ABSTRACT
SO long ago as 1822, that great German thinker and linguist, Wilhelm von Humboldt, stated, and exactly a century later Otto Jespersen, the famous Danish writer on language, repeated, that languages are so different in form that it is impossible to classify them both accurately and comprehensively, or to divide the languages of the world into groups or families in such a way as to account satisfactorily for absolutely all of them.
