Note 846 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

The differentiation of language from the nearby continental speech may be due to a higher development, especially on large islands affording very advantageous conditions, such as Great Britain and Japan. Japanese speech has some affinity with the great Altaic linguistic family, but no close resemblance to any sub-group.846 It presents marked contrasts to the Chinese because it has passed beyond the agglutinative stage of development, just as English has sloughed off more of its inflectional forms than the continental Teutonic languages.