/7 P" 
 
 LANGUAGE 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY 
 OF SPEECH 
 
 EDWARD SAPIR 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
 
 COPYBIGHT, 1921, BY 
 
 Kabcoubt, brace aad company, ma 
 
 Minted in the u s. k
 
 p 
 
 / OS 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 This little book aims to give a certain perspective on 
 the subject of language rather than to assemble facts 
 about it. It has little to say of the ultimate psychologi- 
 cal basis of speech and gives only enough of the actual 
 descriptive or historical facts of particular languages to 
 illustrate principles. Its main purpose is to show what 
 I conceive language to be, what is its variability in place 
 and time, and what are its relations to other fundamen- 
 tal human interests — the problem of thought, the nature 
 of the historical process, race, culture, art. 
 
 The perspective thus gained will be useful, I hope, 
 both to linguistic students and to the outside public that 
 is half inclined to dismiss linguistic notions as the pri- 
 vate pedantries of essentially idle minds. Knowledge 
 of the wider relations of their science is essential to 
 professional students of language if they are to be saved 
 from a sterile and purely technical attitude. Among 
 contemporary writers of influence on liberal thought 
 Croce is one of the very few who have gained an under- 
 standing of the fundamental significance of language. 
 He has pointed out its close relation to the problem of 
 art. I am deeply indebted to him for this insight. 
 Quite aside from their intrinsic interest, linguistic forms 
 and historical processes have the greatest possible diag- 
 nostic value for the understanding of some of the more 
 difficult and elusive problems in the psychology of 
 thought and in the strange, cumulative drift in the life 
 of the human spirit that we call history or progress or
 
 iv PREFACE 
 
 evolution. This value depends chiefly on the uncon- 
 scious and unrationalized nature of linguistic structure. 
 
 I have avoided most of the technical terms and all 
 of the technical symbols of the linguistic academy. 
 There is not a single diacritical mark in the book. 
 Where possible, the discussion is based on English ma- 
 terial. It was necessary, however, for the scheme of 
 the book, which includes a consideration of the protean 
 forms in which human thought has found expression, 
 to quote some exotic instances. For these no apology 
 seems necessary. Owing to limitations of space I have 
 had to leave out many ideas or principles that I should 
 have liked to touch upon. Other points have had to be 
 barely hinted at in a sentence or flying phrase. Never- 
 theless, I trust that enough has here been brought to- 
 gether to serve as a stimulus for the more fundamental 
 study of a neglected field. 
 
 I desire to express my cordial appreciation of the 
 friendly advice and helpful suggestions of a number of 
 friends who have read the work in manuscript, notably 
 Profs. A. L. Kroeber and R. H. Lowie of the University 
 of California, Prof. W. D. Wallis of Reed College, and 
 Prof. J. Zeitlin of the University of Illinois. 
 
 Edward Sapir. 
 
 Ottawa, Ont., 
 April 8, 1921.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 FAGB 
 
 Pbefack iii 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. Inteoductoey : Language Defined .... 1 
 
 Language a cultural, not a biologically inherited, 
 function. Futility of interjectional and sound- 
 imitative theories of the origin of speech. Defini- 
 tion of language. The psycho-physical basis of 
 speech. Concepts and language. Is thought possi- 
 ble without language? Abbreviations and transfers 
 of the speech process. The universality of lan- 
 guage. 
 
 II. The Elements of Speech 24 
 
 Sounds not properly elements of speech. Words 
 and significant parts of words (radical elements, 
 grammatical elements ) . Types of words. The word 
 a formal, not a functional unit. The word has a 
 real psychological existence. The sentence. The 
 cognitive, volitional, and emotional aspects of 
 speech. Feeling-tones of words. 
 
 V III. The Sounds of Language 
 
 43 
 
 The vast number of possible sounds. The articu- 
 lating organs and their share in the production of 
 speech sounds: lungs, glottal cords, nose, mouth 
 and its parts. Vowel articulations. How and 
 where consonants are articulated. The phonetic 
 habits of a language. The "values" of sounds. 
 Phonetic patterns. 
 
 IV. FoEM IN Language: Geajisiatical Peocesses . . 59 
 
 Formal processes as distinct from grammatical 
 functions. Intercrossing of the two points of view. 
 Six main types of grammatical process. Word 
 sequence as a method. Compounding of radical 
 elements. Affixing: prefixes and suffixes; infixes. 
 Internal vocalic change; consonantal change. Re- 
 duplication. Functional variations of stress; of 
 pitch.
 
 vi CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 V. FoBM IN Language: Geammaticax Concepts . . S6 
 
 Analysis of a typical English sentence. Types of 
 concepts illustrated by it. Inconsistent expression 
 of analogous concepts. How the same sentence may 
 be expressed in other languages with striking dif- 
 ferences in the selection and grouping of concepts. 
 Essential and non-essential concepts. The mixing 
 of essential relational concejJts wiih secondary ones 
 of more concrete order. Form for form's sake. 
 Classiiication of linguistic concepts: basic or con- 
 crete, derivational, concrete relational, pure rela- 
 tional. Tendency for these types of concepts to flow 
 into each other. Categories expressed in various 
 grammatical systems. Order and stress as relating 
 principles in the sentence. Concord. Parts of 
 speech: no absolute classification possible; noun 
 and verb. 
 
 VI. Types of Linguistic Stbuctuee 127 
 
 Tlie possibility of classifying languages. Difficul- 
 ties. Classification into form-languages and form- 
 less languages not valid. Classification according 
 to formal processes used not practicable. Classifi- 
 cation according to degree of synthesis. "Inflec- 
 tive" and "agglutinative." Fusion and symbolism 
 as linguistic techniques. Agglutination. "Inflec- 
 tive" a confused term. Threefold classification sug- 
 gested: what types of concepts are expressed? 
 what is the prevailing technique? what is the de- 
 gree of synthesis? Four fundamental conceptual 
 tj-pes. Examples tabulated. Historical test of the 
 validity of the suggested conceptual classification. 
 
 VII. Language as a Historical Product: Drift . . 157 
 
 Variability of language. Individual and dialectic 
 variations. Time variation or "drift." How dia- 
 lects arise. Linguistic stocks. Direction or 
 "slope" of linguistic drift. Tendencies illustrated 
 in an English sentence. Hesitations of usage as 
 symptomatic of the direction of drift. Leveling 
 tendencies in English. Weakening of case elements. 
 Tendency to fixed position in tlie sentence. Drift 
 toward the invariable word. 
 
 VTTT. Language as a Historicai. PnonrcT: Phonetic Law 183 
 
 Parallels in drift in related lansniajrcs. Plionetic 
 
 -^ law as illustrated in the history of certain English 
 
 and German vowels and consonants. Regularity of
 
 CONTENTS vii 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 phonetic law. Shifting of sounds without destruc- 
 tion of phonetic pattern. Difficulty of explaining 
 the nature of phonetic drifts. Vowel mutation in 
 English and German. Morphological influence on 
 phonetic change. Analogical levelings to offset 
 irregularities produced by phonetic laws. New 
 morplioiogical features due to phonetic change. 
 
 IX. How Languages I.nfluexce Each Other . . . 205 
 
 Linguistic influences due to cultural contact. Bor- 
 rowing of words. Resistances to borrowing. Plio- 
 netic modification of borrowed words. Phonetic 
 interinfluencings of neighboring languages. Mor- 
 phological borrowings. iMorpliological resemblances 
 as vestiges of genetic relationship. 
 
 ^ X. Lajsguage, Race, and Culture 221 
 
 Naive tendency to consider linguistic, racial, and 
 cultural groupings as congruent. Race and lan- 
 guage need not correspond. Cultural and linguistic 
 boiuidaries not identical. Coincidences between lin- 
 guistic cleavages and those of language and culture 
 due to historical, not intrinsic psycliological, 
 causes. Language does not in any deep sense "re- 
 flect" culture. 
 
 XI. Language and Literature 236 
 
 Language as the material or medium of literature. 
 Literature may move on tlie generalized linguistic 
 plane or may be inseparable from specific linguistic 
 conditions. Langiiago as a collective art. Neces- 
 sary estlietic advantages or limitations in any lan- 
 guage. Style as conditioned by inherent features 
 of the language. Prosody as conditioned by the 
 phonetic dynamics of a language. 
 
 Index 249
 
 LANGUAGE, 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF SPEECH 
 
 I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY: LANGUAGE DEFINED 
 
 Speech is so familiar a feature of daily life that we 
 rarely pause to define it. It seems as natural to man 
 as walking, and only less so than breathing. Yet it 
 needs but a moment's reflection to convince us that this 
 naturalness of speech is but an illusory feeling. The 
 process of acquiring speech is, in sober fact, an utterly 
 different sort of thing from the process of learning to 
 walk. In the case of the latter function, culture, in 
 other words, the traditional body of social usage, is not 
 seriously brought into play. The child is individually 
 equipped, by the complex set of factors that we term 
 biological heredity, to make all the needed muscular and 
 nervous adjustments that result in walking. Indeed, 
 the very conformation of these muscles and of the ap- 
 propriate parts of the nervous system may be said to 
 be primarily adapted to the movements made in walking 
 and in similar activities. In a very real sense the nor- 
 mal human being is predestined to walk, not because 
 his elders will assist him to learn the art, but because 
 his organism is prepared from birth, or even from 
 the moment of conception, to take on all those expendi- 
 
 1
 
 2 LANGUAGE 
 
 tures of nervous energy and all those muscular adap- 
 tations that result in walking. To put it concisely, 
 walking is an inherent, biological function of man. 
 
 Not so language. It is of course true that in u cer- 
 tain sense the individual is predestined to talk, but 
 that is due entirely to the circumstance that he is born 
 not merely in nature, but in the lap of a society that 
 is certain, reasonably certain, to lead him to its tradi- 
 tions. Eliminate society and there is every reason to 
 believe that he will learn to walk, if, indeed, he survives 
 at all. But it is just as certain that he will never learn 
 to talk, that is, to communicate ideas according to the 
 traditional system of a particular society. Or, again, 
 remove the new-born individual from the social envi- 
 ronment into which he has come and transplant him 
 to an utterly alien one. He will develop the art of 
 walking in his new environment very much as he would 
 have developed it in the old. But his speech will be 
 completely at variance with the speech of his native 
 environment. Walking, then, is a general human ac- 
 tivity that varies only within circumscribed limits as 
 we pass from individual to individual. Its variability 
 is involuntary and purposeless. Speech is a human 
 activity that varies without assignable limit as we pass 
 from social group to social group, because it is a purely 
 historical heritage of the group, the product of long- 
 continued social usage. It varies as all creative effort 
 varies — not as consciously, perhaps, but none the less 
 as truly as do the religions, the beliefs, the customs, 
 and the arts of different peoples. Walking is an or- 
 ganic, an instinctive, function (not, of course, itself 
 an instinct) ; speech is a non-instinctive, acquired, "cul- 
 tural" function. 
 
 There is one fact that has frequently tended to pre-
 
 INTRODUCTORY 3 
 
 vent the recognition of language as a merely conven- 
 tional system of sound symbols, that has seduced the 
 popular mind into attributing to it an instinctive basis 
 that it' does not really possess. This is the well-known 
 observation that under the stress of emotion, say of a 
 sudden twinge of pain or of unbridled joy, we do in- 
 voluntarily give utterance to sounds that the hearer in- 
 terprets as indicative of the emotion itself. But there 
 is all the difference in the world between such invol- 
 untary expression of feeling and the normal type of 
 communication of ideas that is speech. The former 
 kind of utterance is indeed instinctive, but it is non- 
 symbolic; in other words, the sound of pain or the 
 sound of joy does not, as such, indicate the emotion, 
 it does not stand aloof, as it were, and announce that 
 such and such an emotion is being felt. What it does 
 is to serve as a more or less automatic overflow of the 
 emotional energy ; in a sense, it is part and parcel of 
 the emotion itself. Moreover, such instinctive cries 
 hardly constitute communication in any strict sense. 
 They are not addressed to any one, they are merely 
 overheard, if heard at all, as the bark of a dog, the 
 sound of approaching footsteps, or the rustling of the 
 wind is heard. If they convey certain ideas to the 
 hearer, it is only in the very general sense in which 
 any and every sound or even any phenomenon in our 
 environment may be said to convey an idea to the per- 
 ceiving mind. If the involuntary cry of pain which 
 is conventionally represented by "Oh!" be looked upon 
 as a true speech symbol equivalent to some such idea 
 as "I am in great pain," it is just as allowable to in- 
 terpret the appearance of clouds as an equivalent sym- 
 bol that carries the definite message "It is likely to 
 rain." A definition of language, however, that is sp
 
 4 LANGUAGE 
 
 extended as to cover every type of inference becomes ut- 
 terly meaningless. 
 
 The mistake must not be made of identifying our 
 conventional interjections (our oh! and ah! and sh!) 
 with the instinctive cries themselves. These interjec- 
 tions are merely conventional fixations of the natural 
 sounds. They therefore diifer widely in various lan- 
 guages in accordance with the specific phonetic genius 
 of each of these. As such they may be considered an 
 integral portion of speech, in the properly cultural sense 
 of the term, being no more identical with the instinctive 
 cries themselves than such words as ' ' cuckoo ' ' and ' ' kill- 
 deer" are identical with the cries of the birds they 
 denote or than Rossini's treatment of a storm in the 
 overture to "William Tell" is in fact a storm. In other 
 words, the interjections and sound-imitative words of 
 normal speech are related to their natural prototypes 
 as is art, a purely social or cultural thing, to nature. 
 It may be objected that, though the interjections differ 
 somewhat as we pass from language to language, they 
 do nevertheless offer striking family resemblances and 
 may therefore be looked upon as having grown up 
 out of a common instinctive base. But their case is 
 nowise different from that, say, of the varying national 
 modes of pictorial representation. A Japanese picture 
 of a hill both differs from and resembles a typical mod- 
 ern European painting of the same kind of hill. Both 
 are suggested by and both "imitate" the same natural 
 feature. Neither the one nor the other is the same 
 thing as, or, in any intelligible sense, a direct outgrowth 
 of, this natural feature. The two modes of representa- 
 tion are not identical because they proceed from differ- 
 ing historical traditions, are executed with differing 
 pictorial techniques. The interjections of Japanese and
 
 INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 English are, just so, suggested by a common natural 
 prototype, the instinctive cries, and are thus unavoid- 
 ably suggestive of each other. They differ, now greatly, 
 now but little, because they are builded out of histori- 
 cally diverse materials or techniques, the respective 
 linguistic traditions, phonetic systems, speech habits of 
 the two peoples. Yet the instinctive cries as such are 
 practically identical for all humanity, just as the hu- 
 man skeleton or nervous system is to all intents and 
 purposes a "fixed," that is, an only slightly and "acci- 
 dentally" variable, feature of man's organism. 
 
 Interjections are among the least important of speech 
 elements. Their discussion is valuable mainly because 
 it can be shown that even they, avowedly the nearest 
 of all language sounds to instinctive utterance, are only 
 superficially of an instinctive nature. Were it there- 
 fore possible to demonstrate that the whole of lan- 
 guage is traceable, in its ultimate historical and psycho- 
 logical foundations, to the interjections, it would still 
 not follow that language is an instinctive activity. But, 
 as a matter of fact, all attempts so to explain the origin 
 of speech have been fruitless. There is no tangible evi- 
 dence, historical or otherwise, tending to show that 
 the mass of speech elements and speech processes has 
 evolved out of the interjections. These are a very small 
 and functionally insignificant proportion of the vocabu- 
 lary of language ; at no time and in no linguistic prov- 
 ince that we have record of do we see a noticeable tend- 
 ency towards their elaboration into the primary warp 
 and woof of language. They are never more, at best, 
 than a decorative edging to the ample, complex fabric. 
 
 What applies to the interjections applies with even 
 greater force to the sound-imitative words. Such words 
 as "whippoorwill," "to mew," "to caw" are in no sense
 
 6 LANGUAGE 
 
 natural sound;; that man has instinctively or automati- 
 cally reproduced. They are just as truly creations of 
 the human mind, flights of the human fancy, as any- 
 thing else in language. They do not directly grow out 
 of nature, they are suggested by it and play with it. 
 Hence the onomatopoetic theory of the origin of speech, 
 the theory that would explain all speech as a gradual 
 evolution from sounds of an imitative character, really 
 brings us no nearer to the instinctive level than is 
 language as we know it to-day. As to the theory itself, 
 it is scarcely more credible than its interjectional coun- 
 terpart. It is true that a number of words which we do 
 not now feel to have a sound-imitative value can be 
 shown to have once had a phonetic form that strongly 
 suggests their origin as imitations of natural sounds. 
 Such is the English word "to laugh." For all that, 
 it is quite impossible to show, nor does it seem intrinsi- 
 cally reasonable to suppose, that more than a negligible 
 proportion of the elements of speech or anything at 
 all of its formal apparatus is derivable from an onomato- 
 poetic source. However much we may be disposed 
 on general principles to assign a fundamental impor- 
 tance in the languages of primitive peoples to the imi- 
 tation of natural sounds, the actual fact of the matter 
 is that these languages show no particular preference 
 for imitative words. Among the most primitive peoples 
 of aboriginal America, the Athabaskan tribes of the Mac- 
 kenzie River speak languages in which such words seem 
 to be nearly or entirely absent, while they are used 
 freely enough in languages as sophisticated as English 
 and German. Such an instance shows how little the 
 essential nature of speech is concerned with the mere 
 imitation of things. 
 
 The way is now cleared for a servieeal)le deflnition
 
 INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 of language. Language is a purely human and non- 
 instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions, and 
 desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced 
 symbols. These symbols are, in the first instance, audi- 
 tory and they are produced by the so-called "organs 
 of speech." There is no discernible instinctive basis in 
 human speech as such, however much instinctive ex- 
 pressions and the natural environment may serve as a 
 stimulus for the development of certain elements of 
 speech, however much instinctive tendencies, motor and 
 other, may give a predetermined range or mold to lin- 
 guistic expression. Such human or animal communica- 
 tion, if ''communication" it may be called, as is brought 
 about by involuntary, instinctive cries is not, in our 
 sense, language at all. 
 
 I have just referred to the "organs of speech," and 
 it would seem at first blush that this is tantamount 
 to an admission that speech itself is an instinctive, bio- 
 logically predetermiiied activity. We must not be mis- 
 led by the mere term. There are, properly speaking, 
 no organs of speech; there are only organs that are 
 incidentally useful in the production of speech sounds. 
 The lungs, the larynx, the palate, the nose, the tongue, 
 the teeth, and the lips, are all so utilized, but they are 
 no more to be thought of as primary organs of speech 
 than are the fingers to be considered as essentially or- 
 gans of piano-playing or the knees as organs of prayer. 
 Speech is not a simple activity that is carried on by 
 one or more organs biologically adapted to the purpose. 
 It is an extremely complex and ever-shifting network 
 of adjustments — in the brain, in the nervous system, 
 and in the articulating and auditory organs — tending 
 towards the desired end of communication. The lungs 
 developed, roughly speaking, in connection with the
 
 8 LANGUAGE 
 
 necessary biological function known as breathing; the 
 nose, as an organ of smell; the teeth, as organs useful 
 in breaking up food before it was ready for digestion. 
 If, then, these and other organs are being constantly 
 utilized in speech, it is only because any organ, once 
 existent and in so far as it is subject to voluntary con- 
 trol, can be utilized by man for secondary purposes. 
 Physiologically, speech is an overlaid function, or, to be 
 more precise, a group of overlaid functions. It gets 
 what service it can out of organs and functions, nerv- 
 ous and muscular, that have come into being and are 
 maintained for very different ends than its own. 
 
 It is true that physiological psychologists speak of 
 the localization of speech in the brain. This can only 
 mean that the sounds of speech are localized in the audi- 
 tory tract of the brain, or in some circumscribed por- 
 tion of it, precisely as other classes of sounds are lo- 
 calized; and that the motor processes involved in speech 
 (such as the movements of the glottal cords in the 
 larynx, the movements of the tongue required to pro- 
 nounce the vowels, lip movements required to articulate 
 certain consonants, and numerous others) are localized 
 in the motor tract precisely as are all other impulses 
 to special motor activities. In the same way control 
 is lodged in the visual tract of the brain over all those 
 processes of visual recognition involved in reading. Nat- 
 urally the particular points or clusters of points of 
 localization in the several tracts that refer to any ele- 
 ment of language are connected in the brain by paths 
 of association, so that the outward, or psycho-physical, 
 aspect of language, is of a vast network of associated 
 localizations in the brain and lower nervous tracts, the 
 auditory localizations being without doubt the most 
 fundamental of all for speech. However, a speech-
 
 INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 sound localized in the brain, even when associated with 
 the particular movements of the "speech organs" that 
 are required to produce it, is very far from being an 
 element of language. It must be further associated 
 with some element or group of elements of experience, 
 say a visual image or a class of visual images or a feel- 
 ing of relation, before it has even rudimentary linguistic 
 significance. This "element" of experience is the con- 
 tent or "meaning" of the linguistic unit; the associated 
 auditory, motor, and other cerebral processes that lie 
 immediately back of the act of speaking and the act 
 of hearing speech are merely a complicated symbol 
 of or signal for these ' ' meanings, ' ' of which more anon. 
 We see therefore at once that language as such is not 
 and cannot be definitely localized, for it consists of a 
 peculiar symbolic relation — physiologically an arbitrary 
 one — between all possible elements of consciousness 
 on the one hand and certain selected elements local- 
 ized in the auditory, motor, and other cerebral and 
 nervous tracts on the other. If language can be said 
 to be definitely "localized" in the brain, it is only in 
 that general and rather useless sense in which all as- 
 pects of consciousness, all human interest and activity, 
 may be said to be "in the brain." Hence, we have no 
 recourse but to accept language as a fully formed func- 
 tional system within man's psychic or "spiritual" con- 
 stitution. We cannot define it as an entity in psycho- 
 physical terms alone, however much the psycho-physical 
 basis is essential to its functioning in the individual. 
 
 From the physiologist's or psychologist's point of view 
 we may seem to be making an unwarrantable abstrac- 
 tion in desiring to handle the subject of speech without 
 constant and explicit reference to that basis. However, 
 such an abstraction is justifiable. We can profitably dis-
 
 10 LANGUAGE 
 
 cuss the intention, the form, and the history of speech, 
 precisely as we discuss the nature of any other phase of 
 human culture — say art or religion — as an institutional 
 or cultural entity, leaving the organic and psychologi- 
 cal mechanisms back of it as something to be taken for 
 granted. Accordingly, it must be clearly understood 
 that this introduction to the study of speech is not con- 
 cerned with those aspects of physiology and of physio- 
 logical psychology that underlie speech. Our study 
 of language is not to be one of the genesis and opera- 
 tion of a concrete mechanism ; it is, rather, to be an in- 
 quiry into the function and form of the arbitrary sys- 
 tems of symbolism that we term languages. 
 
 I have already pointed out that the essence of lan- 
 guage consists in the assigning of conventional, volun- 
 tarily articulated, sounds, or of their equivalents, to the 
 diverse elements of experience. The word "house" is 
 not a linguistic fact if by it is meant merely the acoustic 
 effect produced on the ear by its constituent consonants 
 and vowels, pronounced in a certain order; nor the 
 motor processes and tactile feelings which make up the 
 articulation of the word ; nor the visual perception on 
 the part of the hearer of this articulation ; nor the visual 
 perception of the word "house" on the written or 
 printed page; nor the motor processes and tactile feel- 
 ings which enter into the writing of the word ; nor the 
 memory of any or all of these experiences. It is only 
 when these, and possibly still other, associated experi- 
 ences are automatically associated with the image of a 
 house that they begin to take on the nature of a symbol, 
 a word, an element of language. But the mere fact of 
 such an association is not eiiougli. One might have heard 
 a particular word spoken in an individual house under 
 such impressive circumstances that neither the word
 
 INTRODUCTORY 11 
 
 nor the image of the house ever recur in consciousness 
 without the other becoming present at the same time. 
 This tj'pe of association does not constitute speech. The 
 association must be a purely symbolic one; in other 
 words, the word must denote, tag off, the image, must 
 have no other significance than to serve as a counter to 
 refer to it whenever it is necessary or convenient to do 
 so. Such an association, voluntary and, in a sense, arbi- 
 trary as it is, demands a considerable exercise of self- 
 conscious attention. At least to begin with, for habit 
 soon makes the association nearly as automatic as any 
 and more rapid than most. 
 
 But we have traveled a little too fast. Were the sym- 
 bol "house" — whether an auditory, motor, or visual ex- 
 perience or image — attached but to the single image of 
 a particular house once seen, it might perhaps, by an 
 indulgent criticism, be termed an element of speech, yet 
 it is obvious at the outset that speech so constituted 
 would have little or no value for purposes of commu- 
 nication. The world of our experiences must be enor- 
 mously simplified and generalized before it is possible 
 to make a symbolic inventory of all our experiences of 
 things and relations; and this inventory is imperative 
 before we can convey ideas. The elements of language, 
 the symbols that ticket off experience, must therefore 
 be associated with whole groups, delimited classes, of 
 experience rather than with the single experiences them- 
 selves. Only so is communication possible, for the single 
 experience lodges in an individual consciousness and is, 
 strictly speaking, incommunicable. To be communicated 
 it needs to be referred to a class which is tacitly accepted 
 by the community as an identity. Thus, the single im- 
 pression which I have had of a particular house must 
 be identified with all my other impressions of it. Fur-
 
 12 LANGUAGE 
 
 ther, my generalized memory or my "notion" of this 
 house must be merged with the notions that all other 
 individuals who have seen the house have formed of 
 it. The particular experience that we started with has 
 now been widened so as to embrace all possible impres- 
 sions or images that sentient beings have formed or may 
 form of the house in question. This first simplification 
 of experience is at the bottom of a large number of ele- 
 ments of speech, the so-called proper nouns or names 
 of single individuals or objects. It is, essentially, the 
 type of simplification which underlies, or forms the 
 crude subject of, history and art. But we cannot be con- 
 tent with this measure of reduction of the infinity of 
 experience. We must cut to the bone of things, we 
 must more or less arbitrarily throw whole masses of ex- 
 perience together as similar enough to warrant their 
 being looked upon — mistakenly, but conveniently — as 
 identical. This house and that house and thousands 
 of other phenomena of like character are thought of as 
 having enough in common, in spite of great and obvious 
 differences of detail, to be classed under the same head- 
 ing. In other words, the speech element "house" is the 
 symbol, first and foremost, not of a single perception, 
 nor even of the notion of a particiilar object, but of 
 a "concept," in other words, of a convenient capsule of 
 thought that embraces thousands of distinct experiences 
 .and that is ready to take in thousands more. If the 
 single significant elements of speech are the symbols of 
 concepts, the actual flow of speech may be interpreted as 
 a record of the setting of these concepts into mutual 
 relations. 
 
