Abstract
The Czech structuralist Vladimír Skalička belongs to eminent language typologists of the 20th century. His epoch-marking contribution deals primarily with Hungarian, yet in an extensive paper, Skalička investigated typology of Modern Chinese as well, and repeatedly referred to Chinese in his later works considering it a classical example of a polysynthetic language.
Such classification deliberately contradicted the both then and now widely accepted view that Chinese a typical isolating language. Not only that his thesis did not compel specialists in Chinese linguistics - his very attempt has fallen into oblivion and has, in fact, never been reflected upon by sinologists in a proper way.
The present article aims to at least partially compensate for this negligence.