I have put French in C
rather than in D with considerable misgivings. Everything depends on how
one evaluates elements like _-al_ in _national_, _-te_ in _bonte_, or
_re-_ in _retourner_. They are common enough, but are they as alive, as
little petrified or bookish, as our English _-ness_ and _-ful_ and
_un-_?]

The table shows clearly enough how little relative permanence there is
in the technical features of language. That highly synthetic languages
(Latin; Sanskrit) have frequently broken down into analytic forms
(French; Bengali) or that agglutinative languages (Finnish) have in
many instances gradually taken on "inflective" features are well-known
facts, but the natural inference does not seem to have been often drawn
that possibly the contrast between synthetic and analytic or
agglutinative and "inflective" (fusional) is not so fundamental after
all. Turning to the Indo-Chinese languages, we find that Chinese is as
near to being a perfectly isolating language as any example we are
likely to find, while Classical Tibetan has not only fusional but strong
symbolic features (e.g., _g-tong-ba_ "to give," past _b-tang_, future
_gtang_, imperative _thong_); but both are pure-relational languages.
Ewe is either isolating or only barely agglutinative, while Shilluk,
though soberly analytic, is one of the most definitely symbolic
languages I know; both of these Soudanese languages are pure-relational.
The relationship between Polynesian and Cambodgian is remote, though
practically certain; while the latter has more markedly fusional
features than the former,[120] both conform to the complex
pure-relational type. Yana and Salinan are superficially very dissimilar
languages. Yana is highly polysynthetic and quite typically
agglutinative, Salinan is no more synthetic than and as irregularly and
compactly fusional ("inflective") as Latin; both are pure-relational,
Chinook and Takelma, remotely related languages of Oregon, have diverged
very far from each other, not only as regards technique and synthesis in
general but in almost all the details of their structure; both are
complex mixed-relational languages, though in very different ways. Facts
such as these seem to lend color to the suspicion that in the contrast
of pure-relational and mixed-relational (or concrete-relational) we are
confronted by something deeper, more far-reaching, than the contrast of
isolating, agglutinative, and fusional.[121]

[Footnote 120: In spite