[…] this common mode of structure, which, in its various aspects and degrees, is at least generally characteristic of American language, is called the polysynthetic or incorporating. Its marked tendency is toward the absorbing of the other parts of the sentence into the verb. Not the subject alone, as in Indo-European, enters into combination with the root for predicative expression, but the objects also, of every kind of relation, and the signs of time and place and manner and degree, and a host of modifiers of the verbal action, for purposes unknown to any grammatical system with which we are ordinarily familiar.
- Whitney (1875), Pag. 260