If all our words had been formed on the type of this example _un-cost-li-ness_, English would have been an agglutinative language. But, as a matter of fact, English, like the rest of the group to which it mainly belongs, has adopted the device of inflecting many of its words (or, rather, has inherited this device from some of its progenitors), and thus belongs to the third order of languages which I have mentioned, namely, the _Inflective_. Languages of this type are also often termed _Transpositive_, because the words now admit of being shifted about as to their relative positions in a sentence, without the meaning being thereby affected. That is to say, relations between words are now marked much less by syntax, and much more by individual change. In languages of this kind the principle of agglutination has been so perfected that the original composition is more or less obscured, and the resulting words therefore admit of being themselves twisted into a variety of shapes significant of finer grades of meaning, in the way of declension, conjugation, &c. Or, to state the case as it has been stated by some philologists, in agglutinative tongues the welded elements are not sufficiently welded to admit of flexion: they are too loosely joined together, or still too independent one of another. But when the union has grown more intimate, the structure allows of more artistic treatment at the hands of language-makers: the “amalgamation” of elements having become complete, the resulting alloy can be manipulated in a variety of ways without involving its disintegration. Moreover, this principle of inflection may extend from the component parts to the root itself; not only suffixes and prefixes, but even the word which these modify, may undergo inflectional change. So that, upon the whole, the best general idea of these various types of language-structure may perhaps be given by the following formulæ, which I take from Hovelacque.[150]