There is another very useful set of distinctions that can be made, but these too must not be applied exclusively, or our classification will again be superficial.  I refer to the notions of “analytic,” “synthetic,” and “polysynthetic.”  The terms explain themselves.  An analytic language is one that either does not combine concepts into single words at all (Chinese) or does so economically (English, French).  In an analytic language the sentence is always of prime importance, the word is of minor interest.  In a synthetic language (Latin, Arabic, Finnish) the concepts cluster more thickly, the words are more richly chambered, but there is a tendency, on the whole, to keep the range of concrete significance in the single word down to a moderate compass.  A polysynthetic language, as its name implies, is more than ordinarily synthetic.  The elaboration of the word is extreme.  Concepts which we should never dream of treating in a subordinate fashion are symbolized by derivational affixes or “symbolic” changes in the radical element, while the more abstract notions, including the syntactic relations, may also be conveyed by the word.  A polysynthetic language illustrates no principles that are not already exemplified in the more familiar synthetic languages.  It is related to them very much as a synthetic language is related to our own analytic English.[102] The three terms are purely quantitative—­and relative, that is, a language may be “analytic” from one standpoint, “synthetic” from another.  I believe the terms are more useful in defining certain drifts than as absolute counters.  It is often illuminating to point out that a language has been becoming more and more analytic in the course of its history or that it shows signs of having crystallized from a simple analytic base into a highly synthetic form.[103]

[Footnote 102:  English, however, is only analytic in tendency.  Relatively to French, it is still fairly synthetic, at least in certain aspects.]

[Footnote 103:  The former process is demonstrable for English, French, Danish, Tibetan, Chinese, and a host of other languages.  The latter tendency may be proven, I believe, for a number of American Indian languages, e.g., Chinook, Navaho.  Underneath their present moderately polysynthetic form is discernible an analytic base that in the one case may be roughly described as English-like, in the other, Tibetan-like.]

We now come to the difference between an “inflective” and an “agglutinative” language.  As I have already remarked, the distinction is a useful, even a necessary, one, but it has been generally obscured by a number of irrelevancies and by the unavailing effort to make the terms cover all languages that are not, like Chinese, of a definitely isolating cast.  The meaning that we had best assign to the term “inflective” can be gained by considering very briefly what are some of the basic features of Latin and Greek that have been looked upon as peculiar to the inflective