, and that James receives

the action.

By the grammatic processes language is organized. Organization

postulâtes the difîerentiation of organs and their combination into in-

tegers. The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are

the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the dif-

ferentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.

For example, let us take the words John, father, and love. JoTm is the

name of an individual; love is the name of a mental action, &n& father

the name of a person. We put them together, John loves father, and

they express a thought John becomes a noun, and is the subject of the

sentence; love becomes a verb, and is the predicant f ailier a noun, and

is the object; and we now have an organized sentence. A sentence re-

quires parts of speech, and parts of speech are such because they are

used as the organic elements of a sentence.

The criteria of rank in languages are, first, grade of organization, i. e.,

the degree to which the grammatic processes and methods are special-

ized, and the parts of speech differentiated; second, sematologic con-

tent, that is, the body of thought which the language is compétent to

convey.

The grammatic processes may be used for three purposes:

First, for derivation, where a new word to express a new idea is made

by combining two or more old words, or-by changing the vowel of one

word, or by changing the intonation of one word.