 The question has often been raised whether thought is 
 possible without speech ; further, if speech and thought 
 be not but two facets of the same psychic process. The
 
 INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 question is all the more difficult because it has been 
 hedged about by misunderstandings. In the first place, 
 it is well to observe that whether or not thought neces- 
 sitates symbolism, that is speech, the flow of language 
 itself is not always indicative of thought. We have 
 seen that the typical linguistic element labels a concept. 
 It does not follow from this that the use to which lan- 
 guage is put is always or even mainly conceptual. We 
 are not in ordinary life so much concerned with con- 
 cepts as such as with concrete particularities and spe- 
 cific relations. When I say, for instance, * ' I had a good 
 breakfast this morning," it is clear that I am not in 
 the throes of laborious thought, ti^at what I have to 
 transmit is hardly more than a pleasurable memory 
 symbolically rendered in the grooves of habitual expres- 
 sion. Each element in the sentence defines a sepa- 
 rate concept or conceptual relation or both combined, 
 but the sentence as a whole has no conceptual significance 
 whatever. It is somewhat as though a dynamo capable 
 of generating enough power to run an elevator were 
 operated almost exclusively to feed an electric door- 
 bell. The parallel is more suggestive than at first sight 
 appears. Language may be looked upon as an instru- 
 ment capable of running a gamut of psychic uses. Its 
 flow not only parallels that of the inner content of con- 
 sciousness, but parallels it on different levels, ranging 
 from the state of mind that is dominated by particular 
 images to that in which abstract concepts and their 
 relations are alone at the focus of attention and which 
 is ordinarily termed reasoning. Thus the outward form 
 only of language is constant; its inner meaning, its 
 psychic value or intensity, varies freely with attention 
 or the selective interest of the mind, also, needless to say, 
 with the mind's general development. From the point
 
 14 LANGUAGE 
 
 of view of language, thought may be defined as the high- 
 est latent or potential content of speech, the content that 
 is obtained by interpreting each of the elements in the 
 flow of language as possessed of its very fullest concep- 
 tual value. From this it follows at once that language 
 and thought are not strictly coterminous. At best lan- 
 guage can but be the outward facet of thought on the 
 highest, most generalized, level of symbolic expression. 
 To put our viewpoint somewhat differently, language is 
 primarily a pre-rational function. It humbly works up 
 to the thought that is latent in, that may eventually be 
 read into, its classifications and its forms; it is not, as 
 is generally but naively assumed, the final label put upon 
 the finished thought. 
 
 Most people, asked if they can think without speech, 
 would probably answer, ''Yes, but it is not easy for me 
 to do so. Still I know it can be done." Language is 
 but a garment! But what if language is not so much 
 a garment as a prepared road or groove ? It is, indeed, 
 in the highest degree likely that language is an instru- 
 ment originally put to uses lower than the conceptual 
 plane and that thought arises as a refined interpretation 
 of its content. The product grows, in other words, with 
 the instrument, and thought may be no more conceivable, 
 in its genesis and daily practice, without speech than is 
 mathematical reasoning practicable without the lever of 
 an appropriate mathematical symbolism. No one be- 
 lieves that even the most difficult mathematical proposi- 
 tion is inherently dependent on an arbitrary set of sym- 
 bols, but it is impossible to suppose that the human mind 
 is capable of arriving at or holding such a proposition 
 without the symbolism. The writer, for one, is strongly 
 of the opinion that the feeling entertained by so many 
 that they can think, or even reason, without language
 
 INTRODUCTORY 15 
 
 is an illusion. The illusion seems to be due to a number 
 of factors. The simplest of these is the failure to dis- 
 tinguish between imagery and thought. As a matter of 
 fact, no sooner do we try to put an image into con- 
 scious relation with another than we find ourselves slip- 
 ping into a silent flow of words. Thought may be a 
 natural domain apart from the artificial one of speech, 
 but speech would seem to be the only road we know 
 of that leads to it. A still more fruitful source of the 
 illusive feeling that language may be dispensed with 
 in thought is the common failure to realize that lan- 
 guage is not identical with its auditory symbolism. The 
 auditory symbolism may be replaced, point for point, 
 by a motor or by a visual symbolism (many people can 
 read, for instance, in a purely visual sense, that is, with- 
 out the intermediating link of an inner flow of the audi- 
 tory images that correspond to the printed or written 
 words) or by still other, more subtle and elusive, types 
 of transfer that are not so easy to define. Hence the 
 contention that one thinks without language merely be- 
 cause he is not aware of a coexisting auditory imageiy is 
 very far indeed from being a valid one. One may go 
 so far as to suspect that the symbolic expression of 
 thought may in some cases run along outside the fringe 
 of the conscious mind, so that the feeling of a free, non- 
 linguistic stream of thought is for minds of a certain 
 type a relatively, but only a relatively, justified one. 
 Psycho-physically, this would mean that the auditory or 
 equivalent visual or motor centers in the brain, to- 
 gether with the appropriate paths of association, that 
 are the cerebral equivalent of speech, are touched off 
 so lightly during the process of thought as not to rise 
 into consciousness at all. This would be a limiting case — 
 thought riding lightly on the submerged crests of speech,
 
 16 LANGUAGE 
 
 instead of jogging along with it, hand in hand. The 
 modern psychology has shown us how powerfully sym- 
 bolism is at work in the unconscious mind. It is there- 
 fore easier to understand at the present time than it 
 would have been twenty years ago that the most rarefied 
 thought may be but the conscious counterpart of an 
 unconscious linguistic symbolism. 
 
 One word more as to the relation between language 
 and thought. The point of view that we have developed 
 does not by any means preclude the possibility of the 
 growth of speech being in a high degree dependent on 
 the development of thought. We may assume that lan- 
 guage arose pre-rationally — just how and on what pre- 
 cise level of mental activity we do not know — but we 
 must not imagine that a highly developed system of 
 speech symbols worked itself out before the genesis of 
 distinct concepts and of thinking, the handling of con- 
 cepts. We must rather imagine that thought processes 
 set in, as a kind of psychic overflow, almost at the be- 
 ginning of linguistic expression; further, that the con- 
 cept, once defined, necessarily reacted on the .life of 
 its linguistic symbol, encouraging further linguistic 
 growth. We see this complex process of the interaction 
 of language and thought actually taking place under 
 our eyes. The instrument makes possible the product, 
 the product refines the instrument. The birth of a new 
 concept is invariably foreshadowed by a more or less 
 strained or extended use of old linguistic material; the 
 concept does not attain to individual and independent 
 life until it has found a distinctive linguistic embodi- 
 ment. In most cases the new symbol is but a thing 
 wrought from linguistic material already in existence 
 in ways mapped out by crushingly despotic precedents. 
 As soon as the word is at hand, we instinctively feel,
 
 INTRODUCTORY 17 
 
 with something of a sigh of relief, that the concept is 
 ours for the handling. Not until we own the symbol 
 do we feel that we hold a key to the immediate knowl- 
 edge or understanding of the concept. Would we be so 
 ready to die for "liberty," to struggle for "ideals," 
 if the words themselves were not ringing within us? 
 And the word, as we know, is not only a key ; it may also 
 be a fetter. 
 
 Language is primarily an auditory system of sym- 
 bols. In so far as it is articulated it is also a motor 
 system, but the motor aspect of speech is clearly sec- 
 ondary to the auditory. In normal individuals the im- 
 pulse to speech first takes effect in the sphere of auditory 
 imagery and is then transmitted to the motor nerves that 
 control the organs of speech. The motor processes and 
 the accompanying motor feelings are not, however, the 
 end, the final resting point. They are merely a means 
 and a control leading to auditory perception in both 
 speaker and hearer. Communication, which is the very 
 object of speech, is successfully effected only when the 
 hearer's auditory perceptions are translated into the 
 appropriate and intended flow of imagery or thought or 
 both combined. Hence the cycle of speech, in so far as 
 we may look upon it as a purely external instrument, 
 begins and ends in the realm of sounds. The concordance 
 between the initial auditory imagery and the final audi- 
 tory perceptions is the social seal or warrant of the 
 successful issue of the process. As we have already seen, 
 the typical course of this process may undergo endless 
 modifications or transfers into equivalent systems with- 
 out thereby losing its essential formal characteristics. 
 
 The most important of these modifications is the ab- 
 breviation of the speech process involved in thinking. 
 This has doubtless many forms, according to the struc-
 
 18 LANGUAGE 
 
 tural or functional peculiarities of the individual mind. 
 The least modified form is that known as "talking to 
 one's self" or "thinking aloud." Here the speaker 
 and the hearer are identified in a single person, who 
 may be said to communicate with himself. More signifi- 
 cant is the still further abbreviated form in which the 
 sounds of speech are not articulated at all. To this 
 belong all the varieties of silent speech and of normal 
 thinking. The auditory centers alone may be excited; 
 or the impulse to linguistic expression may be communi- 
 cated as well to the motor nerves that communicate with 
 the organs of speech but be inhibited either in the mus- 
 cles of these organs or at some point in the motor nerves 
 themselves; or, possibly, the auditory centers may be 
 only slightly, if at all, affected, the speech process mani- 
 festing itself directly in the motor sphere. There must 
 be still other types of abbreviation. How common is 
 the excitation of the motor nerves in silent speech, in 
 which no audible or visible articulations result, is shown 
 by the frequent experience of fatigue in the speech or- 
 gans, particularly in the larynx, after unusually stimu- 
 lating reading or intensive thinking. 
 
 All the modifications so far considered are directly 
 patterned on the typical process of normal speech. Of 
 very great interest and importance is the possibility of 
 transferring the whole system of speech symbolism into 
 other terms than those that are involved in the typical 
 process. This process, as we have seen, is a matter of 
 sounds and of movements intended to produce these 
 sounds. The sense of vision is not brought into play. 
 But let us suppose that one not only hears the articu- 
 lated sounds but sees the ar'ticulations themselves as they 
 are being executed by the speaker. Clearly, if one can 
 only gain a sufficiently high degree of adroitness in
 
 INTRODUCTORY 19 
 
 perceiving these movements of the speech organs, the 
 way is opened for a new type of speech symbolism — that 
 in which the sound is replaced hy the visual image of 
 the articulations that correspond to the sound. This 
 sort of system has no great value for most of us be- 
 cause we are already possessed of the auditory-motor sys- 
 tem of which it is at best but an imperfect translation, 
 not all the articulations being visible to the eye. How- 
 ever, it is well known what excellent use deaf-mutes can 
 make of "reading from the lips" as a subsidiary method 
 of apprehending speech. The most important of all 
 visual speech symbolisms is, of course, that of the writ- 
 ten or printed word, to which, on the motor side, corre- 
 sponds the system of delicately adjusted movements 
 which result in the writing or typewriting or other 
 graphic method of recording speech. The significant 
 feature for our recognition in these new types of sym- 
 bolism, apart from the fact that they are no longer 
 a by-product of normal speech itself, is that each ele- 
 ment (letter or written word) in the system corresponds 
 to a specific element (sound or sound-group or spoken 
 word) in the primary system. Written language is thus 
 a point-to-point equivalence, to borrow a mathematical 
 phrase, to its spoken counterpart. The written forms 
 are secondary symbols of the spaken ones — symbols of 
 sjonbols — yet so close is the correspondence that they 
 may, not only in theory but in the actual practice of cer- 
 tain eye-readers and, possibly, in certain types of think- 
 ing, be entirely substituted for the spoken ones. Yet the 
 auditory-motor associations are probably always latent 
 at the least, that is, they are unconsciously brought into 
 play. Even those who read and think without the slight- 
 est use of sound imagery are, at last analysis, dependent 
 on it. They are merely handling the circulating medium,
 
 20 LANGUAGE 
 
 the money, of visual symbols as a convenient substitute 
 for the economic goods and services of the fundamental 
 auditory symbols. 
 
 The possibilities of linguistic transfer are practically 
 unlimited. A familiar example is the Morse telegraph 
 code, in which the letters of written speech are repre- 
 sented by a conventionally fixed sequence of longer or 
 shorter ticks. Here the transfer takes place from the 
 written word rather than directly from the sounds of 
 spoken speech. The letter of the telegraph code is thus 
 a symbol of a symbol of a symbol. It does not, of course, 
 in the least follow that the skilled operator, in order to 
 arrive at an understanding of a telegraphic message, 
 needs to transpose the individual sequence of ticks into 
 a visual image of the word before he experiences its 
 normal auditory image. The precise method of reading 
 off speech from the telegraphic communication undoubt- 
 edly varies widely with the individual. It is even con- 
 ceivable, if not exactly likely, that certain operators may 
 have learned to think directly, so far as the purely con- 
 scious part of the process of thought is concerned, in 
 terms of the tick-auditory symbolism or, if they happen 
 to have a strong natural bent toward motor symbolism, 
 in terms of the correlated tactile-motor symbolism de- 
 veloped in the sending of telegraphic messages. 
 
 Still another interesting group of transfers are the 
 different gesture languages, developed for the use of 
 deaf-mutes, of Trappist monks vowed to perpetual si- 
 lence, or of communicating parties that are within see- 
 ing distance of each other but are out of earshot. Some of 
 these systems are one-to-one equivalences of the normal 
 system of speech ; others, like military gesture-symbolism 
 or the gesture language of the Plains Indians of North 
 America (understood by tribes of mutually unintelligible
 
 INTRODUCTORY 21 
 
 forms of speech) are imperfect transfers, limiting them- 
 selves to the rendering of such grosser speech elements 
 as are an imperative minimum under difficult circum- 
 stances. In these latter systems, as in such still more im- 
 perfect symbolisms as those used at sea or in the woods, 
 it may be contended that language no longer properly 
 plays a part but that the ideas are directly conveyed by 
 an utterly unrelated symbolic process or by a quasi- 
 instinctive imitativeness. Such an interpretation would 
 be erroneous. The intelligibility of these vaguer sym- 
 bolisms can hardly be due to anything but their auto- 
 matic and silent translation into the terms of a fuller 
 flow of speech. 
 
 We shall no doubt conclude that all voluntary com- 
 munication of ideas, aside from normal speech, is either 
 a transfer, direct or indirect, from the typical sym- 
 bolism of language as spoken and heard or, at the least, 
 involves the intermediary of truly linguistic symbolism. 
 This is a fact of the highest importance. Auditory image- 
 ry and the correlated motor imagery leading to articu- 
 lation are, by whatever devious ways we follow the pro- 
 cess, the historic fountain-head of all speech and of all 
 thinking. One other point is of still greater importance. 
 The ease with which speech symbolism can be transferred 
 from one sense to another, from technique to technique, 
 itself indicates that the mere sounds of speech are not 
 the essential fact of language, which lies rather in the 
 classification, in the formal patterning, and in the relat- 
 ing of concepts. Once more, language, as a structure, is 
 on its inner face the mold of thought. It is this ab- 
 stracted language, rather more than the physical facts 
 of speech, that is to concern us in our inquiry. 
 
 There is no more striking general fact about language 
 than its universality. One may argue as to whether a
 
 22 LANGUAGE 
 
 particular tribe engages in activities that are worthy 
 of the name of religion or of art, but we know of no 
 people that is not possessed of a fully developed lan- 
 guage. The lowliest South African Bushman speaks in 
 the forms of a rich symbolic system that is in essence 
 perfectly comparable to the speech of the cultivated 
 Frenchman. It goes without saying that the more ab- 
 stract concepts are not nearly so plentifully represented 
 in the language of the savage, nor is there the rich ter- 
 minology and the finer definition of nuances that reflect 
 the higher culture. Yet the sort of linguistic development 
 that parallels the historic growth of culture and which, 
 in its later stages, we associate with literature is, at best, 
 but a superficial thing. The fundamental groundwork 
 of language — the development of a clear-cut phonetic 
 system, the specific association of speech elements with 
 concepts, and the delicate provision for the formal ex- 
 pression of all manner of relations — all this meets us 
 rigidly perfected and systematized in every language 
 known to us. Many primitive languages have a formal 
 richness, a latent luxuriance of expression, that eclipses 
 anything known to the languages of modern civilization. 
 Even in the mere matter of the inventory of speech the 
 layman must be prepared for strange surprises. Popular 
 statements as to the extreme poverty of expression to 
 which primitive languages are doomed are simply myths. 
 Scarcely less impressive than the universality of speech 
 is its almost incredible diversity. Those of us that have 
 studied French or German, or, better yet, Latin or Greek, 
 know in what varied forms a thought may run. The 
 formal divergences between the English plan and the 
 Latin plan, however, are comparatively slight in the per- 
 spective of what we know of more exotic linguistic 
 patterns. The universality and the diversity of speech
 
 INTRODUCTORY 23 
 
 lead to a significant inference. We are forced to be- 
 lieve that language is an immensely ancient heritage of 
 the human race, whether or not all forms of speech are 
 the historical outgrowth of a single pristine form. It 
 is doubtful if any other cultural asset of man, be it 
 the art of drilling for fire or of chipping stone, may 
 lay claim to a greater age. I am inclined to believe that 
 it antedated even the lowliest developments of mate- 
 rial culture, that these developments, in fact, were not 
 strictly possible until language, the tool of significant 
 expression, had itself taken shape.
 
 II 
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH 
 
 "We have more than once referred to the ' ' elements of 
 speech," by which we understood, roughly speaking, 
 what are ordinarily called "words." We must now 
 look more closely at these elements and acquaint our- 
 selves with the stuff of language. The very simplest 
 element of speech — and by "speech" we shall hence- 
 forth mean the auditory system of speech symbolism, the 
 flow of spoken words — is the individual sound, though, 
 as we shall see later on, the sound is not itself a simple 
 structure but the resultant of a series of independent, yet 
 closely correlated, adjustments in the organs of speech. 
 And yet the individual sound is not, properly consid- 
 ered, an element of speech at all, for speech is a signifi- 
 cant function and the sound as such has no significance. 
 It happens occasionally that the single sound is an inde- 
 pendently significant element (such as French a "has" 
 and a "to" or Latin i "go!"), but such cases are for- 
 tuitous coincidences between individual sound and sig- 
 nificant word. The coincidence is apt to be foi'tuitous 
 not only in theory but in point of actual historic fact; 
 thus, the instances cited are merely reduced forms of 
 originally fuller phonetic groups — Latin liahct and ad 
 and Indo-European ei respectively. If language is a 
 structure and if the significant elements of language are 
 the bricks of the structure, then the sounds of speech can 
 only be compared to the unformed and unburnt clay of 
 
 24
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH 25 
 
 which the bricks are fashioned. In this chapter we shall 
 have nothing further to do with sounds as sounds. 
 
 The true, significant elements of language are gener- 
 ally sequences of sounds that are either words, significant 
 parts of words, or word groupings. What distinguishes 
 each of these elements is that it is the outward sign of 
 a specific idea, whether of a single concept or image or 
 of a number of such concepts or images definitely con- 
 nected into a whole. The single word may or may not 
 be the simplest significant element we have to deal with. 
 The English words sing, sings, singing, singer each con- 
 veys a perfectly definite and intelligible idea, though 
 the idea is disconnected and is therefore functionally 
 of no practical value. We recognize immediately that 
 these words are of two sorts. The first word, sing, is an 
 indivisible phonetic entity conveying the notion of a 
 certain specific activity. The other words all involve 
 the same fundamental notion but, owing to the addition 
 of other phonetic elements, this notion is given a par- 
 ticular twist that modifies or more closely defines it. 
 They represent, in a sense, compounded concepts that 
 have flowered from the fundamental one. We may, 
 therefore, analyze the words sings, singing, and singer 
 as binary expressions involving a fundamental concept, 
 a concept of subject matter (sing), and a further con- 
 cept of more abstract order — one of person, number, 
 time, condition, function, or of several of these com- 
 bined. 
 
 If we symbolize such a term as sing by the algebraic 
 formula A, we shall have to symbolize such terms as 
 sings and singer by the formula A -\-b.^ The element A 
 may be either a complete and independent word (sing) 
 or the fundamental substance, the so-called root or 
 
 1 We shall reserve capitals for radical elements.
 
 2G LANGUAGE 
 
 stem - or "radical element" (sing-) of a word. The ele- 
 ment b (-S, -ing, -er) is the indicator of a subsidiary and, 
 as a rule, a more abstract concept ; in the widest sense 
 of the word ' ' form, ' ' it puts upon the fundamental con- 
 cept a formal limitation. We may term it a " grammati- 
 cal element" or affix. As we shall see later on, the gram- 
 matical element or the grammatical increment, as we had 
 better put it, need not be suffixed to the radical ele- 
 ment. It may be a prefixed element (like the un- of 
 unsingahle) , it may be inserted into the very body of 
 the stem (like the n of the Latin vinco "I conquer" as 
 contrasted with its absence in vici "I have conquered"), 
 it may be the complete or partial repetition of the stem, 
 or it may consist of some modification of the inner form 
 of the stem (change of vowel, as in sung and song; 
 change of consonant as in dead and death; change of 
 accent; actual abbreviation). Each and every one of 
 these types of grammatical element or modification has 
 this peculiarity, that it may not, in the vast majority 
 of cases, be used independently but needs to be somehow 
 attached to or welded with a radical element in order to 
 convey an intelligible notion. We had better, there- 
 fore, modify our formula, A -\-h, to A -{-' (h), the round 
 brackets symbolizing the incapacity of an element to 
 stand alone. The grammatical element, moreover, is not 
 only non-existent except as associated with a radical one, 
 it does not even, as a rule, obtain its measure of signifi- 
 cance unless it is associated with a particular class of 
 radical elements. Thus, the -s of English he hits sym- 
 bolizes an utterly different notion from the -s of hooks, 
 merely because hit and book are differently classified as 
 to function. We must hasten to observe, however, that 
 while the radical element may, on occasion, be identical 
 2 These words are not here used in a narrowly technical sense.
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH 27 
 
 with the word, it does not follow that it may always, or 
 even customarily, be used as a word. Thus, the horU 
 "garden" of such Latin forms as liortus, horti, and liorto 
 is as much of an abstraction, though one yielding a more 
 easily apprehended significance, than the -ing of singing. 
 Neither exists as an independently intelligible and sat- 
 isfying element of speech. Both the radical element, as 
 such, and the grammatical element, therefore, are 
 reached only by a process of abstraction. It seemed 
 proper to symbolize sing-er as A -|- (&) ; hort-us must be 
 symbolized as (A) + (6). 
 
 So far, the first speech element that we have found 
 which we can say actually ' ' exists ' ' is the word. Before 
 defining the word, however, we must look a little more 
 closely at the type of word that is illustrated by sing. 
 Are we, after all, justified in identifying it with a 
 radical element ? Does it represent a simple correspond- 
 ence between concept and linguistic expression? Is the 
 element sing-, that we have abstracted from sings, sing- 
 ing, and singer and to which we may justly ascribe a 
 general unmodified conceptual value, actually the same 
 linguistic fact as the word singf It would almost seem 
 absurd to doubt it, yet a little reflection only is needed 
 to convince us that the doubt is entirely legitimate. The 
 word sing cannot, as a matter of fact, be freely used to 
 refer to its own conceptual content. The existence of 
 such evidently related forms as sang and sung at once 
 shows that it cannot refer to past time, but that, for 
 at least an important part of its range of usage, it is lim- 
 ited to the present. On the other hand, the use of sing 
 as an "infinitive" (in such locutions as to sing and he 
 will sing) does indicate that there is a fairly strong 
 tendency for the word sing to represent the full, untram- 
 meled amplitude of a specific concept. Yet if sing were.
 
 23 LANGUAGE 
 
 in any adequate sense, the fixed expression of the un- 
 modified concept, there should be no room for such vo- 
 calic aberrations as we find in sa7ig and simg and song, 
 nor should we find sing specifically used to indicate preS' 
 ent time for all persons but one (third person singular 
 sings). 
 
 The truth of the matter is that sing is a kind of twi- 
 light word, trembling between the status of a true radical 
 element and that of a modified word of the type of sing- 
 ing. Though it has no outward sign to indicate that it 
 conveys more than a generalized idea, we do feel that 
 there hangs about it a variable mist of added value. 
 The formula A does not seem to represent it so well as 
 A. -j- (0). We might suspect sing of belonging to the 
 A +(6) type, with the reservation that the (&) had 
 vanished. This report of the ''feel" of the word is far 
 from fanciful, for historical evidence does, in all earnest, 
 show that sing is in origin a number of quite distinct 
 words, of type A -\- (h), that have pooled their separate 
 values. The (&) of each of these has gone as a tangible 
 phonetic element ; its force, however, lingers on in weak- 
 ened measure. The sing of / sing is the correspondent of 
 the Anglo-Saxon singe; the infinitive sing, of singan; 
 the imperative sing of sing. Ever since the breakdown 
 of English forms that set in about the time of the 
 Norman Conquest, our language has been straining 
 towards the creation of simple concept-words, unalloyed 
 by formal connotations, but it has not yet succeeded 
 in this, apart, possibly, from isolated adverbs and other 
 elements of that sort. Were the typical unanalyzable 
 word of the language truly a pure concept-word (typ^ 
 A) instead of being of a strangely transitional type 
 (type A -\- [0] ), our sing and work and hoiise and thou 
 sands of others would compare with the genuine radical-
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH 29 
 
 words of numerous other languages.^ Such a radical- 
 word, to take a random example, is the Nootka* word 
 Jianiot "bone." Our English correspondent is only su- 
 perficially comparable. Hamot means ' ' bone " in a quite 
 indefinite sense ; to our English word clings the notion 
 of singularity. The Nootka Indian can convey the idea 
 of plurality, in one of several ways, if he so desires, but 
 he does not need to ; Jiamot may do for either singular 
 or plural, should no interest happen to attach to the dis- 
 tinction. As soon as we say "bone" (aside from its 
 secondary usage to indicate material), we not merely 
 specify the nature of the object but we imply, whether 
 we will or no, that there is but one of these objects to 
 be considered. And this increment of value makes all 
 the difference. 
 
 We now know of four distinct formal types of word: 
 A (Nootka liamot) ; A -\- (0) {sing,hone) ; A -\- (h) 
 (singing) ; (A) + (&) (Latin hortus). There is but 
 one other type that is fundamentally possible : A -{- B, 
 the union of two (or more) independently occurring 
 radical elements into a single term. Such a word is the 
 compound fire-engine or a Sioux form equivalent to 
 eat-stand (i.e., "to eat while standing"). It frequently 
 happens, however, that one of the radical elements be- 
 comes functionally so subordinated to the other that it 
 takes on the character of a grammatical element. We 
 may symbolize this by A -|- &, a type that may gradually, 
 by loss of external connection between the subordinated 
 element b and its independent counterpart B merge 
 with the commoner type A -j- (&)• A word like heauti- 
 
 3 It is not a question of the general isolating character of such 
 languages as Chinese ( see Chapter VI ) . Radical-words may and 
 do occur in languages of all varieties, many of them of a high 
 degree of complexity. 
 
 4 Spoken by a group of Indian tribes in Vancouver Island.
 
 30 LANGUAGE 
 
 fill is an example of A -]-b, the -fid barely preserving 
 the impress of its lineage. A word like Jiomely, on the 
 other hand, is clearly of the type A -{-' (h), for no one 
 but a linguistic student is aware of the connection be- 
 tween the -ly and the independent word like. 
 
 In actual use, of course, these five (or six) funda- 
 mental types may be indefinitely complicated in a num- 
 ber of ways. The (0) may have a multiple value; in 
 other words, the inherent formal modification of the 
 basic notion of the word may affect more than one cate- 
 gory. In such a Latin word as cor "heart," for in- 
 stance, not only is a concrete concept conveyed, but there 
 cling to the form, which is actually shorter than its own 
 radical element (cord-), the three distinct, yet inter- 
 twined, formal concepts of singularity, gender classifica- 
 tion (neuter), and case (subjective-objective). The 
 complete grammatical formula for cor is, then, A -\- (0) 
 + (0) + W, though the merely external, phonetic 
 formula would be (A)—, (A) indicating the abstracted 
 "stem" cord; the minus sign a loss of material. The 
 significant thing about such a word as cor is that the 
 three conceptual limitations are not merely expressed by 
 implication as the word sinks into place in a sentence; 
 they are tied up, for good and all, within the very vitals 
 of the word and cannot be eliminated by any possibility 
 of usage. 
 
