became arrested and fixed. As the inflectional stage
prevailed over the agglutinative, it is surprising to see how much more
boldly the original roots of the language project from the surface that
conceals them. In the old fragments and proverbs of the preceding stage
the monosyllables which compose those roots vanish amidst words of
enormous length, comprehending whole sentences from which no one part
can be disentangled from the other and employed separately. But when
the inflectional form of language became so far advanced as to have its
scholars and grammarians, they seem to have united in extirpating all
such polysynthetical or polysyllabic monsters, as devouring invaders of
the aboriginal forms. Words beyond three syllables became proscribed
as barbarous and in proportion as the language grew thus simplified it
increased in strength, in dignity, and in sweetness. Though now very
compressed in sound, it gains in clearness by that compression. By a
single letter, according to its position, they contrive to express
all that with civilised nations in our upper world it takes the waste,
sometimes of syllables, sometimes of sentences, to express. Let me here
cite one or two instances: An (which I will translate man), Ana (men);
the letter 's' is with them a letter implying multitude, according to
where it is placed; Sana means mankind; Ansa, a multitude of men. The
prefix of certain letters in their alphabet invariably denotes compound
significations. For instance, Gl (which with them is a single letter, as
'th' is a single letter with the Greeks) at the commencement of a word
infers an assemblage or union of things, sometimes kindred, sometimes
dissimilar--as Oon, a house; Gloon, a town (i. e., an assemblage of
houses). Ata is sorrow; Glata, a public calamity. Aur-an is the health
or wellbeing of a man; Glauran, the wellbeing of the state, the good of
the community; and a word constantly in ther mouths is A-glauran, which
denotes their political creed--viz., that "the first principle of a
community is the good of all." Aub is invention; Sila, a tone in music.
Glaubsila, as uniting the ideas of invention and of musical intonation,
is the classical word for poetry--abbreviated, in ordinary conversation,
to Glaubs. Na, which with them is, like Gl, but a single letter, always,
when an initial, implies something antagonistic to life or joy or
comfort, resembling in this the Aryan root Nak, expressive of perishing
or destructi