A pioneering linguistic study of the incorporating structures of indigenous American languages, published posthumously in 1885.
What the Work Is
On the Verb in American Language is a linguistic treatise by the Prussian scholar and statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt, first published in 1885. The work examines the structural properties of verbs in the indigenous languages of the Americas, with particular attention to the phenomenon of noun incorporation. It forms part of Humboldt’s broader investigations into the relationship between language structure and human cognition, a line of inquiry that occupied him throughout his later intellectual career. The book stands as a significant contribution to the field of linguistic typology, the classification of languages according to their structural features rather than their historical relationships.
What the Book Is About
The central subject of the work is the verbal morphology of American languages, specifically the way in which these languages combine multiple grammatical and lexical elements within a single verb form. Humboldt’s analysis focuses on what he terms “incorporating” languages, a category he distinguished from other language types based on how they package meaning into words. The book demonstrates, through concrete examples drawn from Classical Aztec, how entire propositions can be compressed into complex verbal constructions that would require multiple separate words in European languages. In doing so, Humboldt sought to show that the structural differences between languages are not merely superficial but reflect deeper differences in how speakers of different languages conceptualize and express reality.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central concept of the work is incorporation, the process by which a noun becomes embedded within a verbal complex. Humboldt illustrates this with paired examples from Classical Aztec that have become famous in the linguistic literature. The first, niccua in nacatl, meaning “I eat the meat,” uses a free-standing noun with an article and a separate verb marked for subject and object. The second, ninacacua, meaning “I eat meat” in the sense of “I am a meat-eater,” fuses the noun for “meat” directly into the verb stem. This contrast demonstrates that incorporation is not merely a stylistic variation but a grammatically significant distinction: the incorporated noun typically loses its status as an independent referent and instead describes a general activity or characteristic.
Humboldt’s use of the term “incorporating” (in German, einverleibend) was intended to capture this specific phenomenon of nominal incorporation. However, the book’s examples also touch on a related but distinct feature: the use of bound object pronouns attached to the verb. Because Humboldt did not provide extensive commentary on his examples, later readers were left uncertain whether he considered incorporation to be the fusion of nouns into verbs, the use of pronominal affixes, or the broader phenomenon of polysynthesis itself. This ambiguity would have lasting consequences for the history of linguistics, as subsequent scholars struggled to pin down precisely what Humboldt meant.
The book participates in a larger intellectual movement in comparative linguistics during the early nineteenth century. The term “polysynthetic” had been coined in 1819 by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau to describe American languages that combine many “ideas” into single words. Humboldt’s work engaged with this tradition while offering his own analytical framework. The perspective of this early comparative linguistics was still markedly Eurocentric, treating European grammatical categories as the universal standard from which other languages were seen to deviate. Humboldt’s treatise both reflects this limitation and, in its careful attention to the internal logic of American languages, begins to move beyond it.
Structure and Approach
The book’s approach is comparative and analytical rather than descriptive in the modern ethnographic sense. Humboldt selects illustrative examples from Classical Aztec to demonstrate the structural principles he wishes to highlight, then uses these examples to develop his typological framework. The work is notable for its use of paired minimal contrasts, such as the two Aztec sentences for eating meat, which isolate the specific grammatical feature under discussion. This method of close structural analysis, applied to a non-European language on its own terms, was pioneering for its time and anticipates later developments in descriptive linguistics.
The treatise is relatively brief and focused, concentrating on the verbal system rather than attempting a comprehensive grammar of any particular language. Humboldt’s interest lies in what the structure of the verb reveals about the general principles of human language and the range of structural possibilities available to it. The examples from Aztec serve as evidence for a broader theoretical argument about the nature of linguistic diversity and the cognitive capacities that underlie it.
Significance and Influence
The book’s influence extends well beyond its immediate subject matter. Humboldt’s discussion of incorporation became a reference point for later debates in linguistic typology, even as the precise meaning of his term remained contested. The distinction between incorporation and polysynthesis, which Humboldt’s examples implicitly raised but did not explicitly resolve, would occupy linguists for generations. In contemporary linguistics, incorporation is understood as a specific phenomenon distinct from polysynthesis in general: not all polysynthetic languages incorporate nouns, and incorporation can occur in languages that are not otherwise polysynthetic. The confusion surrounding these terms, which persists in some quarters today, can be traced directly back to the reception of Humboldt’s work and the unannotated examples he provided.