 Other complications result from a manifolding of 
 parts. In a given word there may be several elements 
 of the order A (we have already symbolized this by the 
 type A-\-' B), of the order (A), of the order h, and of 
 the order (&). Finally, the various types may be com- 
 bined among themselves in endless ways. A compara- 
 tively simple language like English, or even Latin, illus- 
 trates but a modest proportion of these theoretical possi*
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH 31 
 
 bilities. But if we take our examples freely from the 
 vast storehouse of language, from languages exotic as 
 well as from those that we are more familiar with, 
 we shall find that there is hardly a possibility that is 
 not realized in actual usage. One example will do for 
 thousands, one complex type for hundreds of possible 
 types. I select it from Paiute, the language of the In- 
 dians of the arid plateaus of southwestern Utah. The 
 W'ord wii-to-kuclium-punku-ruga7ii-yiigwi-va-ntu-in{u) ^ 
 is of unusual length even for its own language, but it is 
 no psychological monster for all that. It means "they 
 who are going to sit and cut up with a knife a black cow 
 {or bull)," or, in the order of the Indian elements, 
 "knife-black-buffalo-pet-cut up-sit(plur.) -future -parti- 
 ciple-animate plur." The formula for this word, in ac- 
 cordance with our symbolism, would be {F )-\- (E) -{- C 
 + cZ-|-A-f B+(^) 4-(70 +(0 + (0). It is the 
 plural of the future participle of a compound verb "to 
 sit and cut up" — A -\- B. The elements (g) — which 
 denotes futurity — , (7i) — a participial suffix — , and (i) 
 — indicating the animate plural — are grammatical ele- 
 ments which convey nothing when detached. The 
 formula (0) is intended to imply that the finished word 
 conveys, in addition to what is definitely expressed, a 
 further relational idea, that of subjectivity; in other 
 words, the form can only be used as the subject of a 
 sentence, not in an objective or other syntactic relation. 
 The radical element A ("to cut up"), before entering 
 into combination with the coordinate element B ("to 
 sit"), is itself compounded with two nominal elements 
 or element-groups — an instrumentally used stem {F) 
 
 5 In this and other examples taken from exotic languages 1 am 
 forced by practical considerations to simplify the actual phonetic 
 forms. This should not matter perceptibly, as we are concerned 
 with form as such, not with phonetic content.
 
 32 LANGUAGE 
 
 C knife"), which may be freely used as the radical 
 element of noun forms but cannot be employed as an 
 absolute noun in its given form, and an objectively used 
 group— (^) -h C + (Z ("black cow or bull"). This 
 group in turn consists of an adjectival radical element 
 (E) ("black"), which cannot be independently em- 
 ployed (the absolute notion of "black" can be rendered 
 only as the participle of a verb: "black-be-ing"), and 
 the compound noun C -{- d ("buffalo-pet"). The radi- 
 cal element C properly means "buffalo," but the ele- 
 ment d, properly an independently occurring noun mean- 
 ing "horse" (originally "dog" or "domesticated ani- 
 mal" in general), is regularly used as a quasi-subordi- 
 nate element indicating that the animal denoted by the 
 stem to which it is ai^xed is owned by a human being. 
 It will be observed that the whole complex (F) -\- (E) 
 -\-' C -\- d -\- A -\- B is functionally no more than a verba] 
 base, corresponding to the sing- of an English form like 
 singing; that this complex remains verbal in force on 
 the addition of the temporal element (g) — this (g), by 
 the way, must not be understood as appended to B 
 alone, but to the whole basic complex as a unit — ; and 
 that the elements (li) -|- (*) + (0) transform the verbal 
 expression into a formally well-defined noun. 
 
 It is high time that we decided just what is meant by 
 a word. Our first impulse, no doubt, would have been 
 to define the word as the symbolic, linguistic counterpart 
 of a single concept. We now know that such a defini- 
 tion is impossible. In truth it is impossible to define 
 the word from a functional standpoint at all, for the 
 word may be anything from the expression of a single 
 concept — concrete or abstract or purely relational (as 
 in of or by or and) — to the expression of a complete
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH 33 
 
 thought (as in Latin dico "I say" or, with greater elabo- 
 rateness of form, in a Nootka verb form denoting "I 
 have been accustomed to eat twenty round objects [e.g., 
 apples] while engaged in [doing so and so]"). In the 
 latter case the word becomes identical with the sentence. 
 The word is merely a form, a definitely molded entity 
 that takes in as much or as little of the conceptual mate- 
 rial of the whole thought as the genius of the language 
 cares to allow. Thus it is that while the single radical 
 elements and grammatical elements, the carriers of iso- 
 lated concepts, are comparable as we pass from language 
 to language, the finished words are not. Radical (or 
 grammatical) element and sentence — these are the pri- 
 mary functional units of speech, the former as an ab- 
 stracted minimum, the latter as the esthetically satisfy- 
 ing embodiment of a unified thought. The actual formal 
 units of speech, the words, may on occasion identify 
 themselves with either of the two functional units ; more 
 often they mediate between the two extremes, embody- 
 ing one or more radical notions and also one or more 
 subsidiary ones. We may put the whole matter in a 
 nutshell by saying that the radical and grammatical 
 elements of language, abstracted as they are from the 
 realities of speech, respond to the conceptual world of 
 science, abstracted as it is from the realities of experi- 
 ence, and that the word, the existent unit of living 
 speech, responds to the unit of actually apprehended ex- 
 perience, of history, of art. The sentence is the logical 
 counterpart of the complete thought only if it be felt as 
 made up of the radical and grammatical elements that 
 lurk in the recesses of its words. It is the psychological 
 counterpart of experience, of art, when it is felt, as in- 
 deed it normally is, as the finished play of word with
 
 34 LANGUAGE 
 
 word. As the necessity of defining thought solely and 
 exclusively for its own sake becomes more urgent, the 
 word becomes increasingly irrelevant as a means. We 
 can therefore easily understand why the mathematician 
 and the symbolic logician are driven to discard the 
 word and to build up their thought with the help of sym- 
 bols which have, each of them, a rigidly unitary value. 
 But is not the word, one may object, as much of an 
 abstraction as the radical element? Is it not as arbi- 
 trarily lifted out of the living sentence as is the mini- 
 mum conceptual element out of the word? Some stu- 
 dents of language have, indeed, looked upon the word 
 as such an abstraction, though with very doubtful war- 
 rant, it seems to me. It is true that in particular cases, 
 especially in some of the highly synthetic languages of 
 aboriginal America, it is not always easy to say whether 
 a particular element of language is to be interpreted as 
 an independent word or as part of a larger word. These 
 transitional cases, puzzling as they may be on occasion, 
 do not, however, materially weaken the case for the psy- 
 chological validity of the word. Linguistic experience, 
 both as expressed in standardized, written form and as 
 tested in daily usage, indicates overwhelmingly that 
 there is not, as a rule, the slightest difficulty in bringing 
 the word to consciousness as a psychological reality. No 
 more convincing test could be desired than this, that 
 the naive Indian, quite unaccustomed to the concept of 
 the written word, has nevertheless no serious difficulty 
 in dictating a text to a linguistic student word by word ; 
 he tends, of course, to run his words together as in actual 
 speech, but if he is called to a halt and is made to under- 
 stand what is desired, he can readily isolate the words 
 as such, repeating them as units. He regularly refuses, 
 on the other hand, to isolate the radical or grammatical
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH 35 
 
 element, on the ground that it ' ' makes no sense. ' ' ^ What, 
 then, is the objective criterion of the word? The speaker 
 and hearer feel the word, let us grant, but how shall 
 we justify their feeling? If function is not the ulti- 
 mate criterion of the word, what is? 
 
 It is easier to ask the question than to answer it. The 
 best that we can do is to say that the word is one of the 
 smallest, completely satisfying bits of isolated "mean- 
 ing" into which the sentence resolves itself. It cannot 
 be cut into without a disturbance of meaning, one or the 
 other or both of the severed parts remaining as a help- 
 less waif on our hands. In practice this unpretentious 
 criterion does better service than might be supposed. 
 In such a sentence as It is untJiinkahle, it is simply im- 
 possible to group the elements into any other and smaller 
 "words" than the three indicated. Tliink or thinkable 
 might be isolated, but as neither un- nor -able nor is-un 
 yields a measurable satisfaction, we are compelled to 
 leave unthinkable as an integral whole, a miniature bit 
 of art. Added to the "feel" of the word are frequently, 
 but by no means invariably, certain external phonetic 
 
 6 These oral experiences, whch I have had time and again as 
 a field student of American Indian languages, are very neatly 
 confirmed by personal experiences of another sort. Twice I have 
 taught intelligent young Indians to write their own languages 
 according to the phonetic system which I employ. They were 
 taught merely how to render accurately the sounds as such. Both 
 had some difficulty in learning to break up a word into its con- 
 stituent sounds, but none whatever in determining the words. This 
 they both did with spontaneous and complete accuracy. In the 
 hundreds of pages of manuscript NootKa text that I have ob- 
 tained from one of these young Indians the words, whether ab- 
 stract relational entities like English that and but or complex 
 sentence-words like the Nootka example quoted above, are, prac- 
 tically without exception, isolated precisely as I or any other 
 student would have isolated them. Such experiences with naive 
 speakers and recorders do more to convince one of the definitely 
 plastic unity of the word than any amount of purely theoretical 
 argument.
 
 36 LANGUAGE 
 
 characteristics. Chief of these is accent. In many, per- 
 haps in most, languages the single word is marked by 
 a unifying accent, an emphasis on one of the syllables, 
 to which the rest are subordinated. The particular sylla- 
 ble that is to be so distinguished is dependent, needless 
 to say, on the special genius of the language. The im- 
 portance of accent as a unifying feature of the word is 
 obvious in such English examples as untJiinkahle, char- 
 acterizing. The long Paiute word that we have analyzed 
 is marked as a rigid phonetic unit by several features, 
 chief of which are the accent on its second syllable {wii'- 
 " knife") and the slurring ("unvoicing," to use the 
 technical phonetic term) of its final vowel (-mii, animate 
 plural) . Such features as accent, cadence, and the treat- 
 ment of consonants and vowels within the body of a word 
 are often useful as aids in the external demarcation of 
 the word, but they must by no means be interpreted, as 
 is sometimes done, as themselves responsible for its psy- 
 chological existence. They at best but strengthen a feel- 
 ing of unity that is already present on other grounds. 
 We have already seen that the major functional unit 
 of speech, the sentence, has, like the word, a psychologi- 
 cal as well as a merely logical or abstracted existence. 
 Its definition is not difficult. It is the linguistic ex- 
 pression of a proposition. It combines a subject of dis- 
 course with a statement in regard to this subject. Sub- 
 ject and "predicate" may be combined in a single word, 
 as in Latin dico; each may be expressed independently, 
 as in the English equivalent, / say; each or either may 
 be so qualified as to lead to complex propositions of many 
 sorts. No matter how many of these qualifying elements 
 (words or functional parts of words) are introduced, the 
 sentence does not lose its feeling of unity so long as each 
 and every one of them falls in place as contributory
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH 37 
 
 to the definition of either the subject of discourse or the 
 core of the predicate.^ Such a sentence as Tlie mayor of 
 New York is goitig to deliver a speech of welcome i>* 
 FrencJi is readily felt as a unified statement, incapable 
 of reduction by the transfer of certain of its elements, 
 in their given form, to the preceding or following sen- 
 tences. The contributory ideas of of New York, of wel- 
 come, and in French may be eliminated without hurting 
 the idiomatic flow of the sentence. The mayor is going 
 to deliver a speech is a perfectly intelligible proposition. 
 But further than this we cannot go in the process of re- 
 duction. We cannot say, for instance, Mayor is going to 
 deliver.^ The reduced sentence resolves itself into the 
 subject of discourse — the mayor — and the predicate — is 
 going to deliver a speech. It is customary to say that 
 the true subject of such a sentence is mayor, the true 
 predicate is going or even is, the other elements being 
 strictly subordinate. Such an analysis, however, is 
 purely schematic and is without psychological value. It 
 is much better frankly to recognize the fact that either 
 or both of the two terms of the sentence-proposition 
 may be incapable of expression in the form of single 
 words. There are languages that can convey all that 
 is conveyed by Tlie-mayor is-going-to-deliver-a-speech in 
 two w^ords, a subject word and a predicate word, but 
 English is not so highly synthetic. The point that we 
 are really making here is that underlying the finished 
 
 7 "Cooidinate sentences" like / shall remain but you may go may 
 only doubtfully be consi ered as truly unified predications, as true 
 sentences. They are sentences in a stylistic sense rather than 
 from the strictly formal linguistic standpoint. The orthography 
 / shall remain. But you may go is as intrinsically justified as 
 / shall remain. Noio you may go. The closer connection in senti- 
 ment between the first two propositions has led to a conventional 
 visual representation that must not deceive the analytic spirit. 
 
 8 Except, possibly, in a newspaper headline. Such headlines, 
 however, are language only in a derived sense.
 
 38 LANGUAGE 
 
 sentence is a living sentence type, of fixed formal char- 
 acteristics. These fixed types or actual sentence-ground- 
 works may be freely overlaid by such additional matter 
 as the speaker or writer cares to put on, but they are 
 themselves as rigidly "given" by tradition as are the 
 radical and grammatical elements abstracted from the 
 finished word. New words may be consciously created 
 from these fundamental elements on the analogy of old 
 ones, but hardly new types of words. In the same way 
 new sentences are being constantly created, but always 
 on strictly traditional lines. The enlarged sentence, how- 
 ever, allows as a rule of considerable freedom in the 
 handling of what may be called "unessential" parts. It 
 is this margin of freedom which gives us the opportunity 
 of individual style. 
 
 The habitual association of radical elements, gram- 
 matical elements, words, and sentences with concepts 
 or groups of concepts related into wholes is the fact 
 itself of language. It is important to note that there 
 is in all languages a certain randomness of association. 
 Thus, the idea of "hide" may be also expressed by the 
 word "conceal," the notion of "three times" also by 
 "thrice." The multiple expression of a single concept 
 is universally felt as a source of linguistic strength and 
 variety, not as a needless extravagance. More irksome 
 is a random correspondence between idea and linguistic 
 expression in the field of abstract and relational con- 
 cepts, particularly when the concept is embodied in a 
 grammatical element. Thus, the randomness of the 
 expression of plurality in such words as hooks, oxen, 
 sheep, and geese is felt to be rather more, I fancy, an 
 unavoidable and traditional predicament than a welcome 
 luxuriance. It is obvious that a language cannot go 
 beyond a certain point in this randomness. Many Ian-
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH 39 
 
 guages go incredibly far in this respect, it is true, but 
 linguistic history shows conclusively that sooner or later 
 the less frequently occurring associations are ironed out 
 at the expense of the more vital ones. In other words, 
 all languages have an inherent tendency to economy of 
 expression. Were this tendency entirely inoperative, 
 there would be no grammar. The fact of grammar, a 
 universal trait of language, is simply a generalized ex- 
 pression of the feeling that analogous concepts and rela- 
 tions are most conveniently symbolized in analogous 
 forms. Were a language ever completely "grammati- 
 cal," it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expres- 
 sion. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyranni- 
 cally consistent. All grammars leak. ^ 
 Up to the present we have been assuming that the 
 material of language reflects merely the world of con- 
 cepts and, on what I have ventured to call the "pre- 
 rational" plane, of images, which are the raw mate- 
 rial of concepts. We have, in other words, been assum- 
 ing that language moves entirely in the ideational or 
 cognitive sphere. It is time that we amplified the pic- 
 ture. The volitional aspect of consciousness also is 
 to some extent explicitly provided for in language. 
 Nearly all languages have special means for the expres- 
 sion of commands (in the imperative forms of the verb, 
 for example) and of desires, unattained or unattainable 
 (Would he might come! or Would he were here!) The 
 emotions, on the whole, seem to be given a less adequate 
 outlet. Emotion, indeed, is proverbially inclined to 
 speechlessness. Most, if not all, the interjections are 
 to be put to the credit of emotional expression, also, it 
 may be, a number of linguistic elements expressing cer- 
 tain modalities, such as dubitative or potential forms, 
 which may be interpreted as reflecting the emotional
 
 40 LANGUAGE 
 
 states of hesitation or doubt — attenuated fear. On the 
 whole, it must be admitted that ideation reigns supreme 
 in language, that volition and emotion come in as dis- 
 tinctly secondary factors. This, after all, is perfectly 
 intelligible. The world of image and concept, the end- 
 less and ever-shifting picture of objective reality, is the 
 unavoidable subject-matter of human communication, 
 for it is only, or mainly, in terms of this world that 
 effective action is possible. Desire, purpose, emotion are 
 the personal color of the objective world; they are ap- 
 plied privately by the individual soul and are of rela- 
 tively little importance to the neighboring one. All 
 this does not mean that volition and emotion are not 
 expressed. They are, strictly speaking, never absent 
 from normal speech, but their expression is not of a 
 truly linguistic nature. The nuances of emphasis, tone, 
 and phrasing, the varying speed and continuity of utter- 
 ance, the accompanying bodily movements, all these 
 express something of the inner life of impulse and 
 feeling, but as these means of expression are, at last 
 analysis, but modified forms of the instinctive utterance 
 that man shares with the lower animals, they cannot 
 be considered as forming part of the essential cultural 
 conception of language, however much they may be in- 
 separable from its actual life. And this instinctive ex- 
 pression of volition and emotion is, for the most part, 
 sufficient, often more than sufficient, for the purposes 
 of communication. 
 
 There are, it is true, certain writers on the psychology 
 of language ^ who deny its prevailingly cognitive char- 
 acter but attempt, on the contrary, to demonstrate the 
 origin of most linguistic elements within the domain 
 of feeling. I confess that I am utterly unable to follow 
 
 » E.g., the brilliant Dutch writer, Jac van Ginneken.
 
 THE ELEMENTS OF SPEECH 41 
 
 them. What there is of truth in their contentions may 
 be summed up, it seems to me, by saying that most words, 
 like practically all elements of consciousness, have an 
 associated feeling-tone, a mild, yet none the less real 
 and at times insidiously powerful, derivative of pleas- 
 ure or pain. This feeling-tone, however, is not as a rule 
 an inherent value in the word itself ; it is rather a senti- 
 mental growth on the word's true body, on its conceptual 
 kernel. Not only may the feeling-tone change from one 
 age to another (this, of course, is true of the conceptual 
 content as well), but it varies remarkably from indi- 
 vidual to individual according to the personal associa- 
 tions of each, varies, indeed, from time to time in a 
 single individual's consciousness as his experiences mold 
 him and his moods change. To be sure, there are so- 
 cially accepted feeling-tones, or ranges of feeling-tone, 
 for many words over and above the force of individual 
 association, but they are exceedingly variable and elusive 
 things at best. They rarely have the rigidity of the 
 central, primary fact. "We all grant, for instance, that 
 storm, teTTipest, and liurricane, quite aside from their 
 slight differences of actual meaning, have distinct feel- 
 ing-tones, tones that are felt by all sensitive speakers and 
 readers of English in a roughly equivalent fashion. 
 Storm, we feel, is a more general and a decidedly less 
 "magnificent" word than the other two; tempest is not 
 only associated with the sea but is likely, in the minds 
 of many, to have obtained a softened glamour from a 
 specific association with Shakespeare's great play; Jiur- 
 ricane has a greater forthrightness, a directer ruthless- 
 ness than its synonyms. Yet the individual's feeling- 
 tones for these words are likely to vary enormously. To 
 some tempest and hurricane may seem "soft," literary 
 words, the simpler storm having a fresh, rugged value
 
 42 LANGUAGE 
 
 which the others do not possess (think of storm and 
 stress). If we have browsed much in our childhood 
 days in books of the Spanish Main, liurricane is likely 
 to have a pleasurably bracing tone ; if we have had the 
 misfortune to be caught in one, we are not unlikely to 
 feel the word as cold, cheerless, sinister. 
 
 The feeling-tones of words are of no use, strictly 
 speaking, to science ; the philosopher, if he desires to 
 arrive at truth rather than merely to persuade, finds 
 them his most insidious enemies. But man is rarely en- 
 gaged in pure science, in solid thinking. Generally his 
 mental activities are bathed in a warm current of feel- 
 ing and he seizes upon the feeling-tones of words as 
 gentle aids to the desired excitation. They are natu- 
 rally of great value to the literary artist. It is inter- 
 esting to note, however, that even to the artist they are 
 a danger. A word whose customary feeling-tone is too 
 unquestioningly accepted becomes a plushy bit of fur- 
 niture, a cliche. Every now and then the artist has to 
 fight the feeling-tone, to get the word to mean what it 
 nakedly and conceptually should mean, depending for 
 the effect of feeling on the creative power of an indi- 
 vidual juxtaposition of concepts or images.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE 
 
 "We have seen that the mere phonetic framework of 
 speech does not constitute the inner fact of language 
 and that the single sound of articulated speech is not, 
 as such, a linguistic element at all. For all that, speech 
 is so inevitably bound up with sounds and their articu- 
 lation that we can hardly avoid giving the subject of 
 phonetics some general consideration. Experience has 
 shown that neither the purely formal aspects of a 
 language nor the course of its history can be fully 
 understood without reference to the sounds in which 
 this form and this history are embodied. A detailed 
 survey of phonetics would be both too technical for 
 the general reader and too loosely related to our main 
 theme to warrant the needed space, but we can well 
 afford to consider a few outstanding facts and ideas con- 
 nected with the sounds of language. 
 
 The feeling that the average speaker has of his lan- 
 guage is that it is built up, acoustically speaking, of 
 a comparatively small number of distinct sounds, each 
 of which is rather accurately provided for in the current 
 alphabet by one letter or, in a few cases, by two or more 
 alternative letters. As for the languages of foreigners, 
 he generally feels that, aside from a few striking dif- 
 ferences that cannot escape even the uncritical ear, the 
 sounds they use are the same as those he is familiar with 
 but that there is a mysterious "accent" to these foreign 
 languages, a certain unanalyzed phonetic character, apart 
 
 43
 
 44 LANGUAGE 
 
 from the sounds as such, that gives them their air of 
 strangeness. This naive feeling is largely illusory on 
 both scores. Phonetic analysis convinces one that the 
 number of clearly distinguishable sounds and nuances 
 of sounds that are habitually employed by the speakers 
 of a language is far greater than they themselves recog- 
 nize. Probably not one English speaker out of a hun- 
 dred has the remotest idea that the ^ of a word like sting 
 is not at all the same sound as the t of teem, the latter 
 t having a fullness of "breath release" that is inhibited 
 in the former ease by the preceding s; that the ea of 
 meat is of perceptibly shorter duration than the ea of 
 mead; or that the final s of a word like heads is not the 
 full, buzzing z sound of the s in such a word as please. 
 It is the frequent failure of foreigners, who have ac- 
 quired a practical mastery of English and who have 
 eliminated all the cruder phonetic shortcomings of their 
 less careful brethren, to observe such minor distinctions 
 that helps to give their English pronunciation the curi- 
 ously elusive ''accent" that we all vaguely feel. We 
 do not diagnose the "accent" as the total acoustic effect 
 produced by a series of slight but specific phonetic er- 
 rors for the very good reason that we have never 
 made clear to ourselves our own phonetic stock in 
 trade. If two languages taken at random, say Eng- 
 lish and Russian, are compared as to their phonetic 
 systems, we are more apt than not to find that very 
 few of the phonetic elements of the one find an exact 
 analogue in the other. Thus, the # of a Russian word 
 like tarn "there" is neither the English t of sting nor 
 the English t of tee7n. It differs from both in its ' ' den- 
 tal" articulation, in other words, in being produced by 
 contact of the tip of the tongue with the upper teeth, 
 not, as in English, by contact of the tongue back of the
 
 THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE 45 
 
 tip with the gum ridge above the teeth; moreover, it 
 differs from the t of teem also in the absence of a marked 
 "breath release" before the following vowel is attached, 
 so that its acoustic effect is of a more precise, "metallic" 
 nature than in English. Again, the English I is un- 
 known in Russian, which possesses, on the other hand, 
 two distinct ^sounds that the normal English speaker 
 would find it difficult exactly to reproduce — a * ' hollow, ' ' 
 guttural-like I and a "soft," palatalized Z-sound that is 
 only very approximately rendered, in English terms, as 
 ly. Even so simple and, one would imagine, so invaria- 
 ble a sound as m differs in the two languages. In a Rus- 
 sian word like rthost "bridge" the m is not the same as 
 the m of the English word most; the lips are more fully 
 roiuided during its articulation, so that it makes a heav- 
 ier, more resonant impression on the ear. The vowels, 
 needless to say, differ completely in English and Rus- 
 sian, hardly any two of them being quite the same. 
 
 I have gone into these illustrative details, which are 
 of little or no specific interest for us, merely in order 
 to provide something of an experimental basis to con- 
 vince ourselves of the tremendous variability of speech 
 sounds. Yet a complete inventory of the acoustic re- 
 sources of all the European languages, the languages 
 nearer home, while unexpectedly large, would still fall 
 far short of conveying a just idea of the true range 
 of human articulation. In many of the languages of 
 Asia, Africa, and aboriginal America there are whole 
 classes of sounds that most of us have no knowledge 
 of. They are not necessarily more difficult of enuncia- 
 tion than sounds more familiar to our ears ; they merely 
 involve such muscular adjustments of the organs of 
 speech as we have never habituated ourselves to. It 
 may be safely said that the total number of possible
 
 46 LANGUAGE 
 
 sounds is greatly in excess of those actually in use. In- 
 deed, an experienced phonetician should have no diffi- 
 culty in inventing sounds that are unknown to objective 
 investigation. One reason why we find it difficult to 
 believe that the range of possible speech sounds is indefi- 
 nitely large is our habit of conceiving the sound as a 
 simple, unanalyzable impression instead of as the re- 
 sultant of a number of distinct muscular adjustments 
 that take place simultaneously. A slight change in any 
 one of these adjustments gives us a new sound which is 
 akin to the old one, because of the continuance of the 
 other adjustments, but which is acoustically distinct 
 from it, so sensitive has the human ear become to the 
 nuanced play of the vocal mechanism. Another reason 
 for our lack of phonetic imagination is the fact that, 
 while our ear is delicately responsive to the sounds of 
 speech, the muscles of our speech organs have early in 
 life become exclusively accustomed to the particular ad- 
 justments and systems of adjustment that are required 
 to produce the traditional sounds of the language. All 
 or nearly all other adjustments have become perma- 
 nently inhibited, whether through inexperience or 
 through gradual elimination. Of course the power to 
 produce these inhibited adjustments is not entirely lost, 
 but the extreme difficulty we experience in learning the 
 new sounds of foreign languages is sufficient evidence of 
 the strange rigidity that has set in for most people in the 
 voluntary control of the speech organs. The point may 
 be brought home by contrasting the comparative lack of 
 freedom of voluntary speech movements with the all but 
 perfect freedom of voluntary gesture.^ Our rigidity in 
 
 1 Obsprve the "voluntary." When we shout or grunt or other- 
 wise allow our voices to take care of themselves, as we are likely to 
 do when alone in the country on a fine spring day, we are no longer
 
 THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE 47 
 
 articulation is the price we have had to pay for easy- 
 mastery of a highly necessary symbolism. One cannot 
 be both splendidly free in the random choice of move- 
 ments and selective with deadly certainty.^ 
 
 There are, then, an indefinitely large number of ar- 
 ticulated sounds available for the mechanics of speech; 
 any given language makes use of an explicit, rigidly 
 economical selection of these rich resources; and each 
 of the many possible sounds of speech is conditioned by 
 a number of independent muscular adjustments that 
 work together simultaneously towards its production. A 
 full account of the activity of each of the organs of 
 speech — in so far as its activity has a bearing on lan- 
 guage — is impossible here, nor can we concern ourselves 
 in a systematic way with the classification of sounds on 
 the basis of their mechanics.^ A few bold outlines are 
 all that we can attempt. The organs of speech are the 
 
 fixing vocal adjustmonts by voluntary control. Under these cir- 
 cumstances we are almost certain to hit on speech sounds that 
 we could never learn to control in actvial speech. 
 
 2 If speech, in its acoustic and articulatory aspect, is indeed 
 a rigid system, how comes it, one may plausibly object, that no 
 two people speak alike? The answer is simple. All that part of 
 speech which falls out of the rigid articulatory framework is not 
 speech in idea, l)ut is merely a superadded, more or less instinc- 
 tively determined vocal complication inseparable from speech in 
 practice. All the individual color of speech — personal emphasis, 
 speed, personal cadence, personal pitch — is a non-linguistic fact, 
 just as the incidental expression of desire and emotion are, for 
 the most part, alien to linguistic expression. Speech, like all 
 elements of culture, demands conceptual selection, inhibition of 
 the randomness of instinctive behavior. That its "idea" is never 
 realized as such in practice, its carriers being instinctively ani- 
 mated organisms, is of course true of each and every aspect of 
 culture. 
 
