Sweet says: “There are many other minor criteria of morphological classification. The most important of these is perhaps that of the agglutinative or inflectional elements before or after the word or stem [modified]. In Turkish and in other Altaic languages, as also in Finnish, these are always post-positions, so that every word begins with the root which always has chief stress. The Bantu languages of South Africa, on the other hand, favor prefixes.... The Semitic languages favor prefixes and post-positions about equally. The Aryan languages are mainly post-positional, with occasional use of prefixes, most of which, however, are of later origin.” It must not be supposed that languages fall into absolutely distinct categories because of their structure. No language to-day is purely of one type or another. There have been too many centuries of borrowing and change for that condition to now be possible for any language, nor are there any longer what might be called primitive tongues. They have all long since outgrown that state, whatever it may have been, even the Botocudo of Brazil, which is generally ranked as the most primitive. Languages may now be classified only according to their prevailing tendencies. Thus, modern English is in part isolating, in part inflectional and in part agglutinative, as that term is generally applied. Basque is an incorporating language, far removed geographically and linguistically from any other of that character. The Indo-European family may be considered as inflectional, because that process is a prominent feature, but it is by no means the only one present, nor is it exclusively typical of that family. There is no doubt that all languages pass through certain stages in their development, but it is not at all true that they all have eventually the same or even similar histories. There are endless possibilities of growth and decay, and this fact alone excludes any set evolutionary scheme. Nor are the isolating languages the most primitive. On the contrary, they are as complex in their way as the most agglutinative North American tongues, and as expressive, for some psychological categories. There is little doubt that all languages have begun on an isolating principle of simple roots for single ideas, from which they have diverged in endless variety. Probably all inflectional languages had an isolating and agglutinative stage, although this is by no means proved. The Chinese seems to have undergone an agglutinative past of some sort, but to have resolved again into simple roots, with only traces of fuller forms, but with the added complexity of tone, accent, and order, to give, as Sweet puts it, “that extreme of elliptical conciseness and concentrated force of expression, which excites our admiration.”