isolatingadj.

1860 F. W. Farrar Ess. Origin Lang. 185 (note) Pott's formula for the morphological classification of languages was that they are ‘isolating’ ‘agglutinative’, and ‘inflectional’.

1861 F. M. Müller Lect. Sci. Lang. viii. 274 Languages belonging to this first or Radical Stage, have sometimes been called Monosyllabic or Isolating.

1868 F. M. Müller Sel. Ess. (1881) I. 44 We find it repeated again and again in most works on Comparative Philology, that Chinese belongs to the isolating class, the Turanian languages to the combinatory, the Aryan and Semitic to the inflectional.

1885 Encycl. Brit. XVIII. 774/2 Such languages, constituting the small minority of human tongues, are wont to be called ‘isolating’, i.e., using each element by itself, in its integral form.

1921 E. Sapir Lang. vi. 133 More justifiable [than the traditional classification of linguistic types as i) isolating, ii) agglutinative, iii) inflective] would be a classification according to the formal processes most typically developed in the language. Those languages that always identify the word with the radical element would be set off as an ‘isolating’ group against such as either affix modifying elements..or possess the power to change the significance of the radical element by internal changes.

1953 C. E. Bazell Ling. Form i. 2 In languages of so-called ‘isolating’ structure the syllable may often be regarded as the minimal unit having independent morphological relevance.

1913 W. Bateson Probl. Genetics vi. 119 In one remarkable case the season of appearance plainly acts as the isolating barrier.

1937 T. Dobzhansky in Amer. Naturalist 71 405 The expression ‘isolating mechanisms’ seems to be a convenient general name for all the mechanisms hindering or preventing the interbreeding of racial complexes or species.

1973 I. H. Herskowitz Princ. Genetics xxxvi. 564 It is expected..that natural selection would favor isolating mechanisms that operate prior to mating.