 3 Purely acoustic classifications, such as more easily suggest 
 themselves to a first attempt at analysis, are now in less favor 
 among students of phonetics than organic classifications. The 
 latter have the advantage of being more olijective. Moreover, 
 the acoustic quality of a sound is dependent on the articulation, 
 even though in linguistic consciousness this quality is the primary, 
 not the secondary, fact.
 
 48 LANGUAGE 
 
 lungs and bronchial tubes; the throat, particularly that 
 part of it which is known as the larynx or, in popular 
 parlance, the "Adam's apple"; the nose; the uvula, 
 which is the soft, pointed, and easily movable organ that 
 depends from the rear of the palate; the palate, which 
 is divided into a posterior, movable "soft palate" or 
 velum and a "hard palate"; the tongue; the teeth; and 
 the lips. The palate, lower palate, tongue, teeth, and 
 lips may be looked upon as a combined resonance cham- 
 ber, whose constantly varying shape, chiefly due to the 
 extreme mobility of the tongue, is the main factor in 
 giving the outgoing breath its precise quality * of sound. 
 
 The lungs and bronchial tubes are organs of speech 
 only in so far as they supply and conduct the current 
 of outgoing air without which audible articulation is 
 impossible. They are not responsible for any specific 
 sound or acoustic feature of sounds except, possibly, 
 accent or stress. It may be that differences of stress 
 are due to slight differences in the contracting force 
 of the lung muscles, but even this influence of the lungs 
 is denied by some students, who explain the fluctuations 
 of stress that do so much to color speech by reference 
 to the more delicate activity of the glottal cords. These 
 glottal cords are two small, nearly horizontal, and highly 
 sensitive membranes within the larynx, which consists, 
 for the most part, of two large and several smaller car- 
 tilages and of a number of small muscles that control 
 the action of the cords. 
 
 The cords, which are attached to the cartilages, are 
 to the human speech organs what the two vibrating reeds 
 
 4 By "quality" is here meant tlie inherent nature and resonance 
 of the sound as such. The general "quality" of the individual's 
 voice is another matter altogether. Tliis is chiefly determined 
 by the individual anatomical characteristics of the larynx and is 
 of no linguistic interest whatever.
 
 THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE 49 
 
 are to a clarinet or the strings to a violin. They are ca- 
 pable of at least three distinct types of movement, each 
 of which is of the greatest importance for speech. They 
 may be drawn towards or away from each other, they 
 may vibrate like reeds or strings, and they may be- 
 come lax or tense in the direction of their length. The 
 last class of these movements allows the cords to vibrate 
 at different "lengths" or degrees of tenseness and is 
 responsible for the variations in pitch which are present 
 not only in song but in the more elusive modulations of 
 ordinary speech. The two other types of glottal action 
 determine the nature of the voice, "voice" being a con- 
 venient term for breath as utilized in speech. If the 
 cords are well apart, allowing the breath to escape in un- 
 modified form, we have the condition technically known 
 as "voicelessness." All sounds produced under these 
 circumstances are ' ' voiceless ' ' sounds. Such are the sim- 
 ple, unmodified breath as it passes into the mouth, which 
 is, at least approximately, the same as the sound that 
 we v/rite Ji, also a large number of special articulations 
 in the mouth chamber, like p and s. On the other hand, 
 the glottal cords may be brought tight together, without 
 vibrating. When this happens, the current of breath 
 is checked for the time being. The slight choke or 
 "arrested cough" that is thus made audible is not rec- 
 ognized in English as a definite sound but occurs never- 
 theless not infrequently.^ This momentary check, tech- 
 nically known as a " glottal stop, " is an integral element 
 of speech in many languages, as Danish, Lettish, certain 
 Chinese dialects, and nearly all American Indian lan- 
 guages. Between the two extremes of voicelessness, that 
 
 5 As at the end of the snappily pronounced no ! ( sometimes 
 written nope!) or in the over-carefuUy pronounced at all, where 
 one may hear a slight check between the t and the a.
 
 50 LANGUAGE 
 
 of completely open breath and that of checked breath, 
 lies the position of true voice. In this position the cords 
 are close together, but not so tightly as to prevent the 
 air from streaming through ; the cords are set vibrating 
 and a musical tone of varying pitch results. A tone so 
 produced is known as a "voiced sound." It may have 
 an indefinite number of qualities according to the precise 
 position of the upper organs of speech. Our vowels, 
 nasals (such as m and n), and such sounds as h, z, and 
 I are all voiced sounds. The most convenient test of a 
 voiced sound is the possibility of pronouncing it on any 
 given pitch, in other words, of singing on it.^ The 
 voiced sounds are the most clearly audible elements of 
 speech. As such they are the carriers of practically all 
 significant differences in stress, pitch, and syllabification. 
 The voiceless sounds are articulated noises that break up 
 the stream of voice with fleeting moments of silence. 
 Acoustically intermediate between the freely unvoiced 
 and the voiced sounds are a number of other character- 
 istic types of voicing, such as murmuring and whisper.'^ 
 These and still other types of voice are relatively unim- 
 portant in English and most other European languages, 
 but there are languages in which they rise to some 
 prominence in the normal flow of speech. 
 
 The nose is not an active organ of speech, but it is 
 highly important as a resonance chamber. It may be 
 
 6 "Singitia;" is licre used in a wide sense. One cannot sing 
 continuously on sncli a sound as h or d, but one may easily 
 outline a tune on a series of &'s or d's in the manner of the 
 plucked "pizzicato" on stringed instruments. A series of tones 
 executed on continuant consonants, like m, z, or /, gives the effect 
 of humming, droning, or buzzing. The sound of "liumming," in- 
 deed, is nothing but a continuous voiced nasal, held on one pitch 
 or varying in pitch, as desired. 
 
 7 The whisper of ordinary speech is a combination of unvoiced 
 sounds and "whispered" sounds, as the term is understood in 
 phonetics.
 
 THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE 51 
 
 disconnected from the mouth, which is the other great 
 resonance chamber, by the lifting of the movable part of 
 the soft palate so as to shut off the passage of the breath 
 into the nasal cavity ; or, if the soft palate is allowed to 
 hang down freely and unobstructively, so that the breath 
 passes into both the nose and the mouth, these make a 
 combined resonance chamber. Such sounds as h and a 
 (as in father) are voiced "oral" sounds, that is, the 
 voiced breath does not receive a nasal resonance. As 
 soon as the soft palate is lowered, however, and the nose 
 added as a participating resonance chamber, the sounds 
 h and a take on a peculiar "nasal" quality and become, 
 respectively, m and the nasalized vowel written an in 
 French (e.g., sang, tant). The only English sounds® 
 that normally receive a nasal resonance are m, n, and the 
 ng sound of sing. Practically all sounds, however, may 
 be nasalized, not only the vowels — nasalized vowels are 
 common in all parts of the world — but such sounds as I 
 or z. Voiceless nasals are perfectly possible. They oc- 
 cur, for instance, in Welsh and in quite a number of 
 American Indian languages. 
 
 The organs that make up the oral resonance chamber 
 may articulate in two ways. The breath, voiced or un- 
 voiced, nasalized or unnasalized, may be allowed to pass 
 through the mouth without being checked or impeded 
 at any point; or it may be either momentarily checked 
 or allowed to stream through a greatly narrowed pas- 
 sage with resulting air friction. There are also tran- 
 sitions between the two latter types of articulation. The 
 unimpeded breath takes on a particular color or quality 
 in accordance with the varying shape of the oral reso- 
 nance chamber. This shape is chiefly determined by the 
 
 8 Aside from the involuntary nasalizing of all voiced sounds 
 in the speech of those that talk with a "nasal twang."
 
 52 LANGUAGE 
 
 position of the movable parts — the tongue and the lips. 
 As the tongue is raised or lowered, retracted or brought 
 forward, held tense or lax, and as the lips are pursed 
 ("rounded") in varying degree or allowed to keep their 
 position of rest, a large number of distinct qualities 
 result. These oral qualities are the vowels. In theory 
 their number is infinite, in practice the ear can dif- 
 ferentiate only a limited, yet a surprisingly large, num- 
 ber of resonance positions. Vowels, whether nasalized 
 or not, are normally voiced sounds; in not a few lan- 
 guages, however, ' ' voiceless vowels ' ' ^ also occur. 
 
 The remaining oral sounds are generally grouped to- 
 gether as "consonants." In them the stream of breath 
 is interfered with in some way, so that a lesser reso- 
 nance results, and a sharper, more incisive quality of 
 tone. There are four main types of articulation 
 generally recognized within the consonantal group 
 of sounds. The breath may be completely stopped for 
 a moment at some definite point in the oral cavity. 
 Sounds so produced, like t or d or p, are known as 
 "stops" or "explosives." ^° Or the breath may be con- 
 tinuously obstructed through a narrow passage, not en- 
 tirely checked. Examples of such "spirants" or "frica- 
 tives," as they are called, are s and z and y. The third 
 class of consonants, the "laterals," are semi-stopped. 
 There is a true stoppage at the central point of articu- 
 lation, but the breath is allowed to escape through the 
 two side passages or through one of them. Our English 
 d, for instance, may be readily transformed into I, 
 
 9 These may be also defined as free unvoiced breath with vary- 
 ing vocalic timbres. In the ioiifj Paiiite word quoted on page 31 
 the first 11 and the final ii are pronounced without voice. 
 
 10 Nasalized stops, say m or n, can iiaturally not be truly 
 "stopped," as there is no way of checking the stream of breath 
 in the nose by a definite articulation.
 
 THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE 53 
 
 which has the voicing and the position of d, merely by 
 depressing the sides of the tongue on either side of the 
 point of contact sufficiently to allow the breath to come 
 through. Laterals are possible in many distinct posi- 
 tions. They may be unvoiced (the Welsh II is an ex- 
 ample) as well as voiced. Finally, the stoppage of the 
 breath may be rapidly intermittent ; in other words, the 
 active organ of contact — generally the point of the 
 tongue, less often the uvula " — may be made to vibrate 
 against or near the point of contact. These sounds are 
 the ''trills" or "rolled consonants," of which the normal 
 English r is a none too typical example. They are well 
 developed in many languages, however, generally in voiced 
 form, sometimes, as in Welsh and Paiute, in unvoiced 
 form as well. 
 
 The oral manner of articulation Ls naturally not suf- 
 ficient to define a consonant. The place of articulation 
 must also be considered. Contacts may be formed at a 
 large number of points, from the root of the tongue to 
 the lips. It is not necessary here to go at length into 
 this somewhat complicated matter. The contact is either 
 between the root of the tongue and the throat,^- some 
 part of the tongue and a point on the palate (as in A; or 
 ch or I), some part of the tongue and the teeth (as in 
 the English th of thick and then), the teeth and one of 
 the lips (practically always the upper teeth and lower 
 lip, as in /), or the two lips (as in p or English w). 
 The tongue articulations are the most complicated of all, 
 as the mobility of the tongue allows various points on 
 its surface, say the tip, to articulate against a number of 
 opposed points of contact. Hence arise many positions 
 
 11 The lips also may theoretically so articulate. "Labial trills.* 
 however, are certainly rare in natural speech. 
 
 12 This position, known as "faucal," is not common.
 
 54 LANGUAGE 
 
 of articulation that we are not familiar with, such as 
 the typical "dental" position of Russian or Italian t 
 and d; or the "cerebral" position of Sanskrit and other 
 languages of India, in which the tip of the tongue articu- 
 lates against the hard palate. As there is no break 
 at any point between the rims of the teeth back to the 
 uvula nor from the tip of the tongue back to its root, 
 it is evident that all the articulations that involve the 
 tongue form a continuous organic (and acoustic) series. 
 The positions grade into each other, but each language 
 selects a limited number of clearly defined positions as 
 characteristic of its consonantal system, ignoring transi- 
 tional or extreme positions. Frequently a language al- 
 lows a certain latitude in the fixing of the required posi- 
 tion. This is true, for instance, of the English A;-sound, 
 which is articulated much further to the front in a word 
 like Jdn than in cool. We ignore this difference, psycho- 
 logically, as a non-essential, mechanical one. Another 
 language might well recognize the difference, or only 
 a slightly greater one, as significant, as paralleling the 
 distinction in position between the k of kin and the t 
 of tin. 
 
 The organic classification of speech sounds is a simple 
 matter after what we have learned of their production. 
 Any such sound may be put into its proper place by 
 the appropriate answer to four main questions : — What 
 is the position of the glottal cords during its articula- 
 tion? Does the breath pass into the mouth alone or is 
 it also allowed to stream into the nose ? Does the breath 
 pass freely through the mouth or is it impeded at some 
 point and, if so, in what manner? What are the pre- 
 cise points of articulation in the mouth ? " This f our- 
 
 i"? "Points of articulation" must be understood to include tongue 
 and lip positions of the vowels.
 
 THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE 55 
 
 fold classification of sounds, worked out in all its de- 
 tailed ramifications/* is sufficient to account for all, or 
 practically all, the sounds of language.^^ 
 
 The phonetic habits of a given language are not ex- 
 haustively defined by stating that it makes use of such 
 and such particular sounds out of the all but endless 
 gamut that we have briefly surveyed. There remains 
 the important question of the dynamics of these phonetic 
 elements. Two languages may, theoretically, be built 
 up of precisely the same series of consonants and vowels 
 and yet produce utterly different acoustic effects. One 
 of them may not recognize striking variations in the 
 lengths or "quantities" of the phonetic elements, the 
 other may note such variations most punctiliously (in 
 probably the majority of languages long and short vow- 
 els are distinguished ; in many, as in Italian or Swedish 
 or Ojibwa, long consonants are recognized as distinct 
 from short ones). Or the one, say English, may be 
 very sensitive to relative stresses, while in the other, 
 say French, stress is a very minor consideration. Or, 
 again, the pitch differences which are inseparable from 
 the actual practice of language may not affect the word 
 as such, but, as in English, may be a more or less ran- 
 dom or, at best, but a rhetorical phenomenon, while 
 in other languages, as in Swedish, Lithuanian, Chinese, 
 Siamese, and the majority of African languages, they 
 may be more finely graduated and felt as integral 
 characteristics of the words themselves. Varying meth- 
 
 14 Including, under the fourth category, a number of special 
 resonance adjustments that we have not been able to take up 
 specifically. 
 
 15 In so far, it should be added, as these sounds are expiratory, 
 i.e., pronounced with the outgoing breath. Certain languages, 
 like the South African Hottentot and Bushman, have also a num- 
 ber of inspiratory sounds, pronounced by sucking in the breath 
 at various points of oral contact. These are the so-called "clicks."
 
 56 LANGUAGE 
 
 ods of syllabifying are also responsible for noteworthy 
 acoustic differences. Most important of all, perhaps, 
 are the very different possibilities of combining the 
 phonetic elements. Each language has its peculiarities. 
 The ts combination, for instance, is found in both Eng- 
 lish and Grerman, but in English it can only occur at 
 the end of a word (as in hats), while it occurs freely 
 in German as the psychological equivalent of a single 
 sound (as in Zeit, Katze). Some languages allow of 
 great heapings of consonants or of vocalic groups (diph- 
 thongs), in others no two consonants or no two vowels 
 may ever come together. Frequently a sound occurs 
 only in a special position or under special phonetic cir- 
 cumstances. In English, for instance, the s-sound of 
 azure cannot occur initially, while the peculiar quality 
 of the t of sting is dependent on its being preceded by the 
 s. These dynamic factors, in their totality, are as im- 
 portant for the proper understanding of the phonetic 
 genius of a language as the sound system itself, often 
 far more so. 
 
 We have already seen, in an incidental way, that 
 phonetic elements or such dynamic features as quantity 
 and stress have varying psychological "values." The 
 English ts of hats is merely a t followed by a func- 
 tionally independent s, the ts of the German word Zeit 
 has an integral value equivalent, say, to the t of the 
 English word tide. Again, the t of time is indeed no- 
 ticeably distinct from that of sting, but the difference, 
 to the consciousness of an English-speaking person, is 
 quite irrelevant. It has no ''value." If we compare 
 the ^sounds of Haida, the Indian language spoken in 
 the Queen Charlotte Islands, we find that precisely the 
 same difference of articulation has a real value. In such 
 a word as sting "two," the t is pronounced precisely
 
 THE SOUNDS OF LANGUAGE 57 
 
 as in English, but in sta "from" the t is clearly ''aspi- 
 rated," like that of time. In other words, an objective 
 dilTerenee that is irrelevant in English is of functional 
 value in Haida; from its own psychological standpoint 
 the t of sting is as different from that of sta as, from 
 our standpoint, is the t of time from the d of divine. 
 Further investigation would yield the interesting result 
 that the Haida ear finds the difference between the Eng- 
 lish t of sting and the d of divine as irrelevant as the 
 naive English ear finds that of the ^sounds of sting and 
 time. The objective comparison of sounds in two or 
 more languages is, then, of no psychological or historical 
 significance unless these sounds are first "weighted," un- 
 less their phonetic ' ' values ' ' are determined. These val- 
 ues, in turn, flow from the general behavior and func- 
 tioning of the sounds in actual speech. 
 
 These considerations as to phonetic value lead to an 
 important conception. Back of the purely objective sys- 
 tem of sounds that is peculiar to a language and which 
 can be arrived at only by a painstaking phonetic analy- 
 sis, there is a more restricted "inner" or "ideal" system 
 which, while perhaps equally unconscious as a system to 
 the naive speaker, can far more readily than the other 
 be brought to his consciousness as a finished pattern, a 
 psychological mechanism. The inner sound-system, over- 
 laid though it may be by the mechanical or the irrelevant, 
 is a real and an immensely important principle in the 
 life of a language. It may persist as a pattern, in- 
 volving number, relation, and functioning of phonetic 
 elements, long after its phonetic content is changed. Two 
 historically related languages or dialects may not have 
 a sound in common, but their ideal sound-systems may 
 be identical patterns. I would not for a moment wish 
 to imply that this pattern may not change. It may
 
 58 LANGUAGE 
 
 shrink or expand or change its functional complexion, 
 but its rate of change is infinitely less rapid than that of 
 the sounds as such. Every language, then, is character- 
 ized as much by its ideal system of sounds and by the 
 underlying phonetic pattern (system, one might term it, 
 of symbolic atoms) as by a definite grammatical struc- 
 ture. Both the phonetic and conceptual structures show 
 the instinctive feeling of language for form.^^ 
 
 16 The conception of the ideal phonetic system, the phonetic 
 pattern, of a language is not as well understood by linguistic 
 students as it should be. In this respect the unschooled recorder 
 of language, provided he has a good ear and a genuine instinct 
 for language, is often at a great advantage as compared with the 
 minute phonetician, who is apt to be swamped by his mass of 
 observations. I have already employed my experience in teach- 
 ing Indians to write their own language for its testing value in 
 another connection. It yields equally valuable evidence here. 
 I found that it was difficult or impossible to teach an Indian 
 to make phonetic distinctions that did not correspond to "points 
 in the pattern of his language," however these differences might 
 strike our objective ear, but that subtle, barely audible, phonetic 
 differences, if only they hit the "points in the pattern," were 
 easily and voluntarily expressed in writing. In watching my 
 Nootka interpreter write his language, I often had the curious 
 feeling that he was transcribing an ideal flow of phonetic ele- 
 ments which he heard, inadequately from a purely objective 
 standpoint, as the intention of the actual rumble of speech.
 
 IV 
 
 FORM IN LANGUAGE: GRAMMATICAL 
 PROCESSES 
 
 The question of form in language presents itself under 
 two aspects. We may either consider the formal meth- 
 ods employed by a language, its ** grammatical proc- 
 esses," or we may ascertain the distribution of concepts 
 with reference to formal expression. What are the for- 
 mal patterns of the language? And what types of con- 
 cepts make up the content of these formal patterns ? The 
 two points of view are quite distinct. The English word 
 untMnkingly is, broadly speaking, formally parallel to 
 the word reformers, each being built up on a radical ele- 
 ment which may occur as an independent verb {think, 
 form), this radical element being preceded by an ele- 
 ment {un-, re-) that conveys a definite and fairly con- 
 crete significance but that cannot be used independently, 
 and followed by two elements {-ing, -ly ; -er, -s) that limit 
 the application of the radical concept in a relational 
 sense. This formal pattern — (&) -\- A -{- {c) -\- (d) ^ — 
 is a characteristic feature of the language. A countless 
 number of functions may be expressed by it; in other 
 words, all the possible ideas conveyed by such prefixed 
 and suffixed elements, while tending to fall into minor 
 groups, do not necessarily form natural, functional sys- 
 tems. There is no logical reason, for instance, why the 
 numeral function of -s should be formally expressed in 
 
 1 For the symbolism, see chapter II. 
 
 59
 
 60 LANGUAGE 
 
 a manner that is analogous to the expression of the idea 
 conveyed by -ly. It is perfectly conceivable that in an- 
 other language the concept of manner {-ly) may be 
 treated according to an entirely different pattern from 
 that of plurality. The former might have to be ex- 
 pressed by an independent word (say, tlius unthinking), 
 the latter by a prefixed element (say, plural ^-refonn-er). 
 There are, of course, an unlimited number of other pos- 
 sibilities. Even within the confines of English alone 
 the relative independence of form and function can be 
 made obvious. Thus, the negative idea conveyed by un- 
 can be just as adequately expressed by a suffixed element 
 {-less) in such a word as tlioughtlessly. Such a twofold 
 formal expression of the negative function would be in- 
 conceivable in certain languages, say Eskimo, where a 
 suffixed element would alone be possible. Again, the 
 plural notion conveyed by the -s of reformers is just as 
 definitely expressed in the word geese, where an utterly 
 distinct method is employed. Furthermore, the prin- 
 ciple of vocalic change {goose — geese) is by no means 
 confined to the expression of the idea of plurality; it 
 may also function as an indicator of difference of time 
 (e.g., sing — sang, throw — threw). But the expression 
 in English of past time is not by any means always 
 bound up with a change of vowel. In the great ma- 
 jority of cases the same idea is expressed by means of 
 a distinct suffix {die-d, work-ed). Functionally, died 
 and sang are analogous; so are reformers and geese. 
 Formally, we must arrange these words quite otherwise. 
 Both die-d and re-fornh-er-s employ the method of suffix- 
 ing grammatical elements; both sang and geese have 
 grammatical form by virtue of the fact that their vowels 
 differ from the vowels of other words with which they 
 2 "Plural" is here a symbol for any prefix indicating plurality.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 61 
 
 are closely related in form and meaning {goose; sing, 
 sung). 
 
 Every language possesses one or more formal methods 
 for indicating the relation of a secondary concept to 
 the main concept of the radical element. Some of these 
 grammatical processes, like suffixing, are exceedingly 
 wide-spread; others, like vocalic change, are less com- 
 mon but far from rare ; still others, like accent and con- 
 sonantal change, are somewhat exceptional as functional 
 processes. Not all languages are as irregular as Eng- 
 lish in the assignment of functions to its stock of gram- 
 matical processes. As a rule, such basic concepts as 
 those of plurality and time are rendered by means of 
 one or other method alone, but the rule has so many 
 exceptions that we cannot safely lay it down as a prin- 
 ciple. Wherever we go we are impressed by the fact 
 that pattern is one thing, the utilization of pattern quite 
 another. A few further examples of the multiple ex- 
 pression of identical functions in other languages than 
 English may help to make still more vivid this idea of 
 the relative independence of form and function. 
 
 In Hebrew, as in other Semitic languages, the verbal 
 idea as such is expressed by three, less often by two 
 or four, characteristic consonants. Thus, the group 
 sh-m-r expresses the idea of "guarding," the group g-n-h 
 that of "stealing," n^t-n that of "giving." Naturally 
 these consonantal sequences are merely abstracted from 
 the actual forms. The consonants are held together in 
 different forms by characteristic vowels that vary ac- 
 cording to the idea that it is desired to express. Pre- 
 fixed and suffixed elements are also frequently used. The 
 method of internal vocalic change is exemplified in 
 slianiar "he has guarded," shomer "guarding," sliamur 
 "being guarded," shmor "(to) guard." Analogously,
 
 62 LANGUAGE 
 
 ganah "he has stolen," goneh "stealing," ganuh "being 
 stolen," giwb "(to) steal." But not all infinitives are 
 formed according to the type of slimor and gnob or of 
 other types of internal vowel change. Certain verbs 
 suffix a ^-element for the infinitive, e.g., ten-etJi "to 
 give," lieyo-tli "to be." Again, the pronominal ideas 
 may be expressed by independent words (e.g., anoki 
 "I"), by prefixed elements (e.g., e-shmor "I shall 
 guard"), or by suffixed elements (e.g., sliamar-ti "I 
 have guarded"). In Nass, an Indian language of Brit- 
 ish Columbia, plurals are formed by four distinct meth- 
 ods. Most nouns (and verbs) are reduplicated in the 
 plural, that is, part of the radical element is repeated, 
 e.g., gyat "person," gyigyat "people." A second 
 method is the use of certain characteristic prefixes, e.g., 
 an'on "hand," ka-an'on "hands"; ivai "one paddles," 
 lu-ivai "several paddle." Still other plurals are formed 
 by means of internal vowel change, e.g., gwula "cloak," 
 givila "cloaks." Finally, a fourth class of plurals is 
 constituted by such nouiLs as suffix a grammatical ele- 
 ment, e.g., ivahy "brother," wakykiv "brothers." 
 
 From such groups of examples as these — and they 
 might be multiplied ad 7iauseam — we cannot but con- 
 elude that linguistic form may and should be studied as 
 types of patterning, apart from the associated functions. 
 We are the more justified in this procedure as all lan- 
 guages evince a curious instinct for the development of 
 one or more particular grammatical processes at the ex- 
 pense of others, tending always to lose sight of any ex- 
 plicit functional value that the process may have had in 
 the first instance, delighting, it would seem, in the sheer 
 play of its means of expression. It does not matter that 
 in such a case as the English goose — geese, foul — defile, 
 sing — sang — sung we can pro-«^e that we are dealing with
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 63 
 
 historically distinct processes, that the vocalic alternation 
 of sing and sang, for instance, is centuries older as a 
 specific type of grammatical process than the outwardly 
 parallel one of goose and geese. It remains true that 
 there is (or was) an inherent tendency in English, at 
 the time such forms as geese came into being, for the 
 utilization of vocalic change as a significant linguistic 
 method. Failing the precedent set by such already ex- 
 isting types of vocalic alternation as sing — sang — sung, 
 it is highly doubtful if the detailed conditions that 
 brought about the evolution of forms like teeth and geese 
 from tooth and goose would have been potent enough to 
 allow the native linguistic feeling to win through to an 
 acceptance of these new types of plural formation as 
 psychologically possible. This feeling for form as such, 
 freely expanding along predetermined lines and greatly 
 inhibited in certain directions by the lack of controlling 
 types of patterning, should be more clearly understood 
 than it seems to be. A general survej^ of many diverse 
 types of languages is needed to give us the proper per- 
 spective on this point. We saw in the preceding chap- 
 ter that every language has an inner phonetic system 
 of definite pattern. We now learn that it has also a 
 definite feeling for patterning on the level of gram- 
 matical formation. Both of these submerged and pow- 
 erfully controlling impulses to definite form operate 
 as such, regardless of the need for expressing particular 
 concepts or of giving consistent external shape to par- 
 ticular groups of concepts. It goes without saying that 
 these impulses can find realization only in concrete func- 
 tional expression. We must say something to be able 
 to say it in a certain manner. 
 
