Note 3 — Outline Grammar, Etc.

It would seem to be not improbable that the language may gradually lose its agglutinative character, and approximate to the inflected type, though the process most likely will be but a slow one, owing to the very clannish temperament of the people which makes them cling strongly to anything they regard as their very own, e.g. their language (cf., a somewhat similar state of things in Wales and the Scottish Highlands). But in its present stage the language is one of no small interest to the student of comparative philology, because it is an apt illustration of a form of speech which, once strictly agglutinative, is now in process of learning inflexion through the pressure of contact with the speakers of Aryan tongues.3