Humboldt was far from saying that the incorporative system was exclusively seen in American languages, any more than that of isolation in Chinese, or flexion in Aryan speech. On the contrary, he distinctly states that every language he had examined shows traces of all three plans; but the preponderance of one plan over the other is so marked and so distinctive that they afford us the best means known for the morphological classification of languages, especially as these traits arise from psychological operations widely diverse, and of no small influence on the development of the intellect.
Dr. Francis Lieber, in an essay on “The Plan of Thought in American Languages,”[290] objected to the terms _polysynthesis_ and _incorporation_ that “they begin at the wrong end; for these names indicate that that which has been separated is put together, as if man began with analysis, whereas he ends with it.” He therefore proposed the noun _holophrasis_ with its adjective _holophrastic_, not as a substitute for the terms he criticised, but to express the meaning or purpose of these processes, which is, to convey the whole of a sentence or proposition in one word. Polysynthesis, he explains, indicates a purely etymological process, holophrasis “refers to the meaning of the word considered in a philosophical point of view.”
If we regard incorporation and polysynthesis as structural processes of language aiming to accomplish a certain theoretical form of speech, then it will be convenient to have this word _holophrasis_ to designate this theoretical form, which is, in short, the expression of the whole proposition in a single word.
The eminent linguist Professor H. Steinthal, has developed the theory of incorporation more fully than any other writer. He expresses himself without reserve of the opinion that all American languages are constructed on this same plan, more or less developed.
I need not make long quotations from a work so well-known as his _Charakteristik der hauptsächlichsten Typen des Sprachbaues_, one section of which, about thirty pages in length, is devoted to a searching and admirable presentation of the characteristics of the incorporative plan as shown in American languages. But I may give with brevity what he regards as the most striking features of this plan. These are especially three:—