[Footnote 29: Indian language of British Columbia closely related to the
Nass already cited.]

Of all grammatical processes affixing is incomparably the most
frequently employed. There are languages, like Chinese and Siamese, that
make no grammatical use of elements that do not at the same time possess
an independent value as radical elements, but such languages are
uncommon. Of the three types of affixing--the use of prefixes, suffixes,
and infixes--suffixing is much the commonest. Indeed, it is a fair guess
that suffixes do more of the formative work of language than all other
methods combined. It is worth noting that there are not a few affixing
languages that make absolutely no use of prefixed elements but possess a
complex apparatus of suffixes. Such are Turkish, Hottentot, Eskimo,
Nootka, and Yana. Some of these, like the three last mentioned, have
hundreds of suffixed elements, many of them of a concreteness of
significance that would demand expression in the vast majority of
languages by means of radical elements. The reverse case, the use of
prefixed elements to the complete exclusion of suffixes, is far less
common. A good example is Khmer (or Cambodgian), spoken in French
Cochin-China, though even here there are obscure traces of old suffixes
that have ceased to function as such and are now felt to form part of
the radical element.

A considerable majority of known languages are prefixing and suffixing
at one and the same time, but the relative importance of the two groups
of affixed elements naturally varies enormously. In some languages, such
as Latin and Russian, the suffixes alone relate the word to the rest of
the sentence, the prefixes being confined to the expression of such
ideas as delimit the concrete significance of the radical element
without influencing its bearing in the proposition. A Latin form like
_remittebantur_ "they were being sent back" may serve as an illustration
of this type of distribution of elements. The prefixed element _re-_
"back" merely qualifies to a certain extent the inherent significance of
the radical element _mitt-_ "send," while the suffixes _-eba-_, _-nt-_,
and _-ur_ convey the less concrete, more strictly formal, notions of
time, person, plurality, and passivity.

On the other hand, there are languages, like the Bantu group of Africa
or the Athabaskan languages[30] of North America, in which the
grammatically significant elements precede, those that follow the
rad