The asymmetry of affixation

There is an old observation that, from a global perspective, there are more suffixes than prefixes in human languages. Probably the first to explicitly assert this was Edward Sapir: ‘Of the three types of affixing – the use of prefixes, suffixes, and infixes – suffixing is much the commonest ’ (Sapir 1921: 67). Bybee et al. (1990: 4