ISOLATION, applied in common par lance to the act of secluding, and of making and also to the state of being alone, of being separate; to the states of exclusion, se clusion, or of insulation, and thus of being free from influences such as are incident to contact and conjunction,— in short, a state of upurite is a word which has several specific meanings in science.
A. In philology.—(1) To denote that process by which a word-form receives a character which distinguishes it as a compound from the parts of which it was composed, and also from any other group of words connected merely in some syntactical relation. Latin mlignOpere, for instance, was isolated from its component ele ments magno and opere by its vowel contrac tion, here the cause of the process. So also was the Homeric Triiv imap or isolated owing to the circumstance that the neu ter when used independently takes a long from rac, racra ; (2) To denote the similar process by which verbal abstract nouns become infinitives, or supines. An infinitive may be said to be completely formed through isolation when the substantive denoting activity or a state, that is when a verbal abstract noun or nomen actionis is no longer regarded as a case form, and its construction no longer follows the analogy of its original use as a noun. This is true, for example, of the Greek guevai ciavat and Latin dare .at the earliest period of which Indo-European philology has any record. By this process of isolation, the infinitive word form reached its most characteristic develop ment in Latin and in Greek. For these are the only languages of the whole Indo-European group in -which one finds a special expression for differences of voice. This kind of isolation seems to have had least influence in the Irish tongue, where the nominci actionis retains the construction of nouns. Even the ancient lan guage of the Veda is said to show in this re spect a further degree of development than the so-called Irish infinitive; (3) To denote that characteristic device of juxtaposing words in a definite order in some languages (of the so called isolating type) to express relational con cepts, all words themselves remaining un changed and unchangeable units, and thus re ceiving their various relational values, not from grammatical modifications, but from the position which they occupy in the sentence.
Chinese affords a classical example of such a language. And it is a most interesting fact that English itself has ceased to be a clear example of the so-called inflective type, and may be said to be an example of an isolating language in the making. When comparative grammarians had succeeded in subjecting the entire content of inavilcind's linguistic power to careful scrutiny and critical examination, three main types of speech emerged. These groups were found to be co-ordinate; and tongues were thereafter.dis tinguished as isolating, agglutinative, and as in flective for taxonomic reasons. This resulted when special regard was paid to the inner coher ence of words, a characteristic produced in all tongues by the operation of various specific grammatic processes. In all such investigations attention was directed in particular to the rela tive degree of unity which the stem or unmodi fied word plus its various grammatical incre ments or modifications possesses, emphasis being always laid on the degree of unity which grammatical processes bring about between the stem and the increments which express rela tional concepts. On the basis of this formal criterion, emphasis being laid on the characters called inflection, agglutination, and isolation re spectively, all the languages in the world can be classified into three main divisions or types, as inflectional, agglutinative and isolating types respectively.
B. In chemistry, isolation refers to the state of any substance when separated from all for eign elements; and also to the act or method of obtaining such a substance in a free state, or of rendering it pure.