the
isolating, like Chinese; the agglutinative, like Turkish and Bantu, and
the inflective, like Latin. It was customary not long ago to look upon
these three types as steps in a process of historical development, the
isolating representing the most primitive form of speech at which it was
possible to arrive, the agglutinative coming next in order as a type
evolved from the isolating, and the inflective as the latest and
so-called highest type of all. But since the matter has been carefully
studied it has been admitted that there is no satisfactory evidence for
believing in any evolution of linguistic types. English is now
considered to be an isolating language in the making while Chinese is
cited by authoritative European scholars as being a language which with
the simplest possible means at its disposal can express the most
technical or philosophical ideas with absolute freedom from ambiguity
and with admirable conciseness and direction.[16]

While I do not pretend to philological authority I do claim the ability
to make a sound comparison between the main Bantu languages which I know
and those European languages with which I happen to be familiar, and I
have no hesitation in saying that though the Bantu types are not at
present as fully developed in point of simplicity and preciseness as are
the main languages of Europe they are, nevertheless, by reason of their
peculiar genius, capable of being rapidly developed into as perfect a
means for the expression of human thought as any of the European types
of speech; they are astonishingly rich in verbs which make it easy to
express motion and action clearly and vividly; the impersonal, or
abstract article "it" is used exactly as in European languages, and the
particular prefix provided in some of the Bantu types for the class of
nouns which represent abstract conceptions makes it possible to increase
the vocabularies in that direction _ad infinitum_. The Bantu types are
not so-called holophrastic forms of primitive speech in which the
compounding of expressions is said to take the place of the conveyance
of ideas, nor are they made up of onomatopoetic, or interjectional
expressions, if indeed such languages exist anywhere outside the heads
of the half-informed. They are languages equal in potential capacity to
any included in the main Indo-European group. Even now in their
comparatively undeveloped state these languages are capable of
expressing the subtleties of early ph