Other classes are included only by myself (interrogatives, adverbs) or only by Swadesh and Hoijer (pronouns, demonstratives).

What we have left as reasonably comparable are four classes: (1) body parts and products, which with a proportionally nearly even representation (51 terms out of 253, 25 out of 100) come out with nearly even ratios; 2.6 and 2.7; (2) Nature (29 terms against 17), ratios 3.3 versus 4.1; (3) adjectives (16, 15 terms), ratios 3.9 versus 4.7; (4) verbs (9, 22 terms), ratios 4.0 versus 3.4.

It will be seen that where the scope is similar, the Athabascan ratios come out somewhat higher (as indeed they ought to with a total ratio of 2.8 as against 3.5 or 4: 5) except for verbs, where alone the Athabascan ratio is lower. This exception may be connected with Hoijer's use of a much higher percentage of verbs: 22% of his total list as against 3.5% in mine. Or the exception may be due to a particular durability peculiar to the Athabascan verb. More word class ratios determined in more languages will no doubt ultimately answer the question.

If word classes differ in their resistance or liability to stem replacement within meaning slot, it is conceivable that individual meanings also differ with fair consistence trans lingually. Hoijer's Athabascan and my Yokuts share 71 identical meanings (with allowance for several near synonyms like stomach belly, big large, long far, many much, die dead, say speak). For Yokuts, I tabulated these 71 items in five columns, according as they were expressed by 1, 2, 3, 4, and more than 4 stems. The totals for these five categories are not too uneven, namely 20, 15, 11, 16, 9 respectively. For Athabascan, with a greater range of stems, the first two of five corresponding columns were identical, 1 and 2 stems; the three others had to be spread somewhat, and are headed respectively ** f; ** f; and ** f stems. While the particular limits of these groupings may seem artificially arbitrary; they do fairly express a corresponding grouping of more variable material, and they eventuate also in five classes, along a similar scale, containing approximately equal numbers of cases, namely 19, 14, 15, 11, 12 in Athabascan.