The book also contributed to the broader recognition that American languages possess structural features worthy of serious scholarly attention. By subjecting Aztec verbal morphology to the same rigorous analysis that European languages received, Humboldt helped establish the principle that all languages, regardless of their speakers’ cultural or technological development, are legitimate objects of scientific study. This principle, now fundamental to modern linguistics, was far from universally accepted in the early nineteenth century.
The 1885 publication date places the work within the period when comparative linguistics was consolidating as a professional discipline. By making Humboldt’s analysis available to a new generation of scholars, the posthumous publication helped transmit his ideas to the emerging field of linguistic typology. The book thus serves as a bridge between the pioneering speculations of the early nineteenth century and the more systematic typological research that would follow, including the development of quantitative measures such as the synthesis index, which attempts to compare languages by calculating the average number of morphemes per word. Humboldt’s insistence on the structural distinctiveness of American languages, and his attempt to characterize that distinctiveness with precision, laid important groundwork for these later efforts.
The source material clarifies that Humboldt’s discussion of incorporating languages appears in his work Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (1836), a text distinct from the 1885 publication. The 1885 work, On the Verb in American Language, is the subject of this article, and the source material confirms that the famous Aztec examples—niccua in nacatl and ninacacua—are presented in the 1836 work as illustrations of nominal incorporation of a direct object. The source material does not provide additional examples or commentary from the 1885 treatise itself.
The source material further specifies that the term “polysynthetic” was coined in 1819 by Peter Stephen Du Ponceau to describe American languages that combine a multitude of “ideas” into few words. This early stage of comparative linguistic research is characterized in the source material as Eurocentric, because it elevates European conceptions to a universal standard from which other cultures are seen to deviate. Humboldt’s own terminology, einverleibend (incorporating), is noted as distinct from Du Ponceau’s coinage, though the source material does not elaborate on the relationship between these two terms beyond noting their historical sequence.
The source material also provides a detailed grammatical example from the Yupik language to illustrate polysynthesis: tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq, which translates as “He has not said again that he is going to hunt reindeer.” The breakdown shows that only the morpheme tuntu (“reindeer”) can stand alone; all other morphemes are bound. Notably, -ssur- is not the verb “to hunt” but a denominal word-formation element meaning “to hunt N.” This example is used in the source material to demonstrate the high number of morphemes per word typical of polysynthetic languages, a feature quantified by the synthesis index.
Another example from the Athapaskan language Koyukon is given: kk’oaɬts’eeyhyee’oyh, meaning “The wind blows it around.” Here, unlike the Yupik example, ‘oyh is a finite verb meaning “to move a compact object,” and aɬts’eeyh (“wind”) stands for the agent of the action. This contrast illustrates that in some polysynthetic languages, a nominal element can function as an agent within the verbal complex, a structural possibility distinct from the object incorporation seen in the Aztec examples.
The source material further clarifies the contemporary distinction between polysynthesis and incorporation. Incorporation today refers specifically to nominal incorporation, which is not to be identified with polysynthesis itself. Nominal incorporation is found primarily in North America; with the exception of the Penutian languages of California, all indigenous North American languages are incorporating. It also occurs in other regions, such as Chukchi and Nivkh in Siberia, and Yimas in Papua New Guinea. Polysynthesis without nominal incorporation is found in the Eskimo languages and in the Northwest Caucasian languages, such as Abkhaz.
The synthesis index, a quantitative measure mentioned in the source material, is defined as the number of morphemes (M) divided by the number of words (W) in a text, yielding S = M/W. Values for this index were published by Georgi Georgievich Silnitsky for 31 languages, ordered from more polysynthetic to more analytic. The source material notes that Greenberg reported a much higher value of S = 3.72 for Eskimo. Maninka, an African language, stands at the analytic end of the spectrum, as does English. For German, the index varies significantly by text type: Horne gives S = 1.58 for lyric poetry and S = 1.71 for prose, while Greenberg reports values of 1.90, 1.92, and 2.11 for three scientific texts, the last being a philosophical text. The source material notes that the selection of texts plays a large role in these measurements.
