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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?
This is also true of many languages of type B, the terms "agglutinative," "fusional," and "symbolic" applying in their case merely to the treatment of the derivational, not the relational, concepts. Such languages could be termed "agglutinative-isolating," "fusional-isolating" and "symbolic-isolating."
Later on the quality of the ö vowel must have departed widely enough from that of o to enable ö to rise in consciousness as a neatly distinct vowel. As soon as this happened, the expression of plurality in föti, töthi, and analogous words became symbolic and fusional, not merely fusional. In musi "mice" the long u was colored by the following i to long ü.
The classification is too sweeping and too broad for an easy, descriptive survey of the many varieties of human speech. It needs to be amplified. Each of the types A, B, C, D may be subdivided into an agglutinative, a fusional, and a symbolic sub-type, according to the prevailing method of modification of the radical element.
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.
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.
The relationship between Polynesian and Cambodgian is remote, though practically certain; while the latter has more markedly fusional features than the former, both conform to the complex pure-relational type. Yana and Salinan are superficially very dissimilar languages. Only a few schematic indications are possible. A separate volume would be needed to breathe life into the scheme.
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