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Updated: May 23, 2025
I believe it is safe to infer that there is a rather strong feeling in English that the interrogative pronoun or adverb, typically an emphatic element in the sentence, should be invariable. The inflective -m of whom is felt as a drag upon the rhetorical effectiveness of the word. It needs to be eliminated if the interrogative pronoun is to receive all its latent power.
It was not difficult for them to be persuaded that these familiar languages represented the "highest" development that speech had yet attained and that all other types were but steps on the way to this beloved "inflective" type.
A language may be both agglutinative and inflective, or inflective and polysynthetic, or even polysynthetic and isolating, as we shall see a little later on. There is a fourth reason why the classification of languages has generally proved a fruitless undertaking. It is probably the most powerful deterrent of all to clear thinking.
Hence has arisen the still popular classification of languages into an "isolating" group, an "agglutinative" group, and an "inflective" group. Sometimes the languages of the American Indians are made to straggle along as an uncomfortable "polysynthetic" rear-guard to the agglutinative languages.
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. Mi di, e.g., "man this, the man" is an absolutive form which may be used as the subject of an intransitive verb.
Champions of the "inflective" languages are wont to glory in the very irrationalities of Latin and Greek, except when it suits them to emphasize their profoundly "logical" character. Yet the sober logic of Turkish or Chinese leaves them cold. The glorious irrationalities and formal complexities of many "savage" languages they have no stomach for.
We can call such languages inflective, if we like, but we must then be prepared to revise radically our notion of inflective form. It is necessary to understand that fusion of the radical element and the affix may be taken in a broader psychological sense than I have yet indicated.
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 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.
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.
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