 Let us now take up a little more systematically, how- 
 ever briefly, the various grammatical processes that lin-
 
 64 LANGUAGE 
 
 guistic research has established. They may be grouped 
 into six main types : word order ; composition ; affixation, 
 including the use of prefixes, suffixes, and infixes ; inter- 
 nal modification of the radical or grammatical element, 
 whether this affects a vowel or a consonant; reduplica- 
 tion; and accentual differences, whether dynamic (stress) 
 or tonal (pitch). There are also special quantitative 
 processes, like vocalic lengthening or shortening and con- 
 sonantal doubling, but these may be looked upon as par- 
 ticular sub-types of the process of internal modification. 
 Possibly still other formal types exist, but they are not 
 likely to be of importance in a general survey. It is 
 important to bear in mind that a linguistic phenomenon 
 cannot be looked upon as illustrating a definite ''proc- 
 ess" unless it has an inherent functional value. The 
 consonantal change in English, for instance, of hooks 
 and hags {s in the former, z in the latter) is of no func- 
 tional significance. It is a purely external, mechanical 
 change induced by the presence of a preceding voiceless 
 consonant, k, in the former case, of a voiced consonant, 
 g, in the latter. This mechanical alternation is objec- 
 tively the same as that between the noun house and the 
 verb to house. In the latter case, however, it has an im- 
 portant grammatical function, that of transforming a 
 noun into a verb. The two alternations belong, then, to 
 entirely different psychological categories. Only the 
 latter is a true illustration of consonantal modification 
 as a grammatical process. 
 
 The simplest, at least the most economical, method of 
 conveying some sort of grammatical notion is to juxta- 
 pose two or more words in a definite sequence without 
 making any attempt by inherent modification of these 
 words to establish a connection between them. Let us 
 put down two simple English words at random, say
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 65 
 
 sing praise. This conveys no finished thought in Eng- 
 lish, nor does it clearly establish a relation between the 
 idea of singing and that of praising. Nevertheless, it 
 is psychologically impossible to hear or see the two words 
 juxtaposed without straining to give them some measure 
 of coherent significance. The attempt is not likely to 
 yield an entirely satisfactory result, but what is signifi- 
 cant is that as soon as two or more radical concepts are 
 put before the human mind in immediate sequence it 
 strives to bind them together with connecting values of 
 some sort. In the ease of sing praise different individ- 
 uals are likely to arrive at different provisional results. 
 Some of the latent possibilities of the juxtaposition, 
 expressed in currently satisfying form, are : sing praise 
 {to liiin) ! or singing praise, praise expressed in a song 
 or to sing and praise or one who sings a song of praise 
 (compare such English compounds as killjoy, i.e., one 
 wJio kills joy) or Jie sings a song of praise (to him). The 
 theoretical possibilities in the way of rounding out these 
 two concepts into a significant group of concepts or 
 even into a finished thought are indefinitely numerous. 
 None of them will quite work in English, but there are 
 numerous languages where one or other of these amplify- 
 ing processes is habitual. It depends entirely on the 
 genius of the particular language what function is in- 
 herently involved in a given sequence of words. 
 
 Some languages, like Latin, express practically all 
 relations by means of modifications within the body of 
 the word itself. In these, sequence is apt to be a rheto- 
 rical rather than a strictly grammatical principle. 
 Whether I say in Latin hominem feynina videt or fernina 
 hominem videt or Jiominem videt femina or videt femina 
 Jiominem makes little or no difference beyond, possibly, 
 a rhetorical or •stylistic one. The woman sees the man
 
 66 LANGUAGE 
 
 is the identical significance of each of these sentences. 
 In Chinook, an Indian language of the Columbia River, 
 one can be equally free, for the relation between the verb 
 and the two nouns is as inherently fixed as in Latin. 
 The difference between the two languages is that, while 
 Latin allows the nouns to establish their relation to 
 each other and to the verb, Chinook lays the formal 
 burden entirely on the verb, the full content of which 
 is more or less adequately rendered by sJie-him-sees. 
 Eliminate the Latin case suffixes {-a and -em) and the 
 Chinook pronominal prefixes {she-him-) and we cannot 
 afford to be so indifferent to our word order. We need 
 to husband our resources. In other words, word order 
 takes on a real functional value. Latin and Chinook 
 are at one extreme. Such languages as Chinese, Siam- 
 ese, and Annamite, in which each and every word, if it 
 is to function properly, falls into its assigned place, are 
 at the other extreme. But the majority of languages 
 fall between these two extremes. In English, for in- 
 stance, it may make little grammatical difference whether 
 I say yesterday the man saw the dog or the man saw the 
 dog yesterday, but it is not a matter of indifference 
 whether I say yesterday the man saw the dog or yester- 
 day the dog saw the m.an or whether I say he is here or 
 is he here? In the one case, of the latter group of ex- 
 amples, the vital distinction of subject and object de- 
 pends entirely on the placing of certain words of the 
 sentence, in the latter a slight difference of sequence 
 makes all the difference between statement and ques- 
 tion. It goes without saying that in these cases the Eng- 
 lish principle of word order is as potent a means of 
 expression as is the Lntin use of case suffixes or of an in- 
 terrogative particle. There is here no question of func* 
 tional poverty, but of formal economy.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 67 
 
 We have already seen something of the process of 
 composition, the uniting into a single word of two or 
 more radical elements. Psychologically this process is 
 closely allied to that of word order in so far as the 
 relation between the elements is implied, not explicitly 
 stated. It differs from the mere juxtaposition of words 
 in the sentence in that the compounded elements are felt 
 as constituting but parts of a single word-organism. Such 
 languages as Chinese and English, in which the principle 
 of rigid sequence is well developed, tend not infrequently 
 also to the development of compound words. It is but 
 a step from such a Chinese word sequence as jin tak 
 "man virtue," i.e., "the virtue of men," to such more 
 conventionalized and psychologically unified juxtaposi- 
 tions as t'ien tsz "heaven son," i.e., "emperor," or 
 shut fu "water man," i.e., "water carrier." In the 
 latter case we may as well frankly write shui-fu as a 
 single word, the meaning of the compound as a whole 
 being as divergent from the precise etymological val- 
 ues of its component elements as is that of our English 
 word typewriter from the merely combined values of 
 type and writer. In English the unity of the word 
 typewriter is further safeguarded by a predominant ac- 
 cent on the first syllable and by the possibility of adding 
 such a suffixed element as the plural -s to the whole 
 word. Chinese also unifies its compounds by means of 
 stress. However, then, in its ultimate origins the pro- 
 cess of composition may go back to typical sequences of 
 words in the sentence, it is now, for the most part, a 
 specialized method of expressing relations. French has 
 as rigid a word order as English but does not possess 
 anything like its power of compounding words into more 
 complex units. On the other hand, classical Greek, in 
 spite of its relative freedom in the placing of word^
 
 68 LANGUAGE 
 
 has a very considerable bent for the formation of com- 
 pound terms. 
 
 It is curious to observe how greatly languages differ 
 in their ability to make use of the process of composi- 
 tion. One would have thought on general principles 
 that so simple a device as gives us our typewriter and 
 blackhird and hosts of other words would be an all but 
 universal grammatical process. Such is not the case. 
 There are a great many languages, like Eskimo and 
 Nootka and, aside from paltry exceptions, the Semitic 
 languages, that cannot compound radical elements. 
 "What is even stranger is the fact that many of these 
 languages are not in the least averse to complex word- 
 formations, but may on the contrary effect a synthesis 
 that far surpasses the utmost that Greek and Sanskrit 
 are capable of. Such a Nootka word, for instance, as 
 "when, as they say, he had been absent for four days" 
 might be expected to embody at least three radical ele- 
 ments corresponding to the concepts of "absent," 
 "four," and "day." As a matter of fact the Nootka 
 word is utterly incapable of composition in our sense. 
 It is invariably built up out of a single radical element 
 and a greater or less number of suffixed elements, some 
 of which may have as concrete a significance as the 
 radical element itself. In the particular case we have 
 cited the radical element conveys the idea of "four," 
 the notions of "day" and "absent" being expressed by 
 suffixes that are as inseparable from the radical nucleus 
 of the word as is an English element like -er from the 
 sing or Jumt of such words as siiiger and hunter. The 
 tendency to word synthesis is, then, by no means the 
 same thing as the tendency to compounding radical ele- 
 ments, though the latter is not infrequently a ready 
 means for the synthetic tendency to work with.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 69 
 
 There is a bewildering variety of types of composi- 
 tion. These types vary according to function, the 
 nature of the compounded elements, and order. In a 
 great many languages composition is confined to what 
 we may call the delimiting function, that is, of the 
 two or more compounded elements one is given a more 
 precisely qualified significance by the others, which con- 
 tribute nothing to the formal build of the sentence. In 
 English, for instance, such compounded elements as red 
 in redcoat or over in overlook merely modify the signifi- 
 cance of the dominant coat or look without in any way 
 sharing, as such, in the predication that is expressed by 
 the sentence. Some languages, however, such as Iro- 
 quois and Nahuatl,^ employ the method of composition 
 for much heavier work than this. In Iroquois, for in- 
 stance, the composition of a noun, in its radical form, 
 with a following verb is a typical method of expressing 
 case relations, particularly of the subject or object. I- 
 meat-eat, for instance, is the regular Iroquois method 
 of expressing the sentence I am eating meat. In other 
 languages similar forms may express local or instru- 
 mental or still other relations. Such English forms as 
 killjoy and marplot also illustrate the compounding of 
 a verb and a noun, but the resulting word has a strictly 
 nominal, not a verbal, function. We cannot say lie 
 marplots. Some languages allow the composition of all 
 or nearly all types of elements. Paiute, for instance, 
 may compound noun with noun, adjective with noun, 
 verb with noun to make a noun, noun with verb to make 
 a verb, adverb with verb, verb with verb. Yana, an 
 Indian language of California, can freely compound noun 
 with noun and verb with noun, but not verb with verb. 
 
 3 The language of the Aztecs, still spoken in large parts of 
 Mexico.
 
 70 LANGUAGE 
 
 On the other hand, Iroquois can compound only noun 
 with verb, never noun and noun as in English or verb 
 and verb as in so many other languages. Finally, each 
 language has its characteristic types of order of com- 
 position. In English the qualifying element regularly 
 precedes ; in certain other languages it follows. Some- 
 times both types are used in the same language, as in 
 Yana, where "beef" is "bitter-venison" but "deer- 
 liver" is expressed by "liver-deer." The compounded 
 object of a verb precedes the verbal element in Paiute, 
 Nahuatl, and Iroquois, follows it in Yana, Tsimshian,* 
 and the Algonkin languages. 
 
 Of all grammatical processes affixing is incomparably 
 the most frequently employed. There are languages, 
 like Chinese and Siamese, that make no grammatical use 
 of elements that do not at the same time possess an 
 independent value as radical elements, but such lan- 
 guages are uncommon. Of the three types of affixing — 
 the use of prefixes, suffixes, and infixes — suffixing is 
 much the commonest. Indeed, it is a fair guess that 
 suffixes do more of the formative work of language 
 than all other methods combined. It is worth noting 
 that there are not a few affixing languages that make 
 absolutely no use of prefixed elements but possess a 
 complex apparatus of suffixes. Such are Turkish, Hot- 
 tentot, Eskimo, Nootka, and Yana. Some of these, like 
 the three last mentioned, have hundreds of suffixed ele- 
 ments, many of them of a concreteness of significance 
 that would demand expression in the vast majority 
 of languages by means of radical elements. The reverse 
 case, the use of prefixed elements to the complete exclu- 
 sion of suffixes, is far less common. A good example is 
 
 4 An Tndin?! lini'niasjc! of British Columbia closely related to 
 the Nass already cited.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 71 
 
 Khmer (or Cambodgian), spoken in French Coehin- 
 China, though even here there are obscure traces of old 
 suffixes that have ceased to function as such and are now 
 felt to form part of the radical element. 
 
 A considerable majority of known languages are 
 prefixing and suffixing at one and the same time, 
 but the relative importance of the two groups of affixed 
 elements naturally varies enormously. In some lan- 
 guages, such as Latin and Russian, the suffixes alone re- 
 late the word to the rest of the sentence, the prefixes be- 
 ing confined to the expression of such ideas as delimit 
 the concrete significance of the radical element without 
 influencing its bearing in the proposition. A Latin form 
 like remittehantur "they were being sent back" may 
 serve as an illustration of this type of distribution of 
 elements. The prefixed element re- "back" merely qual- 
 ifies to a certain extent the inherent significance of the 
 radical element mitt- "send," while the suffixes -eha-, 
 -nt-, and -ur convey the less concrete, more strictly for- 
 mal, notions of time, person, plurality, and passivity. 
 
 On the other hand, there are languages, like the 
 Bantu group of Africa or the Athabaskan languages ^ 
 of North America, in which the grammatically'^ signifi- 
 cant elements precede, those that follow the radical ele- 
 ment forming a relatively dispensable class. The Hupa 
 word te-s-e-ya-te "I will go," for example, consists of a 
 radical element -ya- "to go," three essential prefixes and 
 a formally subsidiary suffix. The element te- indicates 
 that the act takes place here and there in space or con- 
 tinuously over space ; practically, it has no clear-cut sig- 
 nificance apart from such verb stems as it is customary 
 to connect it with. The second prefixed element, -s-, is 
 
 s TnoliKlincr siifh languages as Navaho, Apache, Hupa, Carrier 
 Chipewyan, Loucheux.
 
 72 LANGUAGE 
 
 even less easy to define. All we can say is that it is 
 used in verb forms of ' ' definite ' ' time and that it marks 
 action as in progress rather than as beginning or coming 
 to an end. The third prefix, -e-, is a pronominal ele- 
 ment, "I," which can be used only in "definite" tenses. 
 It is highly important to understand that the use of -e- 
 is conditional on that of -s- or of certain alternative pre- 
 fixes and that te- also is in practice linked with -s-. The 
 group te-s-e-ya is a firmly knit grammatical unit. The 
 suffix -te, which indicates the future, is no more necessary 
 to its formal balance than is the prefixed re- of the Latin 
 word; it is not an element that is capable of standing 
 alone but its function is materially delimiting rather 
 than strictly formal.* 
 
 It is not always, however, that we can clearly set off 
 the suffixes of a language as a group against its pre- 
 fixes. In probably the majority of languages that use 
 both types of affixes each group has both delimiting and 
 formal or relational functions. The most that we can 
 say is that a language tends to express similar functions 
 in either the one or the other manner. If a certain 
 verb expresses a certain tense by suffixing, the probability 
 is strong that it expresses its other tenses in an analogous 
 fashion and that, indeed, all verbs have suffixed tense ele- 
 ments. Similarly, we normally expect to find the pro- 
 nominal elements, so far as they are included in the 
 verb at all, either consistently prefixed or suffixed. But 
 
 6 This may seem surprising to an Enfjlish reader. We generally 
 think of time as a function that is appropriately expressed 
 in a purely formal manner. This notion is due to the bias 
 that Latin grammar has given us. As a matter of fact the 
 English future (/ shall go) is not expressed by affixing at 
 all; moreover, it may be expressed by the present, as in to-morrow 
 I leave this place, where the temporal function is inherent in the 
 independent adverb. Though in lesser degree, the Hupa -te is as 
 irrevelant to the vital word as is to-morrow to the grammatical 
 "feel" of / leave.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 73 
 
 these rules are far from absolute. We have already 
 seen that Hebrew prefixes its pronominal elements in 
 certain cases, suffixes them in others. In Chimariko, an 
 Indian language of California, the position of the pro- 
 nominal affixes depends on the verb; they are prefixed 
 for certain verbs, suffixed for others. 
 
 It will not be necessary to give many further examples 
 of prefixing and suffixing. One of each category will 
 suffice to illustrate their formative possibilities. The 
 idea expressed in English by the sentence / ca7ne to give 
 it to her is rendered in Chinook ^ by i-n-i-a-l-u-d-am. 
 This word — and it is a thoroughly unified word with a 
 clear-cut accent on the first a — consists of a radical ele- 
 ment, -d- ''to give," six functionally distinct, if phoneti- 
 cally frail, prefixed elements, and a suffix. Of the pre- 
 fixes, i- indicates recently past time; n-, the pronominal 
 subject "I"; -i-, the pronominal object "it";^ -a-, the 
 second pronominal object "her"; -1-, a prepositional ele- 
 ment indicating that the preceding pronominal prefix 
 is to be understood as an indirect object {-Jier-to-, i.e., 
 "to her") ; and -u-, an element that it is not easy to 
 define satisfactorily but which, on the whole, indicates 
 movement away from the speaker. The suffixed -am 
 modifies the verbal content in a local sense ; it adds to 
 the notion conveyed by the radical element that of "ar- 
 riving" or "going (or coming) for that particular pur- 
 pose." It is obvious that in Chinook, as in Hupa, the 
 greater part of the grammatical machinery resides in the 
 prefixes rather than in the suffixes. 
 
 A reverse case, one in which the grammatically signifi- 
 cant elements cluster, as in Latin, at the end of the word 
 
 7 Wishram dialect. 
 
 8 Really "him," but Chinook, like Latin or French, possesses 
 grammatical gender. An object may be referred to as "he," "she," 
 or "it," according to the characteristic form of its noun.
 
 74 LANGUAGE 
 
 is yielded by Fox, one of the better known Algonkin lan- 
 guages of the Mississippi Valley. We may take the form 
 eh-kiwi-n-a-m-olit-ati-wa-cli{i) "then they together kept 
 (him) in flight from them." The radical element here 
 is kiwi-, a verb stem indicating the general notion of 
 "indefinite movement round about, here and there." 
 The prefixed element eh- is hardly more than an ad- 
 verbial particle indicating temporal subordination; it 
 may be conveniently rendered as "then." Of the seven 
 suffixes included in this highly-wrought word, -n- seems 
 to be merely a phonetic element serving to connect the 
 verb stem with the following -a-;^ -a- is a "secondary 
 stem"^" denoting the idea of "flight, to flee"; -m- de- 
 notes causality with reference to an animate object ;^^ 
 -o{Jit)- indicates activity done for the subject (the so- 
 called "middle" or "medio-passive" voice of Greek) ; 
 -{a)ti- is a reciprocal element, "one another"; -iva-ch{i) 
 is the third person animate plural (-^vn-, plural; -cJii, 
 more properly personal) of so-called "conjunctive" 
 forms. The word may be translated more literally (and 
 yet only approximately as to grammatical feeling) as 
 "then they (animate) caused some animate being to 
 wander about in flight from one another of themselves." 
 Eskimo, Nootka, Yana, and other languages have simi- 
 larly complex arrays of sufflxed elements, though the 
 
 This analysis is doubtful. Tt is likely that -n- possesses a 
 function that still remains to be ascertained. The Alf!;onkin lan- 
 guages are unusually complex and present ] any unsolved prob- 
 lems of detail. 
 
 in "Secondary stems" are elements which are suffixes from a 
 formal point of view, never appearing without the support of a 
 true radical element, but whose function is as concrete, to all 
 intents and purposes, as that of the radical element itself. Sec- 
 ondary verb stems of this type are characteristic of the Algonkin 
 languages and of Yana. 
 
 11 In the Algonkin languages all persons and things are con- 
 ceived of as either animate or inanimate, just as in Latin or 
 German they are conceived of as masculine, feminine, or neuter.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 75 
 
 functions performed by them and their principles of 
 combination differ widely. 
 
 We have reserved the very curious type of af- 
 fixation known as "infixing" for separate illustra- 
 tion. It is utterly unknown in English, unless we 
 consider the -n- of stand (contrast stood) as an in- 
 fixed element. The earlier Indo-European languages, 
 such as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, made a fairly 
 considerable use of infixed nasals to differentiate the 
 present tense of a certain class of verbs from other forms 
 (contrast Latin vinc-o "I conquer" with vic-i "I con- 
 quered"; Greek lamh-an-o "I take" with e-lah-on "I 
 took"). There are, however, more striking examples of 
 the process, examples in which it has assumed a more 
 clearly defined function than in these Latin and Greek 
 cases. It is particularly prevalent in many languages of 
 southeastern Asia and of the Malay archipelago. Good 
 examples from Khmer (Cambodgian) are tmeu "one 
 who walks" and daneu "walking" (verbal noun), both 
 derived from deu "to walk." Further examples may be 
 quoted from Bontoc Igorot, a Filipino language. Thus, 
 an infixed -in- conveys the idea of the product of an 
 accomplished action, e.g., kayu "wood," kinayu "gath- 
 ered wood." Infixes are also freely used in the Bontoc 
 Igorot verb. Thus, an infixed -uni- is characteristic of 
 many intransitive verbs with personal pronominal suf- 
 fixes, e.g., sad- **to wait," sumid-ak "I wait"; kineg 
 "silent," kuminek-ak "I am silent." In other verbs 
 it indicates futurity, e.g., tengao- "to celebrate a holi- 
 day," tumengao-ak "I shall have a holiday." The past 
 tense is frequently indicated by an infixed -in-; if there 
 is already an infixed -um-, the two elements combine to 
 -in-m-, e.g., kinminek-ak "I am silent." Obviously the 
 infixing process has in this (and related) languages the
 
 76 LANGUAGE 
 
 same vitality that is possessed by the commoner prefixes 
 and suffixes of other languages. The process is also 
 found in a number of aboriginal American languages. 
 The Yana plural is sometimes formed by an infixed ele- 
 ment, e.g., k'uruwi "medicine-men," k'uwi ''medicine- 
 man"; in Chinook an infixed -I- is used in certain verbs 
 to indicate repeated activity, e.g., ksik'ludelk "she keeps 
 looking at him," iksik'lutk "she looked at him" (radical 
 element -tk) . A peculiarly interesting type of infixation 
 is found in the Siouan languages, in which certain verbs 
 insert the pronominal elements into the very body of the 
 radical element, e.g., Sioux cheti "to build a fire," 
 chewati "I build a fire"; shuta "to miss," sJiuunta-pi 
 *'we miss." 
 
 A subsidiary but by no means unimportant grammati- 
 cal process is that of internal vocalic or consonantal 
 change. In some languages, as in English {sing, sang, 
 sung, song; goose, geese), the former of these has be- 
 come one of the major methods of indicating fundamental 
 changes of grammatical function. At any rate, the proc- 
 ess is alive enough to lead our children into untrodden 
 ways. We all know of the growing youngster who 
 speaks of having hrung something, on the analogy of 
 such forms as sung and filing. In Hebrew, as we have 
 seen, vocalic change is of even greater significance 
 than in English. What is true of Hebrew is of course 
 true of all other Semitic languages. A few examples 
 of so-called "broken" plurals from Arabic ^^ will sup- 
 plement the Hebrew verb forms that I have given in 
 another connection. The noun halad "place" has the 
 plural form hilad; " gild "hide" forms the plural gulud; 
 
 12 Egyptian dialect. 
 
 13 There are changes of accent and vocalic quantity in these 
 forms as well, but the requirements of simplicity force us to 
 neglect them.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 77 
 
 ragil "man," the plural rigal; shihbak "window," the 
 plural shahabik. Very similar phenomena are illus- 
 trated by the Hamitic languages of Northern Africa, 
 e.g., Shilh " izhil "hair," plural izhel; a-sleni "fish," 
 plural i-slim-en; sn "to know," sen "to be knowing"; 
 rmi "to become tired," riimni "to be tired"; ttss ^^ "to 
 fall asleep," ttoss "to sleep." Strikingly similar to 
 English and Greek alternations of the type sing — sang 
 and leip-o "I leave," leloip-a "I have left," are such 
 Somali ^'^ cases as al "I am," il "I was"; i-dah-a "I 
 say," i-di "I said," f^e/i "say!" 
 
 Vocalic change is of great significance also in a num- 
 ber of American Indian languages. In the Athabaskan 
 group many verbs change the quality or quantity of 
 the vowel of the radical element as it changes its tense 
 or mode. The Navaho verb for "I put (grain) into a 
 receptacle" is hi-Jii-sh-ju, in which -ja is the radical 
 element; the past tense, hi-M-ja', has a long a- vowel, fol- 
 lowed by the "glottal stop" ; ^' the future is bi-li-de-sh-ji 
 with complete change of vowel. In other types of 
 Navaho verbs the vocalic changes follow different lines, 
 e.g., yali-a-ni-ye "you carry (a pack) into (a stable)"; 
 past, yah'i-ni-yin (with long i in -yin; -n is here used to 
 indicate nasalization) ; future, yah-a-di-yeJil (with long 
 e). In another Indian language, Yokuts,^** vocalic modi- 
 fications affect both noun and verb forms. Thus, 
 huchong "son" forms the plural bocliang-i (contrast the 
 objective huchong-a) ; enasli "grandfather," the plural 
 inash-a; the verb engtyim "to sleep" forms the continu- 
 
 14 A Berber language of Morocco. 
 
 15 Some of the Berber languages allow consonantal combina- 
 tions that seem unpronounceable to us. 
 
 16 One of the Hamitic languages of eastern Africa. 
 
 17 See page 49. 
 
 18 Spoken in the south-central part of California.
 
 78 LANGUAGE 
 
 ative ingetym-ad "to be sleeping" and the past ingetym- 
 ash. 
 
 Consonantal change as a functional process is prob- 
 ably far less common than vocalic modifications, but 
 it is not exactly rare. There is an interesting group 
 of cases in English, certain nouns and corresponding 
 verbs differing solely in that the final consonant is 
 voiceless or voiced. Examples are wreath (with tJi as 
 in tliink), but to wreatlie (with th as in then); house, 
 but to house (with s pronounced like z). That we have 
 a distinct feeling for the interchange as a means of dis- 
 tinguishing the noun from the verb is indicated by the 
 extension of the principle by many Americans to such 
 a noun as rise (e.g., the rise of democracy) — pronounced 
 like rice — in contrast to the verb to rise {s like z). 
 
 In the Celtic languages the initial consonants undergo 
 several types of change according to the grammatical 
 relation that subsists between the word itself and the 
 preceding word. Thus, in modern Irish, a word like 
 ho "ox" may under the appropriate circumstances, take 
 the forms hho (pronounce wo) or mo (e.g., an ho "the 
 ox," as a subject, but tir Tia mo "land of the oxen," 
 as a possessive plural). In the verb the principle has as 
 one of its most striking consequences the "aspiration" 
 of initial consonants in the past tenre. If a verb be- 
 gins with t, say, it changes the t to th (now pronounced 
 h) in forms of the past; if it begins with g, the conso- 
 nant changes, in analogous forms, to gh (pronounced 
 like a voiced spirant ^^ g or like y, according to the 
 nature of the following vowel). In modern Irish 
 the principle of consonantal change, which began in 
 the oldest period of the language as a secondary conse- 
 quence of certain phonetic conditions, has become one 
 
 !!• See page 50.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 79 
 
 of the primary grammatical processes of the language. 
 
 Perhaps as remarkable as these Irish phenomena are 
 the consonantal interchanges of Ful, an African lan- 
 guage of the Soudan. Here we find that all nouns be- 
 longing to the personal class form the plural by chang- 
 ing their initial g, j, d, h, k, cli, and p to y (or iv), y, r, 
 w, h, s and / respectively; e.g., jim-o ''companion," 
 yim- 'be " companions ' ' ; pio-o ' ' beater, " fio-'he " beat- 
 ers." Curiously enough, nouns that belong to the class 
 of things form their singular and plural in exactly re- 
 verse fashion, e.g., yola-re "grass-grown place," jola-je 
 ** grass-grown places"; fitan-du "soul," pital-i "souls." 
 In Nootka, to refer to but one other language in which 
 the process is found, the t or tl -° of many verbal suf- 
 fixes becomes Id in forms denoting repetition, e.g., 
 liita^'ato "to fall out," Jiita-'ald "to keep falling out"; 
 mat-achislit-utl "to fly on to the water, ' ' mat-achisJit-ohl 
 "to keep flying on to the water." Further, the hi of 
 certain elements changes to a peculiar 7i-sound in plural 
 forms, e.g., yak-old " sore-f aeed, " yak-oJi "sore-faced 
 (people)." 
 
