Modern philologists have made different classifications of the various
languages of the world, one of which divides them into three great
classes: the Monosyllabic, the Agglutinated, and the Inflected.

--The _first_, or Monosyllabic class, contains those languages which
consist only of separate, unvaried monosyllables. The words have no
organization that adapts them for mutual affiliation, and there is in
them, accordingly, an utter absence of all scientific forms and principles
of grammar. The Chinese and a few languages in its vicinity, doubtless
originally identical with it, are all that belong to this class. The
languages of the North American Indians, though differing in many
respects, have the same general grade of character.

The _second_ class consists of those languages which are formed by
agglutination. The words combine only in a mechanical way; they have _no_
elective affinity, and exhibit toward each other none of the active or
sensitive capabilities of living organisms. Prepositions are joined to
substantives, and pronouns to verbs, but never so as to make a new form of
the original word, as in the inflected languages, and words thus placed in
juxtaposition retain their personal identity unimpaired.

The agglutinative languages are known also as the Turanian, from Turan, a
name of Central Asia, and the principal varieties of this family are the
Tartar, Finnish, Lappish, Hungarian, and Caucasian. They are classed
together almost exclusively on the ground of correspondence in their
grammatical structure, but they are bound together by ties of far less
strength than those which connect the inflected languages. The race by
whom they are spoken has, from the first, occupied more of the surface of
the earth than either of the others, stretching westward from the shores