limits itself, so far as its prefixes (and infixes) are concerned, to the expression of derivational concepts, and the Bantu languages, in which the prefixed elements have a far-reaching significance as symbols of syntactic relations.  The classification has much greater value if it is taken to refer to the expression of relational concepts[100] alone.  In this modified form we shall return to it as a subsidiary criterion.  We shall find that the terms “isolating,” “affixing,” and “symbolic” have a real value.  But instead of distinguishing between prefixing and suffixing languages, we shall find that it is of superior interest to make another distinction, one that is based on the relative firmness with which the affixed elements are united with the core of the word.[101]

[Footnote 98:  See Chapter IV.]

[Footnote 99:  There is probably a real psychological connection between symbolism and such significant alternations as drink, drank, drunk or Chinese mai (with rising tone) “to buy” and mai (with falling tone) “to sell.”  The unconscious tendency toward symbolism is justly emphasized by recent psychological literature.  Personally I feel that the passage from sing to sang has very much the same feeling as the alternation of symbolic colors—­e.g., green for safe, red for danger.  But we probably differ greatly as to the intensity with which we feel symbolism in linguistic changes of this type.]

[Footnote 100:  Pure or “concrete relational.”  See Chapter V.]

[Footnote 101:  In spite of my reluctance to emphasize the difference between a prefixing and a suffixing language, I feel that there is more involved in this difference than linguists have generally recognized.  It seems to me that there is a rather important psychological distinction between a language that settles the formal status of a radical element before announcing it—­and this, in effect, is what such languages as Tlingit and Chinook and Bantu are in the habit of doing—­and one that begins with the concrete nucleus of a word and defines the status of this nucleus by successive limitations, each curtailing in some degree the generality of all that precedes.  The spirit of the former method has something diagrammatic or architectural about it, the latter is a method of pruning afterthoughts.  In the more highly wrought prefixing languages the word is apt to affect us as a crystallization of floating elements, the words of the typical suffixing languages (Turkish, Eskimo, Nootka) are “determinative” formations, each added element determining the form of the whole anew.  It is so difficult in practice to apply these elusive, yet important, distinctions that an elementary study has no recourse but to ignore them.]