 Nothing is more natural than the prevalence of re- 
 duplication, in other words, the repetition of all or part 
 of the radical element. The process is generally em- 
 ployed, with self-evident symbolism, to indicate such 
 concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary 
 activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance. 
 Even in English it is not unknown, though it is not gen- 
 erally accounted one of the typical formative devices of 
 our language. Such words as goody-goody and to pooh- 
 pooh have become accepted as part of our normal vocabu- 
 lary, but the method of duplication may on occasion be 
 used more freely than is indicated by such stereotyped 
 
 20 These orthographies are but makeshifts for simple sounds.
 
 80 LANGUAGE 
 
 examples. Such locutions as a hig hig man or Let it 
 cool till it's thick thick are far more common, especially 
 in the speech of women and children, than our linguistic 
 text-books would lead one to suppose. In a class by 
 themselves are the really enormous number of words, 
 many of them sound-imitative or contemptuous in psy- 
 chological tone, that consist of duplications with either 
 change of the vowel or change of the initial consonant — 
 words of the type sing-song, riff-raff, wishy-washy, 
 harum-skarum, roly-poly. Words of this type are all 
 but universal. Such examples as the Eussian Chuda- 
 Yudo (a dragon), the Chinese ping-pang "rattling of 
 rain on the roof,"^^ the Tibetan kyang-kyong "lazy," 
 and the Manchu porpon parpan "blear-eyed" are curi- 
 ously reminiscent, both in form and in psychology, of 
 words nearer home. But it can hardly be said that 
 the duplicative process is of a distinctively grammatical 
 significance in English. We must turn to other lan- 
 guages for illustration. Such cases as Hottentot go-go 
 "to look at carefully" (from go "to see"), Somali fen- 
 fen "to gnaw at on all sides" (from fen "to gnaw at"), 
 Chinook iwi iwi "to look about carefully, to examine" 
 (from iwi "to appear"), or Tsimshian am' am "several 
 (are) good" (from am "good") do not depart from 
 the natural and fundamental range of significance of 
 the process. A more abstract function is illustrated in 
 Ewe,^^ in which both infinitives and verbal adjectives are 
 formed from verbs by duplication; e.g., yi "to go," yiyi 
 "to go, act of going"; ivo "to do," ivowo~^ "done"; 
 mawomawo "not to do" (with both duplicated verb 
 stem and duplicated negative particle). Causative du- 
 
 21 Whence our ping-pong. 
 
 22 An African language of the Guinea Coast. 
 
 23 In the verbal adjective the tone of the second syllable differs 
 from that of the first.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 81 
 
 plications are characteristic of Hottentot, e.g., gam- 
 gam-^ "to cause to tell" (from gam "to tell"). Or the 
 process may be used to derive verbs from nouns, as in 
 Hottentot klioe-khoe "to talk Hottentot" (from khoe-b 
 "man, Hottentot"), or as in Kwakiutl metmat "to eat 
 clams" (radical element 7net- "clam"). 
 
 The most characteristic examples of reduplication are 
 such as repeat only part of the radical element. It would 
 be possible to demonstrate the existence of a vast num- 
 ber of formal types of such partial duplication, accord- 
 ing to whether the process makes use of one or more of 
 the radical consonants, preserves or weakens or alters 
 the radical vowel, or affects the beginning, the middle, 
 or the end of the radical element. The functions are 
 even more exuberantly developed than with simple du- 
 plication, though the basic notion, at least in origin, 
 is nearly always one of repetition or continuance. Ex- 
 amples illustrating this fundamental function can be 
 quoted from all parts of the globe. Initially redupli- 
 cating are, for instance, Shilh ggen "to be sleeping" 
 (from gen "to sleep") ; Ful pepeu-'do "liar" (i.e., "one 
 who always lies"), plural fefeu-'he (from fewa "to 
 lie") ; Bontoc Igorot anak "child," ananak "children"; 
 kamu-ek "I hasten," kakamu-ek "I hasten more"; 
 Tsimshian gyad "person," gyigyad "people"; Nass 
 gyibayuk "to fly," gyigyihayuk "one who is flying." 
 Psychologically comparable, but with the reduplication 
 at the end, are Somali ur "body," plural urar; Hausa 
 suna "name," plural sunana-ki; Washo ^^ gusu "buf- 
 falo," gususu "buffaloes"; Takelma -® himi-d- "to talk 
 to," Jiimim-d- "to be accustomed to talk to." Even 
 
 24 Initial "click" (see page 55, note 15) omitted. 
 
 25 An Indian language of Nevada. 
 
 26 An Indian language of Oregon.
 
 82 LANGUAGE 
 
 more commonly than simple duplication, this partial 
 duplication of the radical element has taken on in many 
 languages functions that seem in no way related to 
 the idea of increase. The best known examples are 
 probably the initial reduplication of our older Indo- 
 European languages, which helps to form the perfect 
 tense of many verbs (e.g., Sanskrit dadarslia "I have 
 seen," Greek leloipa "I have left," Latin tetigi "I have 
 touched," Gothic lelot "I have let"). In Nootka re- 
 duplication of the radical element is often employed in 
 association with certain suffixes; e.g., hlucli- "woman" 
 forms liluliluch-'ituhl "to dream of a woman," Jiliihluch- 
 k'ok "resembling a woman." Psychologically similar 
 to the Greek and Latin examples are many Takelma 
 cases of verbs that exhibit two forms of the stem, one 
 employed in the present or past, the other in the future 
 and in certain modes and verbal derivatives. The for- 
 mer has final reduplication, which is absent in the lat- 
 ter; e.g., nl-i/eheh-i'n "I show (or showed) to him," al- 
 yeh-in "I shall show him." 
 
 We come now to the subtlest of all grammatical proc- 
 esses, variations in accent, whether of stress or pitch. 
 The chief difficulty in isolating accent as a functional 
 process is that it is so often combined with alternations 
 in vocalic quantity or quality or complicated by the 
 presence of affixed elements that its grammatical value 
 appears as a secondary rather than as a primary fea- 
 ture. In Greek, for instance, it is characteristic of true 
 verbal forms that they throw the accent back as far as 
 the general accentual rules Avill permit, while nouns may 
 be more freely accented. There is thus a striking ac- 
 centual difference between a verbal form like elutJiemen 
 "we were released," accented on the second syllable of 
 the word, and its participial derivative lutJieis "re-
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 83 
 
 leased, ' ' accented on the last. The presence of the char- 
 acteristic verbal elements e- and -me7i in the first case 
 and of the nominal -s in the second tends to obscure the 
 inherent value of the accentual alternation. This value 
 comes out very neatly in such English doublets as to 
 refund and a refund, to extract and an extract, to come 
 down and a come down, to lack luster and lack-luster 
 eyes, in which the difference between the verb and the 
 noun is entirely a matter of changing stress. In the 
 Athabaskan languages there are not infrequently sig- 
 nificant alternations of accent, as in Navaho ta-di-gis 
 "you wash yourself" (accented on the second syllable), 
 ta-di-gis "he washes himself" (accented on the first ).-^ 
 Pitch accent may be as functional as stress and is 
 perhaps more often so. The mere fact, however, that 
 pitch variations are phonetically essential to the lan- 
 guage, as in Chinese (e.g., fe7ii{ "wind" with a level 
 tone, feng "to serve" with a falling tone) or as in classi- 
 cal Greek (e.g., lab-on "having taken" with a simple 
 or high tone on the suffixed participial -on, gunaik-on "of 
 women" with a compound or falling tone on the case 
 suffix -on) does not necessarily constitute a functional, 
 or perhaps we had better say grammatical, use of pitch. 
 In such eases the pitch is merely inherent in the radi- 
 cal element or affix, as any vowel or consonant might 
 be. It is different with such Chinese alternations as 
 chung (level) ''middle" and cluing (falling) "to hit 
 the middle"; WAai (rising) "to buy" and mai (falling) 
 "to sell"; pei (falling) "back" and pei (level) "to 
 carry on the back." Examples of this type are not 
 exactly common in Chinese and the language cannot be 
 said to possess at present a definite feeling for tonal dif- 
 
 ^7 It is not unlikely, however, that these Athabaskan alterna- 
 tions are primarily tonal in character.
 
 84 LANGUAGE 
 
 ferences as symbolic of the distinction between noun 
 and verb. 
 
 There are languages, however, in which such differ- 
 ences are of the most fundamental grammatical impor- 
 tance. They are particularly common in the Soudan. 
 In Ewe, for instance, there are formed from suho "to 
 serve" two reduplicated forms, an infinitive suhosubo 
 "to serve," with a low tone on the first two syllables 
 and a high one on the last two, and an abjectival suho- 
 suho "serving," in which all the syllables have a high 
 tone. Even more striking are cases furnished by Shil- 
 luk, one of the languages of the headwaters of the Nile. 
 The plural of the noun often differs in tone from the 
 singular, e.g., yit (high) "ear" but yit (low) "ears." 
 In the pronoun three forms may be distinguished by tone 
 alone ; e " he " has a high tone and is sub j eeti ve, -e " him ' ' 
 (e.g., a chwol-e "he called him") has a low tone and is 
 objective, -e "his" (e.g., wod-e "his house") has a 
 middle tone and is possessive. Prom the verbal ele- 
 ment gwed- "to write" are formed gwcd-o "(he) 
 writes" with a low tone, the passive gwet "(it was) 
 written" with a falling tone, the imperative gwet 
 "write!" with a rising tone, and the verbal noun gwet 
 "writing" with a middle tone. In aboriginal America 
 also pitch accent is known to occur as a grammatical 
 process. A good example of such a pitch language is 
 Tlingit, spoken by the Indians of the southern coast 
 of Alaska. In this language many verbs vary the tone 
 of the radical element according to tense ; Jiun ' ' to sell, ' ' 
 siyi "to hide," tin "to see," and numerous other radi- 
 cal elements, if low-toned, refer to past time, if high- 
 toned, to the future. Another type of function is illus- 
 trated by the Takelma forms liel "song," with falling 
 pitch, but hel "sing!" with a rising inflection; parallel
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL PROCESSES 85 
 
 to these forms are sel (falling) "black paint," sel (ris- 
 ing) "paint it!" All in all it is clear that pitch ac- 
 cent, like stress and vocalic or consonantal modifications, 
 is far less infrequently employed as a grammatical proc- 
 ess than our own habits of speech would prepare us tc 
 believe probable.
 
 FORM IN LANGUAGE: GRAMMATICAL 
 CONCEPTS 
 
 We have seen that the single word expresses either 
 a simple concept or a combination of concepts so inter- 
 related as to form a psychological unity. We have, fur- 
 thermore, briefly reviewed from a strictly formal stand- 
 point the main processes that are used by all known 
 languages to affect the fundamental concepts — those em- 
 bodied in unanalyzable words or in the radical elements 
 of words — by the modifying or formative influence of 
 subsidiary concepts. In this chapter we shall look a 
 little more closely into the nature of the world of con- 
 cepts, in so far as that world is reflected and Systematized 
 in linguistic structure. 
 
 Let us begin with a simple sentence that involves va- 
 rious kinds of concepts — the fanner kills the duckling. 
 A rough and ready analysis discloses here the presence 
 of three distinct and fundamental concepts that are 
 brought into connection with each other in a number of 
 ways. These three concepts are "farmer" (the subject 
 3f discourse), "kill" (defining the nature of the activity 
 which the sentence informs us al)out), and "duckling" 
 (another subject ^ of discourse that takes an important 
 though somewhat passive part in this activity). We can 
 visualize the farmer and the duckling and we have also 
 no difficulty in constructing an image of the killing. In 
 
 iNot in its technical sense. 
 
 86
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 87 
 
 other words, the elements farmer, kill, and duckling de- 
 fine concepts of a concrete order. 
 
 But a more careful linguistic analysis soon brings us 
 to see that the two subjects of discourse, however simply 
 we may visualize them, are not expressed quite as di- 
 rectly, as immediately, as we feel them. A "farmer" 
 is in one sense a perfectly unified concept, in another he 
 is * ' one who farms. ' ' The concept conveyed by the radi- 
 cal element (faron-) is not one of personality at all but 
 of an industrial activity {to farm), itself based on the 
 concept of a particular type of object (a farm). Simi- 
 larly, the concept of duckliyig is at one remove from that 
 which is expressed by the radical element of the word, 
 duck. This element, which may occur as an independ- 
 ent word, refers to a whole class of animals, big and 
 little, while duckling is limited in its application to the 
 young of that class. The word farm er has an ' ' agentive ' * 
 suffix -er that performs the function of indicating the 
 one that carries out a given activity, in this case that 
 of farming. It transforms the verb to farm into an 
 agentive noun precisely as it transforms the verbs to 
 sing, to paint, to teach into the corresponding agentive 
 nouns singer, painter, teaclier. The element -ling is not 
 so freely used, but its significance is obvious. It adds to 
 the basic concept the notion of smallness (as also in 
 gosling, fledgeling) or the somewhat related notion of 
 "contemptible" (as in weakling, princeling, liircling). 
 The agentive -er and the diminutive -ling both convey 
 fairly concrete ideas (roughly those of "doer" and "lit- 
 tle"), but the concreteness is not stressed. They do 
 not so much define distinct concepts as mediate between 
 concepts. The -er of farmer does not quite say * * one who 
 (farms) " it merely indicates that the sort of person we 
 call a "farmer" is closely enough associated with ac-
 
 8S LANGUAGE 
 
 t,ivity on a farm to be conventionally thought of as al- 
 ways so occupied. He may, as a matter of fact, go to 
 town and engage in any pursuit but farming, yet his 
 linguistic label remains "farmer." Language here be- 
 trays a certain helplessness or, if one prefers, a stub- 
 born tendency to look away from the immediately sug- 
 gested function, trusting to the imagination and to usage 
 to fill in the transitions of thought and the details of 
 application that distinguish one concrete concept (to 
 farm) from another "derived" one {farmer). It would 
 be impossible for any language to express every con- 
 crete idea by an independent word or radical element. 
 The concreteness of experience is infinite, the resources 
 of the richest language are strictly limited. It must per- 
 force throw countless concepts under the rubric of cer- 
 tain basic ones, using other concrete or semi-concrete 
 ideas as functional mediators. The ideas expressed by 
 these mediating elements — they may be independent 
 words, affixes, or modifications of the radical element — 
 may be called "derivational" or "qualifying." Some 
 concrete concepts, such as kill, are expressed radically; 
 others, such as farmer and duckling, are expressed 
 derivatively. Corresponding to these two modes of ex- 
 pression we have two types of concepts and of linguistic 
 elements, radical {f<irm, kill, duck) and derivational 
 {-er, -ling). When a word (or unified group of words) 
 contains a derivational element (or word) the concrete 
 significance of the radical element {farm-, duck-) tends 
 to fade from consciousness and to yield to a new concrete- 
 ness {farmer, duckling) that is synthetic in expression 
 rather than in thought. In our sentence the concepts 
 of farm and duck are not really involved at all; they are 
 merely latent, for formal reasons, in the linguistic ex- 
 pression.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 89 
 
 Keturning to this sentence, we feel that the analysis 
 of farmer and duckling are practically irrelevant to an 
 understanding of its content and entirely irrelevant to 
 a feeling for the structure of the sentence as a whole. 
 From the standpoint of the sentence the derivational 
 elements -er and -ling are merely details in the local 
 economy of two of its terms {farmer, duckling) that it 
 accepts as units of expression. This indifference of the 
 sentence as such to some part of the analysis of its words 
 is shown by the fact that if we substitute such radical 
 words as man and chick for farmer and duckling, we 
 obtain a new material content, it is true, but not in the 
 least a new structuial mold. We can go further and 
 substitute another activity for that of ''killing," say 
 "taking." The new sentence, the man takes the chick, 
 is totally different from the first sentence in what it 
 conveys, not in how it conveys it. We feel instinctively, 
 without the slightest attempt at conscious analysis, that 
 the two sentences fit precisely the same pattern, that they 
 are really the same fundamental sentence, differing only 
 in their material trappings. In other words, they express 
 identical relational concepts in an identical manner. 
 The manner is here threefold — the use of an inherently 
 relational word (the) in analogous positions, the analo- 
 gous sequence (subject; predicate, consisting of verb 
 and object) of the concrete terms of the sentence, and 
 the use of the suffixed element -s in the verb. 
 
 Change any of these features of the sentence and it 
 becomes modified, slightly or seriously, in some purely 
 relational, non-material regard. If the is omitted 
 {farmer kills duckling, man takes chick), the sentence 
 becomes impossible; it falls into no recognized formal 
 pattern and the two subjects of discourse seem to hang 
 incompletely in the void. We feel that there is no rela-
 
 90 LANGUAGE 
 
 tion established between either of them and what is 
 already in the minds of the speaker and his auditor. 
 As soon as a the is put before the two nouns, we feel 
 relieved. We know that the farmer and duckling which 
 the sentence tells us about are the same farmer and 
 duckling that we had been talking about or hearing 
 about or thinking about some time before. If I meet a 
 man who is not looking at and knows nothing about the 
 farmer in question, I am likely to be stared at for my 
 pains if I announce to him that "the farmer [what 
 farmer?] kills the duckling [didn't know he had any, 
 whoever he is]." If the fact nevertheless seems interest- 
 ing enough to communicate, I should be compelled to 
 speak of *'a farmer up my way" and of *'a duckling of 
 his." These little words, the and a, have the important 
 function of establishing a definite or an indefinite 
 reference. 
 
 If I omit the first the and also leave out the suffixed 
 -s, I obtain an entirely new set of relations. Farmer, 
 kill the duckling implies that I am now speaking to the 
 farmer, not merely about him ; further, that he is not 
 actually killing the bird, but is being ordered by me 
 to do so. The subjective relation of the first sentence 
 has become a vocative one, one of address, and the ac- 
 tivity is conceived in terms of command, not of state- 
 ment. We conclude, therefore, that if the farmer is to 
 be merely talked about, the little the must go back into 
 its place and the -s must not be removed. The latter 
 element clearly defines, or rather helps to define, state- 
 ment as contrasted with command. I find, moreover, 
 that if I wish to speak of several farmers, I cannot say 
 the farmers kills the duckling, but must say the farmers 
 kill the duckling. Evidently -s involves the notion of 
 singularity in the subject. If the noun is singular, the
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 91 
 
 verb must have a form to correspond; if the noun is 
 plural, the verb has another, corresponding form.^ Com- 
 parison with such forms as 7 kill and you kill shows, 
 moreover, that the -s has exclusive reference to a per- 
 son other than the speaker or the one spoken to. We 
 conclude, therefore, that it connotes a personal relation 
 as well as the notion of singularity. And comparison 
 with a sentence like the fanner killed the duckling indi- 
 cates that there is implied in this overburdened -s a 
 distinct reference to present time. Statement as such 
 and personal reference may well be looked upon as in- 
 herently relational concepts. Number is evidently felt 
 by those who speak English as involving a necessary re- 
 lation, otherwise there would be no reason to express 
 the concept twice, in the noun and in the verb. Time 
 also is clearly felt as a relational concept ; if it were 
 not, we should be allowed to say tlie farmer killed-s to 
 correspond to the farmer kills. Of the four concepts 
 inextricably interwoven in the -s suffix, all are felt as 
 relational, two necessarily so. The distinction between 
 a truly relational concept and one that is so felt and 
 treated, though it need not be in the nature of things, 
 will receive further attention in a moment. 
 
 Finally, I can radically disturb the relational cut of 
 the sentence by changing the order of its elements. If 
 the positions of farmer and kills are interchanged, 
 the sentence reads kills the farmer the duckling, which 
 is most naturally interpreted as an unusual but not un- 
 intelligible mode of asking the question, does the farmer 
 kill the duckling f In this new sentence the act is not 
 conceived as necessarily taking place at all. It may 
 or it may not be happening, the implication being that 
 
 2 It is, of course, an "accident" that -s denotes plurality in the 
 noun, singularity in the verb.
 
 92 LANGUAGE 
 
 the speaker wishes to know the truth of the matter and 
 that the person spoken to is expected to give him the 
 information. The interrogative sentence possesses an 
 entirely different "modality" from the declarative one 
 and implies a markedly different attitude of the speaker 
 towards his companion. An even more striking change 
 in personal relations is effected if we interchange the 
 farmer and tlic duckling. The duckling kills the farmer 
 involves precisely the same subjects of discourse and 
 the same type of activity as our first sentence, but the 
 roles of these subjects of discourse are now reversed. 
 The duckling has turned, like the proverbial worm, or, to 
 put it in grammatical terminology, what was "subject" 
 is now "object," what was object is now subject. 
 
 The following tabular statement analyzes the sentence 
 from the point of view of the concepts expressed in it 
 and of the grammatical processes employed for their 
 expression. 
 
 I. Concrete Concepts: 
 
 1. First subject of discourse: farmer 
 
 2. Second subject of discourse: duckling 
 
 3. Activity: kill 
 analyzable into: 
 
 A. Radical Concepts: 
 
 1. Verb : (to) farm 
 
 2. Noun : duck 
 
 3. Verb: kill 
 
 B. Derivational Concepts: 
 
 1. Agentive : expressed by suffix -er 
 
 2. Dirainutive : expressed by suffix -ling 
 II. Relational Concepts: 
 
 Reference : 
 
 1. Definiteness of reference to first subject of dis- 
 course: expressed by first the, which has pre- 
 posed position
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 93 
 
 2. Definiteness of reference to second subject of dis- 
 
 course: expressed by second the, which has pro- 
 posed position 
 Modality : 
 
 3. Declarative: expressed by sequence of "subject" 
 
 plus verb ; and implied by suffixed -s 
 Personal relations : 
 
 4. Subjectivity of farmer: expressed by position of 
 
 farmer before kills; and by suffixed -s 
 
 5. Objectivity of duckling: expressed by position of 
 
 duckling after kills 
 Number : 
 
 6. Singularity of first subject of discourse: ex- 
 
 pressed by lack of plural suffix in farmer; and 
 by suffix -s in following verb 
 
 7. Singularity of second subject of discourse : ex- 
 
 pressed by lack of plural suffix in duckling 
 Time: 
 
 8. Present: expressed by lack of preterit suffix in 
 
 verb; and by suffixed -s 
 
 In this short sentence of five words there are expressed, 
 therefore, thirteen distinct concepts, of which three are 
 radical and concrete, two derivational, and eight rela- 
 tional. Perhaps the most striking result of the analysis 
 is a renewed realization of the curious lack of accord in 
 our language between function and form. The method 
 of suffixing is used both for derivational and for rela- 
 tional elements ; independent words or radical elements 
 express both concrete ideas (objects, activities, qualities) 
 and relational ideas (articles like the and a; words defin- 
 ing case relations, like of, to, for, with, by; words defin- 
 ing local relations, like in, on, at) ; the same relational 
 concept may be expressed more than once (thus, the sin- 
 gularity of farmer is both negatively expressed in the 
 noun and positively in the verb) ; and one element may
 
 94 LANGUAGE 
 
 convey a group of interwoven concepts rather than one 
 definite concept alone (thus the -s of kills embodies no 
 less than four logically independent relations). 
 
 Our analysis may seem a bit labored, but only be- 
 cause we are so accustomed to our own well-worn grooves 
 of expression that they have come to be felt as inevitable. 
 Yet destructive analysis of the familiar is the only 
 method of approach to an understanding of fundamen- 
 tally different modes of expression. When one has 
 learned to feel what is fortuitous or illogical or unbal- 
 anced in the structure of his own language, he is already 
 well on the way towards a sympathetic grasp of the 
 expression of the various classes of concepts in alien 
 types of speech. Not everything that is "outlandish" 
 is intrinsically illogical or far-fetched. It is often pre- 
 cisely the familiar that a wider perspective reveals as 
 the curiously exceptional. From a purely logical stand- 
 point it is obvious that there is no inherent reason why 
 the concepts expressed in our sentence should have been 
 singled out, treated, and grouped as they have been and 
 not otherwise. The sentence is the outgrowth of his- 
 torical and of unreasoning psychological forces rather 
 than of a logical synthesis of elements that have been 
 clearly grasped in their individuality. This is the case, 
 to a greater or less degree, in all languages, though in 
 the forms of many we find a more coherent, a more con- 
 sistent, reflection than in our English forms of that un- 
 conscious analysis into individual concepts which is 
 never entirely absent from speech, however it may be 
 complicated with or overlaid by the more irrational 
 factors. 
 
 A cursory examination of other languages, near and 
 far, would soon show that some or all of the thirteen 
 concepts that our sentence happens to embody may not
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 95 
 
 only be expressed in different form but that they may 
 be differently grouped among themselves; that some 
 among them may be dispensed with; and that other 
 concepts, not considered worth expressing in English 
 idiom, may be treated as absolutely indispensable to the 
 intelligible rendering of the proposition. First as to 
 a different method of handling such concepts as we have 
 found expressed in the English sentence. If we turn 
 to German, we find that in the equivalent sentence (Der 
 Bauer totet das Entelein) the definiteness of reference 
 expressed by the English the is unavoidably coupled with 
 three other concepts — number (both der and das are ex- 
 plicitly singular), case {der is subjective; das is sub- 
 jective or objective, by elimination therefore objective), 
 and gender, a new concept of the relational order that 
 is not in this case explicitly involved in English {der is 
 masculine, das is neuter). Indeed, the chief burden 
 of the expression of case, gender, and number is in the 
 German sentence borne by the particles of reference 
 rather than by the words that express the concrete con- 
 cepts {Bauer, Entelein) to which these relational concepts 
 ought logically to attach themselves. In the sphere of 
 concrete concepts too it is worth noting that the German 
 splits up the idea of "killing" into the basic concept of 
 ''dead" {tot) and the derivational one of "causing to 
 do (or be) so and so" (by the method of vocalic change, 
 tot-); the German tot-et (analytically #of- + vowel 
 change + -eO "causes to be dead" is, approximately, 
 the formal equivalent of our dead-en-s, though the idio- 
 matic application of this latter word is different.^ 
 
 Wandering still further afield, we may glance at the 
 
 3 "To cause to be dead" or "to cause to die" in the sense of 
 "to kill" is an exceedingly wide-spread usage. It is found, for 
 instance^ also in Nootka and Sioux.
 
 96 LANGUAGE 
 
 Yana method of expression. Literally translated, the 
 equivalent Yana sentence would read something like 
 "kill-s he farmer* he to duck-ling," in which ''he" and 
 "to" are rather awkward English renderings of a gen- 
 eral third personal pronoun {lie, slie, it, or they) and an 
 objective particle which indicates that the following 
 noun is connected with the verb otherwise than as sub- 
 ject. The suffixed element in "kill-s" corresponds to 
 the English suffix with the important exceptions that it 
 makes no reference to the number of the subject and 
 that the statement is known to be true, that it is vouched 
 for by the speaker. Number is only indirectly expressed 
 in the sentence in so far as there is no specific verb 
 suffix indicating plurality of the subject nor specific 
 plural elements in the two nouns. Had the statement 
 been made on another's authority, a totally different 
 "tense-modal" suffix would have had to be used. The 
 pronouns of reference ("he") imply nothing by them- 
 selves as to number, gender, or case. Gender, indeed, 
 is completely absent in Yana as a relational category. 
 
