ABSTRACT
SINCE the very first beginning of the truly scientific study of languages as such, i.e. since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has been customary to speak of one great class of languages as monosyllabic or isolating in contradistinction to agglutinative and flexional languages, and to take Chinese as a typical example of these monosyllabic languages; further it has been very often remarked that English in the course of its development in historical times has in many respects come to approach that type. The gradual change through which English had acquired more and more of the structural traits found in Chinese was formerly looked upon as decay from a more developed to a more primitive type, as Chinese was considered a specimen of the most primitive or, as it were, childish stage in linguistic evolution; nowadays one is much more inclined to see in this development a progressive tendency towards a more perfect structure;2 besides, the dogma of the primitivity of Chinese has been recognized as completely wrong and due in a great measure to the peculiar system of Chinese writing with ideographical symbols which conceals f rom us the numerous changes that have made Chinese what it is, from a language that had quite a different phonetic and morphological structure.
