ike _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.]

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 every noun plural in English were of the type of _book_:
_books_, if there were not such conflicting patterns as _deer_: _deer_,
_ox_: _oxen_, _goose_: _geese_ to complicate the general form picture of
plurality, there is litt