 The Yana sentence has already illustrated the point 
 that certain of our supposedly essential concepts may 
 be ignored; both the Yana and the German sentence 
 illustrate the further point that certain concepts may 
 need expression for Avhich an English-speaking person, 
 or rather the English-speaking habit, finds no need what- 
 ever. One could go on and give endless examples of 
 such deviations from English form, but we shall have 
 to content ourselves with a few more indications. In 
 the Chinese sentence "Man kill duck," which may be 
 looked upon as the practical equivalent of "The man 
 
 4 Agriculture was not practised by the Yana. Tlio verbal idea 
 of "to farm" would probably be expressed in some sueli synthetic 
 manner as "to dig-earth" or "to grow-cause." There are suf* 
 fixed elements corresjionding to -er and -ling.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 97 
 
 kills the duck," there is by no means present for the 
 Chinese consciousness that childish, halting, empty feel- 
 ing which we experience in the literal English transla- 
 tion. The three concrete concepts — two objects and an 
 action — are each directly expressed by a monosyllabic 
 word which is at the same time a radical element; the 
 two relational concepts — "subject" and "object" — are 
 expressed solely by the position of the concrete words 
 before and after the word of action. And that is all. 
 Definiteness or indefiniteness of reference, number, per- 
 sonality as an inherent aspect of the verb, tense, not 
 to speak of gender — all these are given no expression in 
 the Chinese sentence, which, for all that, is a perfectly 
 adequate communication — provided, of course, there is 
 that context, that background of mutual understanding 
 that is essential to the complete intelligibility of all 
 speech. Nor does this qualification impair our argu- 
 ment, for in the English sentence too we leave unex- 
 pressed a large number of ideas which are either taken 
 for granted or which have been developed or are about 
 to be developed in the course of the conversation. Noth- 
 ing has been said, for example, in the English, German, 
 Yana, or Chinese sentence as to the place relations of 
 the farmer, the duck, the speaker, and the listener. Are 
 the farmer and the duck both visible or is one or the 
 other invisible from the point of view of the speaker, 
 and are both placed within the horizon of the speaker, 
 the listener, or of some indefinite point of reference "off 
 yonder"? In other words, to paraphrase awkwardly 
 certain latent "demonstrative" ideas, does this farmer 
 (invisible to us but standing behind a door not far 
 away from me, you being seated yonder well out of 
 reach) kill that duckling (which belongs to you) ? or 
 does that farmer (who lives in your neighborhood and
 
 98 LANGUAGE 
 
 whom we see over there) kill that duckling (that be- 
 longs to him) ? This type of demonstrative elaboration 
 is foreign to our way of thinking, but it would seem very 
 natural, indeed unavoidable, to a Kwakiutl Indian. 
 
 What, then, are the absolutely essential concepts in 
 speech, the concepts that must be expressed if language 
 is to be a satisfactory means of communication? 
 Clearly we must have, first of all, a large stock of basic 
 or radical concepts, the concrete wherewithal of speech. 
 "We must have objects, actions, qualities to talk about, 
 and these must have their corresponding symbols in 
 independent words or in radical elements. No proposi- 
 tion, however abstract its intent, is humanly possible 
 without a tying on at one or more points to the con- 
 crete world of sense. In every intelligible proposition 
 at least two of these radical ideas must be expressed, 
 though in exceptional cases one or even both may be 
 understood from the context. And, secondly, such re- 
 lational concepts must be expressed as moor the concrete 
 concepts to each other and construct a definite, funda- 
 mental form of proposition. In this fundamental form 
 there must be no doubt as to the nature of the rela- 
 tions that obtain between the concrete concepts. We 
 must know what concrete concept is directly or indi- 
 rectly related to what other, and how. If we wish to 
 talk of a thing and an action, we must know if they are 
 coordinately related to each other (e.g., "He is fond of 
 ivine and gamhling") ; or if the thing is conceived of as 
 the starting point, the "doer" of the action, or, as it 
 is customary to say, the "subject" of which the action 
 is predicated ; or if, on the contrary, it is the end point, 
 the "object" of the action. If I wish to communicate 
 an intelligible idea about a farmer, a duckling, and 
 the act of killing, it is not enough to state the linguistic
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 99 
 
 symbols for these concrete ideas in any order, higgledy- 
 piggledy, trusting that the hearer may construct some 
 kind of a relational pattern out of the general probabili- 
 ties of the case. The fundamental syntactic relations 
 must be unambiguously expressed. I can afford to be 
 silent on the subject of time and place and number and 
 of a host of other possible types of concepts, but I can 
 find no way of dodging the issue as to who is doing the 
 killing. There is no known language that can or does 
 dodge it, any more than it succeeds in saying something 
 without the use of symbols for the concrete concepts. 
 
 We are thus once more reminded of the distinction 
 between essential or unavoidable relational concepts and 
 the dispensable type. The former are universally ex- 
 pressed, the latter are but sparsely developed in some 
 languages, elaborated with a bewildering exuberance in 
 others. But what prevents us from throwing in these 
 "dispensable" or "secondary" relational concepts with 
 the large, floating group of derivational, qualifying con- 
 cepts that we have already discussed? Is there, after 
 all is said and done, a fundamental difference between 
 a qualifying concept like the negative in unJieaWiy and 
 a relational one like the number concept in hool's? If 
 unliealtJiy may be roughly paraphrased as vot healthy, 
 may not hooks be just as legitimately paraphrased, bar- 
 ring the violence to English idiom, as several hook? 
 There are, indeed, languages in which the plural, if ex- 
 pressed at all, is conceived of in the same sober, re- 
 stricted, one might almost say casual, spirit in which 
 we feel the negative in unhealthy. For such languages 
 the number concept has no syntactic significance what- 
 ever, is not essentially conceived of as defining a rela- 
 tion, but falls into the group of derivational or even 
 of basic concepts. In English, however, as in French,
 
 100 LANGUAGE 
 
 German, Latin, Greek — indeed in all the languages that 
 we have most familiarity with — the idea of number is 
 not merely appended to a given concept of a thing. It 
 ma}^ have something of this merely qualifying value, but 
 its force extends far beyond. It infects much else in 
 the sentence, molding other concepts, even such as have 
 no intelligible relation to number, into forms that are 
 said to correspond to or "agree with" the basic concept 
 to which it is attached in the first instance. If "a man 
 falls" but "men fall" in English, it is not because of 
 any inherent change that has taken place in the nature 
 of the action or because the idea of plurality inherent 
 in "men" must, in the very nature of ideas, relate itself 
 also to the action performed by these men. What we are 
 doing in these sentences is what most languages, in 
 greater or less degree and in a hundred varying ways, 
 are in the habit of doing — throwing a bold bridge be- 
 tween the two basically distinct types of concept, the 
 concrete and the abstractly relational, infecting the lat- 
 ter, as it were, with the color and grossness of the for- 
 mer. By a certain violence of metaphor the material 
 concept is forced to do duty for (or intertwine itself 
 with) the strictly relational. 
 
 The ease is even more obvious if we take gender as our 
 text. In the two English phrases, "The white woman 
 that comes" and "The white men that come," we are 
 not reminded that gender, as well as number, may be 
 elevated into a secondary relational concept. It would 
 seem a little far-fetched to make of masculinity and 
 femininity, crassly material, philosophically accidental 
 concepts that they are, a means of relating quality and 
 person, person and action, nor would it easily occur 
 to us, if we had not studied the classics, that it was 
 anything but absurd to inject into two such highly at*
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 101 
 
 tenuated relational concepts as are expressed by "the" 
 and "that" the combined notions of number and sex. 
 Yet all this, and more, happens in Latin, Ilia alba 
 femina quae venit and illi alhi liomines qui veniunt, 
 conceptually translated, amount to this: i/ia^-one-femi- 
 nine-doer ^ one-f eminine-i6'7uYe-doer feminine-doing-one- 
 woman wliicli - one - feminine - doer other °- one - now- 
 come; and: /7iai- several -masculine -doer several -mascu- 
 line-M'7iiYe-doer masculine-doing-several- wmii which-sev- 
 eral-masculine-doer other-several-now-conie. Each word 
 involves no less than four concepts, a radical concept 
 (either properly concrete — wliite, man, wmnan, come — 
 or demonstrative — tliat, wliich) and three relational con- 
 cepts, selected from the categories of case, number, gen- 
 der, person, and tense. Logically, only case ^ (the rela- 
 tion of woman or me?i to a following verb, of which to 
 its antecedent, of that and white to woman or men, and 
 of which to come) imperatively demands expression, and 
 that only in connection with the concepts directly af- 
 fected (there is, for instance, no need to be informed 
 that the whiteness is a doing or doer's whiteness ^) . The 
 
 5 "Doer," not "done to." This is a necessarily clumsy tag to 
 represent the "nominative" (subjective) in contrast to the "accu- 
 sative" ( objective ) . 
 
 6 I.e., not you or I. 
 
 7 By "case" is here meant not only the subjective-objective rela- 
 tion but also that of attribution. 
 
 8 Except in so far as Latin uses this method as a rather awk- 
 ward, roundabout method of establishing the attribution of the 
 color to the particular object or person. In effect one cannot 
 in Latin directly say that a person is white, merely that what is 
 white is identical with the person who is, acts, or is acted upon 
 in such and such a manner. In origin the feel of the Latin ilia 
 alba femina is really "that-one, the-white-one, (namely) the- 
 woman" — three substantive ideas that are related to each other 
 by a juxtaposition intended to convey an identity. English 
 and Chinese express the attribution directly by means of order. 
 In Latin the ilia and alba may occupy almost any position in the 
 sentence. It is important to observe that the subjective form
 
 102 LANGUAGE 
 
 other relational concepts are either merely parasitic 
 (gender throughout; number in the demonstrative, the 
 adjective, the relative, and the verb) or irrelevant to 
 the essential syntactic form of the sentence (number 
 in the noun; person; tense). An intelligent and sensi- 
 tive Chinaman, accustomed as he is to cut to the very 
 bone of linguistic form, might well say of the Latin sen- 
 tence, ''How pedantically imaginative!" It must be 
 difficult for him, when first confronted by the illogical 
 complexities of our European languages, to feel at home 
 in an attitude that so largely confounds the subject- 
 matter of speech with its formal pattern or, to be more 
 accurate, that turns certain fundamentally concrete con- 
 cepts to such attenuated relational uses. 
 
 I have exaggerated somewhat the concreteness of our 
 subsidiary or rather non-syntactical relational concepts 
 in order that the essential facts might come out in bold 
 relief. It goes without saying that a Frenchman has no 
 clear sex notion in his mind when he speaks of un arhre 
 ("a-masculine tree") or of une ponime ("a-feminine 
 apple"). Nor have we, despite the grammarians, a very 
 vivid sense of the present as contrasted with all past 
 and all future time when we say He comes.^ This is 
 evident from our use of the present to indicate both 
 future time ("He comes to-morrow") and general ac- 
 tivity unspecified as to time ("Whenever he comes, I 
 am glad to see him," where "comes" refers to past oc- 
 
 of ilJa and oUja does not truly define a relation of these qualifying 
 concepts to fcmina. Such a relation might be formally expressed 
 via an attriliutive case, sav the srenitive (tromnn of irhiteness). 
 In Tibetan both the methods of order and of true case relation 
 may be employed: iroman vhife (i.e., "white woman") or vhite-of 
 icoman (i.e., "woman of whiteness, woman who is white, white 
 woman") . 
 
 » Aside, naturally, from the life and imminence that may bo 
 created for such a sentence by a particular context.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 103 
 
 eurrences and possible future ones rather than to pres- 
 ent activity). In both the French and English instances 
 the primary ideas of sex and time have become diluted 
 by form-analogy and by extensions into the relational 
 sphere, the concepts ostensibly indicated being now so 
 vaguely delimited that it is rather the tyranny of usage 
 than the need of their concrete expression that sways us 
 in the selection of this or that form. If the thinning- 
 out process continues long enough, we may eventually 
 be left with a system of forms on our hands from which 
 all the color of life has vanished and which merely per- 
 sist by inertia, duplicating each other's secondary, syn- 
 tactic functions with endless prodigality. Hence, in 
 part, the complex conjugational systems of so many 
 languages, in which differences of form are attended by 
 no assignable differences of function. There must have 
 been a time, for instance, though it antedates our earliest 
 documentary evidence, when the type of tense formation 
 represented by drove or sank differed in meaning, in 
 however slightly nuanced a degree, from the type 
 {hilled, worked) which has now become established in 
 English as the prevailing preterit formation, very much 
 as we recognize a valuable distinction at present between 
 both these types and the "perfect" {has driven, has 
 killed) but may have ceased to do so at some point m 
 the future.^" Now form lives longer than its own con- 
 ceptual content. Both are ceaselessly changing, but, on 
 the whole, the form tends to linger on when the spirit 
 has flown or changed its being. Irrational form, form 
 for form's sake — however we term this tendency to hold 
 on to formal distinctions once they have come to be — is 
 
 10 This has largely happened in popular French and German, 
 where the difference is stylistic rather than functional. The 
 preterits are more literarj or formal in tone than the perfecta.
 
 104 LANGUAGE 
 
 as natural to the life of language as is the retention of 
 modes of conduct that have long outlived the meaning 
 they once had. 
 
 There is another powerful tendency which makes for 
 a formal elaboration that does not strictly correspond 
 to clear-cut conceptual differences. Tliis is the tend- 
 ency to construct schemes of classification into which 
 all the concepts of language must be fitted. Once we 
 have made up our minds that all things are either 
 definitely good or bad or definitely black or white, it 
 is difficult to get into the frame of mind that recog- 
 nizes that any particular thing may be both good and 
 bad (in other words, indifferent) or both black and 
 white (in other words, gray), still more difficult to 
 realize that the good-bad or black-white categories may 
 not apply at all. Language is in many respects as un- 
 reasonable and stubborn about its classifications as is 
 such a mind. It must have its perfectly exclusive 
 pigeon-holes and will tolerate no flying vagrants. Any 
 concept that asks for expression must submit to the 
 classificatory rules of the game, just as there are statisti- 
 cal surveys in which even the most convinced atheist 
 must perforce be labeled Catholic, Protestant, or Jew 
 or get no hearing. In English we have made up our 
 minds that all action must be conceived of in reference 
 to three standard times. If, therefore, we desire to state 
 a proposition that is as true to-morrow as it was yes- 
 terday, we have to pretend that the present moment may 
 be elongated fore and aft so as to take in all eternity." 
 In French we know once for all that an object is mas- 
 culine or feminine, whether it be living or not; just as 
 
 11 Hence, "the square root of 4 is 2," precisely as "my uncle is 
 here now." There are many "primitive" languages that are more 
 philosophical and distinguish between a true "present" and a 
 "customary" or "general" tense.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 105 
 
 in many American and East Asiatic languages it must 
 be understood to belong to a certain form-category (say, 
 ring-round, ball-round, long and slender, cylindrical, 
 sheet-like, in mass like sugar) before it can be enu- 
 merated (e.g., "two ball-class potatoes," "three sheet- 
 class carpets") or even said to "be" or "be handled in 
 a definite way" (thus, in the Athabaskan languages and 
 in Yana, "to carry" or "throw" a pebble is quite an- 
 other thing than to carry or throw a log, linguistically 
 no less than in terms of muscular experience). Such 
 instances might be multiplied at will. It is almost as 
 though at some period in the past the unconscious mind 
 of the race had made a hasty inventory of experience, 
 committed itself to a premature classification that al- 
 lowed of no revision, and saddled the inheritors of its 
 language with a science that they no longer quite 
 believed in nor had the strength to overthrow. Dogma, 
 rigidly prescribed by tradition, stiffens into formalism. 
 Linguistic categories make up a system of surviving 
 dogma — dogma of the unconscious. They are often but 
 half real as concepts; their life tends ever to languish 
 away into form for form's sake. 
 
 There is still a third cause for the rise of this non- 
 significant form, or rather of non-significant differences 
 of form. This is the mechanical operation of phonetic 
 processes, which may bring about formal distinctions 
 that have not and never had a corresponding functional 
 distinction. Much of the irregularity and general for- 
 mal complexity of our declensional and conjugational 
 systems is due to this process. The plural of hat is hats, 
 the plural of self is selves. In the former case we have 
 a true -.s symbolizing plurality, in the latter a g-sound 
 coupled with a change in the radical element of the word 
 of / to V. Here we have not a falling together of forms
 
 106 I.ANGUAGE 
 
 that originally stood for fairly distinct concepts — as we 
 saw was presumably the case with such parallel forms 
 as drove and worked — but a merely mechanical mani- 
 folding of the same formal element without a corre- 
 sponding growth of a new concept. This type of form 
 development, therefore, while of the greatest interest 
 for the general history of language, does not directly 
 concern us now in our effort to understand the nature 
 of grammatical concepts and their tendency to degen- 
 erate into purely formal counters. 
 
 We may now conveniently revise our first classifica- 
 tion of concepts as expressed in language and suggest 
 the following scheme : 
 
 I. Basic {Concrete) Concepts (such as objects, actions, 
 qualities) : normally expressed by independent words 
 or radical elements ; involve no relation as such ^- 
 II. Derivational Concepts (less concrete, as a rule, than I, 
 more so than III) : normally expressed by affixing 
 non-radical elements to radical elements or by inner 
 modification of these; differ from type I in defining 
 ideas that are irrelevant to the proposition as a whole 
 but that give a radical element a particular increment 
 of significance and that are thus inherently related in 
 a specific way to concepts of type I ^^ 
 
 12 Except, of course, the fundamental selection and contrast nec- 
 essarily implied in defining one conecpt as against another. 
 "Man" and "white" possess an inherent relation to "woman" 
 and "black," but it is a relation of conceptual content only and 
 is of no direct interest to grammar. 
 
 13 Thus, the -er of farmer may be defined as indicating that 
 particular substantive concept (object or thinp) that serves as 
 the habitual subject of the particidar verb to which it is affixed. 
 This relation of "subject" \a farmer farms) is inliercnt in and 
 specific to the word; it does not exist for the sentenc(> as a wliole. 
 In the same way the -linff of duckling defines a specific relation 
 of attribution that concerns only the radical element, not the 
 sentence.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 107 
 
 III. Concrete Relational Concepts (still more abstract, yet 
 
 not entirely devoid of a measure of concreteness) : 
 normally expressed by affixing non-radical elements to 
 radical elements, but generally at a greater remove 
 from these than is the case with elements of type II, 
 or by inner moditlcation of radical elements; differ 
 fundamentally from type II in indicating or implying 
 relations that transcend the particular word to which 
 they are immediately attached, thus leading over to 
 
 IV. Pure Relational Concepts (purely abstract) : normally 
 
 expressed by affixing non-radical elements to radical 
 elements (in which case these concepts are frequently 
 intertwmed with those of type III) or by their inner 
 modification, by independent words, or by position ; 
 serve to relate the concrete elements of the proposition 
 to each other, thus giving it definite syntactic form. 
 
 The nature of these four classes of concepts as regards 
 their concreteness or their power to express syntactic 
 relations may be thus symbolized: 
 
 Material ( I. Basic Concepts 
 Content 1 H- Derivational Concepts 
 
 Relation i ^^^' Concrete Relational Concepts 
 IV. Pure Relational Concepts 
 
 These schemes must not be worshipped as fetiches. 
 In the actual work of analysis difficult problems fre- 
 quently arise and we may well be in doubt as to how 
 to group a given set of concepts. This is particularly apt 
 to be the case in exotic languages, where we may be 
 quite sure of the analysis of the words in a sentence 
 and yet not succeed in acquiring that inner ''feel" of 
 its structure that enables us to tell infallibly what is 
 "material content" and what is "relation." Concepts
 
 108 LANGUAGE 
 
 of class I are essential to all speech, also concepts of 
 class IV. Concepts II and III are both common, but not 
 essential; particularly group III, which represents, in 
 effect, a psychological and formal confusion of types II 
 and IV or of types I and IV, is an avoidable class of 
 concepts. Logically there is an impassable gulf between 
 I and IV, but the illogical, metaphorical genius of 
 speech has wilfully spanned the gulf and set up a con- 
 tinuous gamut of concepts and forms that leads imper- 
 ceptibly from the crudest of materialities ("house" or 
 "John Smith") to the most subtle of relations. It is 
 particularly significant that the unanalyzable inde- 
 pendent word belongs in most cases to either group I or 
 group IV, rather less commonly to II or III. It is 
 possible for a concrete concept, represented by a 
 simple word, to lose its material significance entirely 
 and pass over directly into the relational sphere 
 without at the same time losing its independence as a 
 word. This happens, for instance, in Chinese and Cam- 
 bodgian when the verb "give" is used in an abstract 
 sense as a mere symbol of the "indirect objective" rela- 
 tion (e.g., Cambodgian "We make story this give all 
 that person who have child," i.e., "We have made this 
 story for all those that have children"). 
 
 There are, of course, also not a few instances of transi- 
 tions between groups I and II and I and III, as well 
 as of the less radical one between II and III. To the 
 first of these transitions belongs that whole class of ex- 
 amples in which the independent word, after passing 
 through the preliminary stage of functioning as the sec- 
 ondary or qualifying element in a compound, ends up 
 by being a derivational affix pure and simple, yet with- 
 out losing the memory of its former independence. Such 
 an element and concept is the full of teaspoonfull, which
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 109 
 
 hovers psychologically between the status of an inde- 
 pendent, radical concept (compare full) or of a sub- 
 sidiary element in a compound (cf. hrim-full) and that 
 of a simple suffix (cf. dutiful) in which the primary con- 
 creteness is no longer felt. In general, the more highly 
 synthetic our linguistic type, the more difficult and even 
 arbitrary it becomes to distinguish groups I and II. 
 
 Not only is there a gradual loss of the concrete as we 
 pass through from group I to group IV, there is also 
 a constant fading away of the feeling of sensible re- 
 ality within the main groups of linguistic concepts them- 
 selves. In many languages it becomes almost imperative, 
 therefore, to make various sub-classifications, to segre- 
 gate, for instance, the more concrete from the more ab- 
 stract concepts of group II. Yet we must always beware 
 of reading into such abstracter groups that purely for- 
 mal, relational feeling that we can hardly help associat- 
 ing with certain of the abstracter concepts which, with 
 us, fall in group III, unless, indeed, there is clear evi- 
 dence to warrant such a reading in. An example or two 
 should make clear these all-important distinctions.^* In 
 Nootka we have an unusually large number of deriva- 
 tional affixes (expressing concepts of group II). Some 
 of these are quite material in content (e.g., "in the 
 house," "to dream of"), others, like an element denot- 
 ing plurality and a diminutive affix, are far more ab- 
 stract in content. The former type are more closely 
 welded v/ith the radical element than the latter, which 
 can only be suffixed to formations that have the value of 
 
 1* It is precisely the failure to feel the "value" or "tone," as 
 distinct from the outer significance, of the concept expressed by 
 a given grammatical element that has so often led students to 
 misunderstand the nature of languages profoundly alien to their 
 own. Not everything that calls itself "tense" or "mode" or 
 "number" or "gender" or "person" is genuinely comparable to 
 what we mean by these terms in Latin or French.
 
 110 LANGUAGE 
 
 complete words. If, therefore, I wish to say * ' the small 
 fires in the house" — and I can do this in one word — I 
 must form the word "fire-in-the-house," to which ele- 
 ments corresponding to "small," our plural, and "the" 
 are appended. The element indicating the definiteness 
 of reference that is implied in our "the" comes at the 
 very end of the word. So far, so good. " Fire-in-the- 
 house-the" is an intelligible correlate of our "the house- 
 fire."^^ But is the Nootka correlate of "the small fires 
 in the house" the true equivalent of an English "the 
 Jiouse-firelets"? ^'^ By no means. First of all, the plural 
 element precedes the diminutive in Nootka : ' ' fire-in-the- 
 house-plural-small-the, ' ' in other words ' ' the house-fires- 
 let," which at once reveals the important fact that the 
 plural concept is not as abstractly, as relationally, felt 
 as in English. A more adequate rendering would be 
 "the house-fire-several-let," in which, however, "sev- 
 eral" is too gross a word, "-let" too choice an element 
 ("small" again is too gross). In truth we cannot carry 
 over into English the inherent feeling of the Nootka 
 word, which seems to hover somewhere between "the 
 house-firelets " and "the house-fire-several-small." But 
 what more than anything else cuts off all possibility of 
 comparison between the English -s of "house-firelets" 
 and the "-several-small" of the Nootka word is this, 
 that in Nootka neither the plural nor the diminutive 
 affix corresponds or refers to anything else in the sen- 
 tence. In English "the house-firelets burn" (not 
 "burns"), in Nootka neither verb, nor adjective, nor 
 
 15 Suffixed articles occur also in Danish and Rwedisli and in 
 numermis other lanpnaj?es. The Nootka element for "in the 
 house" differs from our "house-" in that it is suffixed and cannot 
 occur as an independent word ; nor is it related to the Nootka 
 word for "house." 
 
 16 Assuming the existence of a word "firelet."
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 111 
 
 anything else in the proposition is in the least concerned 
 with the plurality or the diminutiveness of the fire. 
 Hence, while Nootka recognizes a cleavage between con- 
 crete and less concrete concepts within group II, the less 
 concrete do not transcend the group and lead us into 
 that abstracter air into which our plural -s carries us. 
 But at any rate, the reader may object, it is something 
 that the Nootka plural affix is set apart from the con- 
 ereter group of affixes ; and may not the Nootka diminu- 
 tive have a slenderer, a more elusive content than our 
 -let or -ling or the German -chen or -leinf ^'^ 
 
 Can such a concept as that of plurality ever be clas- 
 sified with the more material concepts of group II? 
 Indeed it can be. In Yana the third person of the 
 verb makes no formal distinction between singular and 
 plural. Nevertheless the plural concept can be, and 
 nearly always is, expressed by the suffixing of an ele- 
 ment (-ha-) to the radical element of the verb. ''It 
 burns in the east" is rendered by the verb ya-liau-si 
 "burn-east-s." ^^ ''They burn in the east" is ya-ha- 
 Jiau-si. Note that the plural affile immediately follows 
 the radical element (ya-), disconnecting it from the local 
 element {-Tiau-). It needs no labored argument to prove 
 that the concept of plurality is here hardly less concrete 
 than that of location "in the east," and that the Yana 
 form corresponds in feeling not so much to our "They 
 burn in the east" (ardunt oriente) as to a "Burn-several- 
 east-s, it plurally burns in the east, ' ' an expression which 
 
 17 The Nootka diminutive is doubtless more of a feeling-element, 
 an element of nuance, than our -ling. This is shown by the fact 
 that it may be used with verbs as well as with nouns. In speak- 
 ing to a child, one is likely to add the diminutive to any word in 
 the sentence, regardless of whether there is an inherent diminutive 
 meaning in the word or not. 
 
 18 -si is the third person of the present tense, -hau- "east" is 
 an affix, not a compounded radical element.
 
 U2 LANGUAGE 
 
 we cannot adequately assimilate for lack of the necessary 
 form-grooves into which to run it. 
 
 But can we go a step farther and dispose of the cate- 
 gory of plurality as an utterly material idea, one that 
 would make of "books" a "plural book," in which the 
 "plural," like the "white" of "white book," falls con- 
 tentedly into group I? Our "many books" and "sev- 
 eral books" are obviously not cases in point. Even if 
 we could say "many book" and "several book" (as we 
 can say "many a book" and "each book"), the plural 
 concept would still not emerge as clearly as it should for 
 our argument; "many" and "several" are contaminated 
 by certain notions of quantity or scale that are not essen- 
 tial to the idea of plurality itself. We must turn to 
 central and eastern Asia for the type of expression we 
 are seeking. In Tibetan, for instance, nga-s mi mtJiong ^^ 
 "I-by man see, by me a man is seen, I see a man" may 
 just as well be understood to mean "I see men," if there 
 happens to be no reason to emphasize the fact of plu- 
 rality.'" If the fact is worth expressing, however, I 
 can say nga-s mi mams mthong "by me man plural see," 
 where mams is the perfect conceptual analogue of -s in 
 books, divested of all relational strings. Rnams follows 
 its noun as would any other attributive word — "man 
 plural" (whether two or a million) like "man white." 
 No need to bother about his plurality any more than 
 about his whiteness unless we insist on the point. 
 
 What is true of the idea of plurality is naturally just 
 as true of a great many other concepts. They do not 
 necessarily belong where we who speak English are in 
 the habit of putting them. They may be shifted to- 
 
 19 These are classical, not modern colloquial, forms. 
 
 20 Just as in English "He lias written books" makes no com- 
 mitment on the score of quantity ("a few, several, many").
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 113 
 
 wards I or towards IV, the two poles of linguistic ex- 
 pression. Nor dare we look down on the Nootka In- 
 dian and the Tibetan for their material attitude towards 
 a concept which to us is abstract and relational, lest we 
 invite the reproaches of the Frenchman who feels a 
 subtlety of relation in femme blanche and liomme hlanc 
 that he misses in the coarser-grained white woman and 
 white man. But the Bantu Negro, were he a philoso- 
 pher, might go further and find it strange that we put 
 in group II a category, the diminutive, which he strongly 
 feels to belong to group III and which he uses, along with 
 a number of other classificatory concepts,^^ to relate his 
 subjects and objects, attributes and predicates, as a 
 Russian or a German handles his genders and, if pos- 
 sible, with an even greater finesse. 
 
