Mr. F. SCHLEGEL does not enter into any inquiry of the origin of what is generally called grammatical inflection, this subject belonging not to the plan of his highly instructive work; if he had been induced to undertake it, it would certainly not have escaped his usual sagacity and profoundness of thought, that the greatest part of those inflections are merely additional particles, whose proper signification, where it can be discovered, is more or less connected with the modification of sense induced by them upon the verb or noun. The only real inflections which I consider possible in a language, whose elements are monosyllables, are the change of their vowels and the repetition of their radical consonants, otherwise called reduplication. These two modes of inflection are used in the Sanskrit and its kindred dialects to their full extent, and often even, particularly in the former, to a useless redundancy, I mean without indicating a modification of the sense.
- Bopp (1820), a pag.11-12