[…] one more important department of the means of enrichment of a language: namely, the capacity, belonging to every tongue that has any share of inflective character, of multiplying the applicabilities, and so the usefulness of its material new or old, by adding formative elements to it, by putting it through the processes of inflection and derivation.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.130

It is of high importance, if we would understand the structure of any language, to distinguish its living apparatus of inflection and derivation from that which is only recognizable in its older words as having been formerly alive. And it is in great part by the deadening of such means of multiplication of expression that a language like ours gains its peculiar character, as a prevailingly analytical speech.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.132