Is the fusing technique thereby set off as the essence of inflection?  I am afraid that we have not yet reached our goal.  If our language were crammed full of coalescences of the type of depth, but if, on the other hand, it used the plural independently of verb concord (e.g., the books falls like the book falls, or the book fall like the books fall), the personal endings independently of tense (e.g., the book fells like the book falls, or the book fall like the book fell), and the pronouns independently of case (e.g., I see he like he sees me, or him see the man like the man sees him), we should hesitate to describe it as inflective.  The mere fact of fusion does not seem to satisfy us as a clear indication of the inflective process.  There are, indeed, a large number of languages that fuse radical element and affix in as complete and intricate a fashion as one could hope to find anywhere without thereby giving signs of that particular kind of formalism that marks off such languages as Latin and Greek as inflective.

What is true of fusion is equally true of the “symbolic” processes.[105] There are linguists that speak of alternations like drink and drank as though they represented the high-water mark of inflection, a kind of spiritualized essence of pure inflective form.  In such Greek forms, nevertheless, as pepomph-a “I have sent,” as contrasted with pemp-o “I send,” with its trebly symbolic change of the radical element (reduplicating pe-, change of e to o, change of p to ph), it is rather the peculiar alternation of the first person singular _-a_ of the perfect with the _-o_ of the present that gives them their inflective cast.  Nothing could be more erroneous than to imagine that symbolic changes of the radical element, even for the expression of such abstract concepts as those of number and tense, is always associated with the syntactic peculiarities of an inflective language.  If by an “agglutinative” language we mean one that affixes according to the juxtaposing technique, then we can only say that there are hundreds of fusing and symbolic languages—­non-agglutinative by definition—­that are, for all that, quite alien in spirit to the inflective type of Latin and Greek.  We can call such languages inflective, if we like, but we must then be prepared to revise radically our notion of inflective form.

[Footnote 105:  See pages 133, 134.]

[Transcriber’s note:  Footnote 105 refers to the paragraph beginning on line 4081.]