But what is important for the constitution of philology is not so much knowing whether the elements of conjugation may, at some more or less distant period in the past, have enjoyed the benefit of an isolated existence carrying with it an autonomous value; what is essential, and what distinguishes the analyses of Schlegel and Bopp from those that may perhaps have seemed to anticipate them in the eighteenth century, is that the original syllables do not grow (by means of internal adjunctions or proliferations) without a certain number of modifications regulated within the root.