[Footnote 109:  If we deny the application of the term “inflective” to fusing languages that express the syntactic relations in pure form, that is, without the admixture of such concepts as number, gender, and tense, merely because such admixture is familiar to us in Latin and Greek, we make of “inflection” an even more arbitrary concept than it need be.  At the same time it is true that the method of fusion itself tends to break down the wall between our conceptual groups II and IV, to create group III.  Yet the possibility of such “inflective” languages should not be denied.  In modern Tibetan, for instance, in which concepts of group II are but weakly expressed, if at all, and in which the relational concepts (e.g., the genitive, the agentive or instrumental) are expressed without alloy of the material, we get many interesting examples of fusion, even of symbolism. Mi di, e.g., “man this, the man” is an absolutive form which may be used as the subject of an intransitive verb.  When the verb is transitive (really passive), the (logical) subject has to take the agentive form. Mi di then becomes mi di “by the man,” the vowel of the demonstrative pronoun (or article) being merely lengthened. (There is probably also a change in the tone of the syllable.) This, of course, is of the very essence of inflection.  It is an amusing commentary on the insufficiency of our current linguistic classification, which considers “inflective” and “isolating” as worlds asunder, that modern Tibetan may be not inaptly described as an isolating language, aside from such examples of fusion and symbolism as the foregoing.]

But to have thus defined inflection is to doubt the value of the term as descriptive of a major class.  Why emphasize both a technique and a particular content at one and the same time?  Surely we should be clear in our minds as to whether we set more store by one or the other.  “Fusional” and “symbolic” contrast with “agglutinative,” which is not on a par with “inflective” at all.  What are we to do with the fusional and symbolic languages that do not express relational concepts in the word but leave them to the sentence?  And are we not to distinguish between agglutinative languages that express these same concepts in the word—­in so far inflective-like—­and those that do not?  We dismissed the scale:  analytic, synthetic, polysynthetic, as too merely quantitative for our purpose.  Isolating, affixing, symbolic—­this also seemed insufficient for the reason that it laid too much stress on technical externals.  Isolating, agglutinative, fusional, and symbolic is a preferable scheme, but still skirts the external.  We shall do best, it seems to me, to hold to “inflective” as a valuable suggestion for a broader and more consistently developed scheme, as a hint for a classification based on the nature of the concepts expressed by the language.  The other two classifications, the first based on degree of synthesis, the second on degree of fusion, may be retained as intercrossing schemes that give us the opportunity to subdivide our main conceptual types.