house.”  We can diminutivize this plural:  inikw-ihl-’minih-’is, “little fires in the house” or “burn plurally and slightly in the house.”  What if we add the preterit tense suffix _-it_?  Is not inikw-ihl-’minih-’is-it necessarily a verb:  “several small fires were burning in the house”?  It is not.  It may still be nominalized; inikwihl’minih’isit-’i means “the former small fires in the house, the little fires that were once burning in the house.”  It is not an unambiguous verb until it is given a form that excludes every other possibility, as in the indicative inikwihl-minih’isit-a “several small fires were burning in the house.”  We recognize at once that the elements _-ihl_, _-’minih_, _-’is_, and _-it_, quite aside from the relatively concrete or abstract nature of their content and aside, further, from the degree of their outer (phonetic) cohesion with the elements that precede them, have a psychological independence that our own affixes never have.  They are typically agglutinated elements, though they have no greater external independence, are no more capable of living apart from the radical element to which they are suffixed, than the _-ness_ and goodness or the _-s_ of books.  It does not follow that an agglutinative language may not make use of the principle of fusion, both external and psychological, or even of symbolism to a considerable extent.  It is a question of tendency.  Is the formative slant clearly towards the agglutinative method?  Then the language is “agglutinative.”  As such, it may be prefixing or suffixing, analytic, synthetic, or polysynthetic.

[Footnote 107:  See page 110.]

[Transcriber’s note:  Footnote 107 refers to the paragraph beginning on line 3331.]

To return to inflection.  An inflective language like Latin or Greek uses the method of fusion, and this fusion has an inner psychological as well as an outer phonetic meaning.  But it is not enough that the fusion operate merely in the sphere of derivational concepts (group II),[108] it must involve the syntactic relations, which may either be expressed in unalloyed form (group IV) or, as in Latin and Greek, as “concrete relational concepts” (group III).[109] As far as Latin and Greek are concerned, their inflection consists essentially of the fusing of elements that express logically impure relational concepts with radical elements and with elements expressing derivational concepts.  Both fusion as a general method and the expression of relational concepts in the word are necessary to the notion of “inflection.”

[Footnote 108:  See Chapter V.]