Nearest to Chinese, we find Basque, Coptic, and the American languages; these all use separable elements as a means of connection; but those elements, instead of remaining always in a free state, like so many irreducible verbal atoms, 'are already beginning to melt into the word'; Arabic is defined by its mixture of the system of affixes and that of inﬂections; Celtic is almost exclusively an inﬂectional language, though one still finds in it 'vestiges of affixive languages'.