remembered that extreme peculiarities of grammar, like the vocal
mutations of the Hebrew or the monosyllabic separation of the Chinese,
have not been discovered among Indian tongues. It therefore becomes
necessary in the classification of Indian languages into families to
neglect grammatic structure, and to consider lexical elements only. But
this statement must be clearly understood. It is postulated that in the
growth of languages new words are formed by combination, and that these
new words change by attrition to secure economy of utterance, and also
by assimilation (analogy) for economy of thought. In the comparison of
languages for the purposes of systematic philology it often becomes
necessary to dismember compounded words for the purpose of comparing the
more primitive forms thus obtained. The paradigmatic words considered in
grammatic treatises may often be the very words which should be
dissected to discover in their elements primary affinities. But the
comparison is still lexic, not grammatic.

A lexic comparison is between vocal elements; a grammatic comparison is
between grammatic methods, such, for example, as gender systems. The
classes into which things are relegated by distinction of gender may be
animate and inanimate, and the animate may subsequently be divided into
male and female, and these two classes may ultimately absorb, in part at
least, inanimate things. The growth of a system of genders may take
another course. The animate and inanimate may be subdivided into the
standing, the sitting, and the lying, or into the moving, the erect and
the reclined; or, still further, the superposed classification may be
based upon the supposed constitution of things, as the fleshy, the
woody, the rocky, the earthy, the watery. Thus the number of genders may
increase, while further on in the history of a language the genders may
decrease so as almost to disappear. All of these characteristics are in
part adventitious, but to a large extent the gender is a phenomenon of