 It is because our conceptual scheme is a sliding scale 
 rather than a philosophical analysis of experience 
 that we cannot say in advance just where to 
 put a given concept. "We must dispense, in other 
 words, with a well-ordered classification of categories. 
 "What boots it to put tense and mode here or number 
 there when the next language one handles puts 
 tense a peg "lower down" (towards I), mode and 
 number a peg ''higher up" (towards I"V) f Nor is there 
 much to be gained in a summary work of this kind from 
 a general inventory of the types of concepts generally 
 found in groups II, III, and I"V. There are too many 
 possibilities. It would be interesting to show what are 
 the most typical noun-forming and verb-forming ele- 
 ments of group II ; how variously nouns may be classi- 
 fied (by gender ; personal and non-personal ; animate and 
 inanimate ; by form ; common and proper) ; how the con- 
 
 21 Such as person class, animal class, instrument class, augmen- 
 tative class.
 
 114 LANGUAGE 
 
 cept of number is elaborated (singular and plural; sin- 
 gular, dual, and plural ; singular, dual, trial, and plural ; 
 single, distributive, and collective) ; what tense distinc- 
 tions may be made in verb or noun (the "past," for in- 
 stance, may be an indefinite past, immediate, remote, 
 mythical, completed, prior) ; how delicately certain lan- 
 guages have developed the idea of "aspect"-- (momen- 
 taneous, durative, continuative, inceptive, cessative, 
 durative-inceptive, iterative, momentaneous-iterative, du- 
 rative-iterative, resultative, and still others) ; what mo- 
 dalities may be recognized (indicative, imperative, po- 
 tential, dubitative, optative, negative, and a host of 
 others-^); what distinctions of person are possible (is 
 "we," for instance, conceived of as a plurality of "I" 
 or is it as distinct from "I" as either is from "you" 
 or "he"? — both attitudes are illustrated in language; 
 moreover, does "we" include you to whom I speak or 
 not? — "inclusive" and "exclusive" forms) ; what may 
 be the general scheme of orientation, the so-called demon- 
 strative categories ("this" and "that" in an endless 
 procession of nuances) ; -* how frequently the form ex- 
 
 22 A term borrowed from Slavic grammar. It indicates the 
 lapse of action, its nature from the standpoint of continuity. 
 Our "cry" is indefinite as to aspect, "be crying" is durative, "cry 
 out" is momentaneous, "burst into tears" is inceptive, "keep cry- 
 ing" is continuative, "start in crying" is durative-inceptive, "cry 
 now and again" is iterative, "cry out every now and then" or 
 "cry in fits and starts" is momentaneous-iterative. "To put on a 
 coat" is momentaneous. "to wear a coat" is resultative. As our 
 examples show, aspect is expressed in English by all kinds of 
 idiomatic turns rather than i)y <a consistently worked out set of 
 grammatical forms. In many languages as))ect is of far greater 
 formal significance than tense, with wliich the naive student is apt 
 to confuse it. 
 
 23 By "modalities" I do not mean the matter of fact statement, 
 say, of negation or uncertainty as such, rather their implication 
 in terms of form. There are languages, for instance, which have 
 as elaborate an apparatus of negative forms for the verb aa 
 Greek has of the optative or wish-modality. 
 
 24 Compare page 97.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 115 
 
 presses the source or nature of the speaker's knowledge 
 (known by actual experience, by hearsay,-^ by infer- 
 ence) ; how the syntactic relations may be expressed in 
 the noun (subjective and objective; agentive, instrumen- 
 tal, and person affected;-^ various types of "genitive" 
 and indirect relations) and, correspondingly, in the verb 
 (active and passive; active and static; transitive and in- 
 transitive ; impersonal, reflexive, reciprocal, indefinite as 
 to object, and many other special limitations on the start- 
 ing-point and end-point of the flow of activity). These 
 details, important as many of them are to an under- 
 standing of the "inner form" of language, yield in gen- 
 eral significance to the more radical group-distinctions 
 that we have set up. It is enough for the general reader 
 to feel that language struggles towards two poles of lin- 
 guistic expression — material content and relation — and 
 that these poles tend to be connected by a long series 
 of transitional concepts. 
 
 In dealing with words and their varying forms we 
 have had to anticipate much that concerns the sentence 
 
 2s It is because of this classification of experience that in many 
 languages the verb forms which are proper, say, to a mythical 
 narration differ from those commonly used in daily inter- 
 course. We leave these shades to the context or content ourselves 
 with a more explicit and roundabout mode of expression, e.g., "He 
 is dead, as I happen to know," "They say he is dead," "He must 
 be dead by the looks of things." 
 
 26 We say "/ sleep" and "7 go," as well as "/ kill him," but "he 
 kills me." Yet me of the last example is at least as close psycho- 
 logically to I of "I sleep" as is the latter to / of "I kill him." It 
 is only by form that we can classify the "I" notion of "I sleep" 
 as that of an acting subject. Properly speaking, I am handled 
 by forces beyond my control when I sleep just as truly as when 
 some one is killing me. Numerous languages differentiate clearly 
 between active suljject and static subject (/ rjo and / kill him as 
 distinct from I sleep, I am good. I am killed) or between transi- 
 tive subject and intransitive subject (7 kill him as distinct from 
 7 sleep, I am good. I am killedr, I go) . The intransitive or static 
 subjects may or may not be identical with the object of the 
 transitive verb.
 
 116 LANGUAGE 
 
 as a whole. Every language has its special method or 
 methods of binding words into a larger unity. The im- 
 portance of these methods is apt to vary with the com- 
 plexity of the individual word. The more synthetic the 
 language, in other words, the more clearly the status of 
 each word in the sentence is indicated by its own re- 
 sources, the less need is there for looking beyond the 
 word to the sentence as a whole. The Latin agit '' (he) 
 acts" needs no outside help to establish its place in a 
 proposition. Whether I say agit dominus "the master 
 acts" or sic femina agit "thus the woman acts," the net 
 result as to the syntactic feel of the agit is practically the 
 same. It can only be a verb, the predicate of a proposi- 
 tion, and it can only be conceived as a statement of activ- 
 ity carried out by a person (or thing) other than you 
 or me. It is not so with such a word as the English act. 
 Act is a syntactic waif until we have defined its status 
 in a proposition — one thing in "they act abominably," 
 quite another in "that was a kindly act." The Latin 
 sentence speaks with the assurance of its individual mem- 
 bers, the English word needs the prompting of its fel- 
 lows. Roughly speaking, to be sure. And yet to say that 
 a sufficiently elaborate word-structure compensates for 
 external syntactic methods is perilously close to begging 
 the question. The elements of the word are related to 
 each other in a specific way and follow each other in a 
 rigorously determined sequence. This is tantamount to 
 saying that a word which consists of more than a radi- 
 cal element is a crystallization of a sentence or of some 
 portion of a sentence, that a form like agit is roughly 
 the psychological -^ equivalent of a form like age is ' ' act 
 he." Breaking down, then, the wall that separates word 
 and sentence, we may ask: What, at last analysis, are 
 27 Ultimately, also historical — say, age to "act that (one)."
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 117 
 
 the fundamental methods of relating word to word and 
 element to element, in short, of passing from the isolated 
 notions symbolized by each word and by each element 
 to the unified proposition that corresponds to a thought ? 
 The answer is simple and is implied in the preceding 
 remarks. The most fundamental and the most powerful 
 of all relating methods is the method of order. Let us 
 think of some more or less concrete idea, say a color, 
 and set down its symbol — red; of another concrete idea, 
 say a person or object, setting down its symbol — dog; 
 finally, of a third concrete idea, say an action, setting 
 down its symbol — run. It is hardly possible to set down 
 these three symbols — red dog run — without relating them 
 in some way, for example {tlie) red dog run{s) . I 
 am far from wishing to state that the proposition has 
 always grown up in this analytic manner, merely that 
 the very process of juxtaposing concept to concept, sym- 
 bol to symbol, forces some kind of relational "feeling," 
 if nothing else, upon us. To certain syntactic adhesions 
 we are very sensitive, for example, to the attributive rela- 
 tion of quality (red dog) or the subjective relation {dog 
 run) or the objective relation {kill dog), to others we 
 are more indifferent, for example, to the attributive 
 relation of circumstance (to-day red dog run or red dog 
 to-day run or red dog run to-day, all of which are equiva- 
 lent propositions or propositions in embryo). Words 
 and elements, then, once they are listed in a certain or- 
 der, tend not only to establish some kind of relation 
 among themselves but are attracted to each other in 
 greater or in less degree. It is presumably this very 
 greater or less that ultimately leads to those firmly 
 solidified groups of elements (radical element or ele- 
 ments plus one or more grammatical elements) that we 
 have studied as complex words. They are in all like-
 
 118 LANGUAGE 
 
 lihood nothing but sequences that have shrunk together 
 and away from other sequences or isolated elements in 
 the flow of speech. While they are fully alive, in other 
 words, while they are functional at every point, they 
 can keep themselves at a psychological distance from 
 their neighbors. As they gradually lose much of their 
 life, they fall back into the embrace of the sentence as a 
 whole and the sequence of independent words regains 
 the importance it had in part transferred to the crystal- 
 lized groups of elements. Speech is thus constantly 
 tightening and loosening its sequences. In its highly 
 integrated forms (Latin, Eskimo) the ''energy" of 
 sequence is largely locked up in complex word forma- 
 tions, it becomes transformed into a kind of potential 
 energy that may not be released for millennia. In its 
 more analytic forms (Chinese, English) this energy is 
 mobile, ready to hand for such service as we demand 
 of it. 
 
 There can be little doubt that stress has frequently 
 played a controlling influence in the formation of ele- 
 ment-groups or complex words out of certain sequences 
 in the sentence. Such an English word as ivitlistand 
 is merely an old sequence until stand, i.e., " against ^^ 
 stand, ' ' in which the unstressed adverb was permanently 
 drawn to the following verb and lost its independence as 
 a significant element. In the same way French futures 
 of the type irai " (1) shall go" are but the resultants of 
 a coalescence of oriijinally independent words: ?r -^ a'i 
 "to-go I-have," under the influence of a unifying accent. 
 But stress has done more than articulate or unify se- 
 quences that in their own right imply a syntactic rela- 
 
 28 For with in the sense of "against," compare German toidel 
 "against." 
 
 -'■> Cf. Latin ire "to go"; also our English idiom "I have to go," 
 i.e., "must go."
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 119 
 
 tion. Stress is the most natural means at our disposal 
 to emphasize a linguistic contrast, to indicate the major 
 element in a sequence. Hence we need not be sur- 
 prised to find that accent too, no less than sequence, may 
 serve as the unaided symbol of certain relations. Such 
 a contrast as that of go between ("one who goes be- 
 tween") and to go between may be of quite secondary 
 origin in English, but there is every reason to believe 
 that analogous distinctions have prevailed at all times 
 in linguistic history. A sequence like see man might 
 imply some type of relation in which see qualifies the 
 following w^ord, hence "a seeing man" or "a seen (or 
 visible) man," or is its predication, hence "the man 
 sees" or "the man is seen," while a sequence like see 
 man might indicate that the accented word in some way 
 limits the application of the first, say as direct object, 
 hence "to see a man" or "(he) sees the man." Such 
 alternations of relation, as symbolized by varying 
 stresses, are important and frequent in a number of 
 languages.^" 
 
 It is a somewhat venturesome and yet not an altogether 
 unreasonable speculation that sees in word order and 
 stress the primary methods for the expression of all syn- 
 tactic relations and looks upon the present relational 
 value of specific words and elements as but a secondary 
 condition due to a transfer of values. Thus, we may 
 surmise that the Latin -m of words like feminam, 
 dominum, and civem did not originally ^^ denote that 
 "woman," "master," and "citizen" were objectively 
 related to the verb of the proposition but indicated some- 
 
 30 In Chinese no less than in English. 
 
 31 By "originally" 1 mean, of course, some time antedating the 
 earliest period of the Indo-European languages that we can get 
 at by comparative evidence.
 
 120 LANGUAGE 
 
 thing far more concrete,^- that the objective relation was 
 merely implied by the position or accent of the word 
 (radical element) immediately precediaig the -m, and 
 that gradually, as its more concrete significance faded 
 away, it took over a syntactic function that did not 
 originally be'ong to it. This sort of evolution by trans- 
 fer is traceable in many instances. Thus, the of in an 
 English phrase like "the law of the land" is now as 
 colorless in content, as purely a relational indicator as 
 the ''genitive" suffix -is in the Latin lex urhis "the law 
 of the city. ' ' We know, however, that it was originally 
 an adverb of considerable concreteness of meaning,^^ 
 "away, moving from," and that the syntactic relation 
 was originally expressed by the case form ^* of the sec- 
 ond noun. As the case form lost its vitality, the adverb 
 took over its function. If we are actually justified in 
 assuming that the expression of all syntactic relations 
 is ultimately traceable to these two unavoidable, dynamic 
 features of speech — sequence and stress ^^ — an interest- 
 ing thesis results: — All of the actual content of speech, 
 its clusters of vocalic and consonantal sounds, is in 
 origin limited to the concrete; relations were originally 
 not expressed in outward form but were merely implied 
 and articulated with the help of order and rhj'-thm. In 
 other words, relations were intuitively felt and could 
 only "leak out" with the help of dynamic factors that 
 themselves move on an intuitional plane. 
 
 There is a special method for the expression of rela- 
 tions that has been so often evolved in the history of 
 language that we must glance at it for a moment. This 
 is the method of "concord" or of like signaling. It is 
 
 32 Perhaps it was a noun-classifying element of some sort. 
 
 33 Compare its close historical parallel off. 
 
 34 "At)lative" at last analysis. 
 
 35 Very likely jjitch should be understood along with stress.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 121 
 
 based on the same principle as the password or label. 
 All persons or objects that answer to the same counter- 
 sign or that bear the same imprint are thereby stamped 
 as somehow related. It makes little difference, once they 
 are so stamped, where they are to be found or how 
 they behave themselves. They are known to belong to- 
 gether. We are familiar with the principle of concord 
 in Latin and Greek. Many of us have been struck by 
 such relentless rhymes as vidi ilium honum dominum 
 "I saw that good master" or quarum dearum saevarum 
 "of which stern goddesses." Not that sound-echo, 
 whether in the form of rhyme or of alliteration ^'^ is nec- 
 essary to concord, though in its most typical and orig- 
 inal forms concord is nearly always accompanied by 
 sound repetition. The essence of the principle is sim- 
 ply this, that words (elements) that belong together, 
 particularly if they are syntactic equivalents or are re- 
 lated in like fashion to another word or element, are 
 outwardly marked by the same or functionally equiva- 
 lent affixes. The application of the principle varies 
 considerably according to the genius of the particular 
 language. In Latin and Greek, for instance, there is 
 concord between noun and qualifying word (adjective 
 or demonstrative) as regards gender, number, and case, 
 between verb and subject only as regards number, and 
 no concord between verb and object. 
 
 In Chinook there is a more far-reaching concord be- 
 tween noun, whether subject or object, and verb. Every 
 noun is classified according to five categories — masculine, 
 feminine, neuter,^^ dual, and plural. ' ' Woman ' ' is f em- 
 
 36 As in Bantu or Chinook. 
 
 37 Perhaps better "general." The Chinook "neuter" may refer 
 to persons as well as things and may also be used as a plural. 
 "Masculine" and "feminine," as in German and French, include 
 a great number of inanimate nouns.
 
 122 LANGUAGE 
 
 inine, "sand" is neuter, "table" is masculine. If, 
 therefore, I wish to say "The woman put the sand on 
 the table," I must place in the verb certain class or 
 gender prefixes that accord with corresponding noun pre- 
 fixes. The sentence reads then, "The (fern.) -woman she 
 (fern.) -it (neut.)-it (masc.) -on-put the (neut.)-sand the 
 (masc.) -table." If "sand" is qualified as "much" and 
 "table" as "large," these new ideas are expressed as 
 abstract nouns, each with its inherent class-prefix 
 ("much" is neuter or feminine, "large" is masculine) 
 and with a possessive prefix referring to the qualified 
 noun. Adjective thus calls to noun, noun to verb. 
 "The woman put much sand on the large table," there- 
 fore, takes the form: "The (fem.) -woman she (fem.)-it 
 (neut.)-it (masc.) -on-put the (fem.) -thereof (neut.)- 
 quantity the (neut.)-sand the (masc.) -thereof (masc.)- 
 largeness the (masc.) -table." The classification of "ta- 
 ble" as masculine is thus three times insisted on — in the 
 noun, in the adjective, and in the verb. In the Bantu 
 languages,^^ the principle of concord works very much 
 as in Chinook. In them also nouns are classified into 
 a number of categories and are brought into relation 
 with adjectives, demonstratives, relative pronouns, and 
 verbs by means of prefixed elements that call off the class 
 and make up a complex system of concordances. In such 
 a sentence as "That fierce lion who came here is dead," 
 the class of "lion," which we may call the animal class, 
 would be referred to by concording prefixes no less than 
 six times, — with the demonstrative ("that"), the quali- 
 fying adjective, the noun itself, the relative pronoun, 
 
 38 Spoken in the greater part of the southern half of Africa. 
 Chinook is spoken in a number of diah^cts in the lower Columbia 
 River valley. It is impressive to observe how the human mind 
 has arrived at the same form of expression in two such histori- 
 cally unconnected regions.
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 123 
 
 the subjective prefix to the verb of the relative clause, 
 and the subjective prefix to the verb of the main clause 
 ("is dead"). We recognize in this insistence on exter- 
 nal clarity of reference the same spirit as moves in the 
 more familiar ilium bonum dominum. 
 
 Psychologically the methods of sequence and accent 
 lie at the opposite pole to that of concord. Where they 
 are all for implication, for subtlety of feeling, concord 
 is impatient of the least ambiguity but must have its 
 well-certificated tags at every turn. Concord tends to 
 dispense with order. In Latin and Chinook the inde- 
 pendent words are free in position, less so in Bantu. 
 In both Chinook and Bantu, however, the methods of 
 concord and order are equallj^ important for the differ- 
 entiation of subject and object, as the classifying verb 
 prefixes refer to subject, object, or indirect object ac- 
 cording to the relative position they occupy. These ex- 
 amples again bring home to us the significant fact that 
 at some point or other order asserts itself in every lan- 
 guage as the most fundamental of relating principles. 
 
 The observant reader has probably been surprised that 
 all this time we have had so little to say of the time- 
 honored ''parts of speech." The reason for this is not 
 far to seek. Our conventional classification of words 
 into parts of speech is only a vague, wavering approxi- 
 mation to a consistently worked out inventory of experi- 
 ence. We imagine, to begin Avith, that all "verbs" are 
 inherently concerned with action as such, that a "noun" 
 is the name of some definite object or personality that 
 can be pictured by the mind, that all qualities are neces- 
 sarily expressed by a definite group of words to which 
 we may appropriately apply the term "adjective." As 
 soon as we test our vocabulary, we discover that the 
 parts of speech are far from corresponding to so sim-
 
 124 ' LANGUAGE 
 
 pie an analysis of reality. We say *'it is red" and 
 define "red" as a quality- word or adjective. We should 
 consider it strange to think of an equivalent of ''is red" 
 in which the whole predication (adjective and verb of 
 being) is conceived of as a verb in precisely the same 
 way in which we think of "extends" or "lies" or 
 "sleeps" as a verb. Yet as soon as we give the "dura- 
 tive" notion of being red an inceptive or transitional 
 turn, we can avoid the parallel form "it becomes red, 
 it turns red ' ' and say ' ' it reddens. ' ' No one denies that 
 "reddens" is as good a verb as "sleeps" or even 
 "walks." Yet "it is red" is related to "it reddens" 
 very much as is " he stands " to "he stands up " or "he 
 rises." It is merely a matter of English or of general 
 Indo-European idiom that we cannot say "it reds" in 
 the sense of "it is red." There are hundreds of lan- 
 guages that can. Indeed there are many that can ex- 
 press what we should call an adjective only by making 
 a participle out of a verb. "Red" in such languages is 
 merely a derivative "being red," as our "sleeping" or 
 "walking" are derivatives of primary verbs. 
 
 Just as we can verbify the idea of a quality in such 
 eases as "reddens," so we can represent a quality or an 
 action to ourselves as a thing. We speak of "the height 
 of a building" or "the fall of an apple" quite as though 
 these ideas were parallel to "the roof of a building" or 
 "the skin of an apple," forgetting that the nouns 
 (lieigJity fall) have not ceased to indicate a quality and 
 an act when we have made them speak with the accent 
 of mere objects. And just as there are languages that 
 make verbs of the great mass of adjectives, so there are 
 others that make nouns of them. In Chinook, as we 
 have seen, "the big table" is "the-table its-bigness"; in 
 Tibetan the same idea may be expressed by "the table
 
 FORM: GRAMMATICAL CONCEPTS 125 
 
 of bigness," very much as we may say "a man of 
 wealth" instead of "a rich man." 
 
 But are there not certain ideas that it is impossible 
 to render except by way of such and such parts of 
 speech ? What can be done with the " to " of "he came 
 to the house"! Well, we can say "he reached the 
 house" and dodge the preposition altogether, giving 
 the verb a nuance that absorbs the idea of local 
 relation carried by the "to." But let us insist on 
 giving independence to this idea of local relation. 
 Must we not then hold to the preposition? No, we can 
 make a noun of it. We can say something like "he 
 reached the proximity of the house" or "he reached the 
 house-locality." Instead of saying "he looked into the 
 glass" we may say "he scrutinized the glass-interior." 
 Such expressions are stilted in English because they do 
 not easily fit into our formal grooves, but in language 
 after language we find that local relations are expressed 
 in just this way. The local relation is nominalized. 
 And so wx might go on examining the various parts 
 of speech and showing how they not merely grade into 
 each other but are to an astonishing degree actually con- 
 vertible into each other. The upshot of such an exami- 
 nation would be to feel convinced that the "part of 
 speech" reflects not so much our intuitive analysis of 
 reality as our ability to compose that reality into a 
 variety of formal patterns. A part of speech outside of 
 the limitations of syntactic form is but a will o' the wisp. 
 For this reason no logical scheme of the parts of speech 
 — their number, nature, and necessary confines — is of the 
 slightest interest to the linguist. Each language has its 
 own scheme. Everything depends on the formal de- 
 marcations which it recognizes. 
 
 Yet we must not be too destructive. It is well to re-
 
 126 LANGUAGE 
 
 member that speech consists of a series of propositions. 
 There must be something to talk about and something 
 must be said about this subject of discourse once it is 
 selected. This distinction is of such fundamental im- 
 portance that the vast majority of languages have em- 
 phasized it by creating some sort of formal barrier 
 between the two terms of the proposition. The subject 
 of discourse is a noun. As the most common subject of 
 diseour.se is either a person or a thing, the noun clusters 
 about concrete concepts of that order. As the thing 
 predicated of a subject is generally an activity in the 
 widest sense of the word, a passage from one moment of 
 existence to another, the form which has been set aside 
 for the business of predicating, in other words, the verb, 
 clusters about concepts of activit}^ No language wholly 
 fails to distinguish noun and verb, though in particular 
 cases the nature of the distinction may be an elusive 
 one. It is different with the other parts of speech. Not 
 one of them is imperatively required for the life of 
 language.^^ 
 
 39 In Yana the noun and the verb are well distinct, though there 
 are certain features that they hold in common which tend to draw 
 them nearer to each other than we feel to be possible. But there 
 are, strictly speaking, no other parts of speech. The adjective 
 is a verb. So are the numeral, the interrogative pronoun (e.g., 
 "to be what?"), and certain "conjunctions" and adverbs (e.g., "to 
 be and" and "to be not"; one says "and-past-I go," i.e., "and I 
 went"). Adverbs and prepositions are either nouns or merely 
 derivative affixes in the verb.
 
 VI 
 
 TYPES OP LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 
 
 So far, in dealing with linguistic form, we have been 
 concerned only with single words and with the relations 
 of words in sentences. We have not envisaged whole 
 languages as conforming to this or that general type. 
 Incidentally we have observed that one language runs 
 to tight-knit synthesis where another contents itself with 
 a more analytic, piece-meal handling of its elements, or 
 that in one language syntactic relations appear pure 
 which in another are combined with certain other no- 
 tions that have something concrete about them, however 
 abstract they may be felt to be in practice. In this 
 way we may have obtained some inkling of what is 
 meant when we speak of the general form of a language. 
 For it must be obvious to any one v/ho has thought 
 about the question at all or who has felt something of 
 the spirit of a foreign language that there is such a 
 thing as a basic plan, a certain cut, to each language. 
 This type or plan or structural "genius" of the lan- 
 guage is something much more fundamental, much more 
 pervasive, than any single feature of it that we can 
 mention, nor can we gain an adequate idea of its na- 
 ture by a mere recital of the sundry facts that make up 
 the grammar of the language. When we pass from 
 Latin to Russian, we feel that it is approximately the 
 same horizon that bounds our view, even though the near, 
 familiar landmarks have changed. When we come to 
 English, we seem to notice that the hills have dipped 
 
 127
 
 128 LANGUAGE 
 
 down a little, yet we recognize the general lay of the 
 land. And when we have arrived at Chinese, it is an 
 utterly different sky that is looking down upon us. We 
 can translate these metaphors and say that all languages 
 differ from one another but that certain ones differ far 
 more than others. This is tantamount to saying that 
 it is possible to group them into morphological types. 
 
 Strictly speaking, we know in advance that it is 
 impossible to set up a limited number of types that 
 would do full justice to the peculiarities of the thou- 
 sands of languages and dialects spoken on the surface 
 of the earth. Like all human institutions, speech 
 is too variable and too elusive to be quite safely ticketed. 
 Even if we operate with a minutely subdivided scale 
 of types, we may be quite certain that many of our 
 languages will need trimming before they fit. To get 
 them into the scheme at all it will be necessary to over- 
 estimate the significance of this or that feature or to 
 ignore, for the time being, certain contradictions in their 
 mechanism. Does the difficulty of classification prove 
 the uselessness of the task? I do not think so. It 
 would be too easy to relieve ourselves of the burden of 
 constructive thinking and to take the standpoint that 
 each language has its unique history, therefore its unique 
 structure. Such a standpoint expresses only a half 
 truth. Just as similar social, economic, and religious 
 institutions have grown up in different parts of the 
 world from distinct historical antecedents, so also lan- 
 guages, traveling along different roads, have tended to 
 converge toward similar forms. Moreover, the historical 
 study of language has proven to us beyond all doubt 
 that a language changes not only gradually but 
 consistently, that it moves unconsciously from one type 
 towards another, and that analogous trends are observ-
 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 129 
 
 able in remote quarters of the globe. From this it fol- 
 lows that broadly similar morphologies must have been 
 reached by unrelated languages, independently and fre- 
 quently. In assuming the existence of comparable types, 
 therefore, we are not gainsaying the individuality of all 
 historical processes; we are merely affirming that back 
 of the face of history are powerful drifts that move 
 language, like other social products, to balanced pat- 
 terns, in other words, to types. As linguists we shall 
 be content to realize that there are these types and that 
 certain processes in the life of language tend to modify 
 them. Why similar types should be formed, just what 
 is the nature of the forces that make them and dissolve 
 them — these questions are more easily asked than an- 
 swered. Perhaps the psychologists of the future will be 
 able to give us the ultimate reasons for the formation of 
 linguistic types. 
 
 When it comes to the actual task of classification, we 
 find that we have no easy road to travel. Various classi- 
 fications have been suggested, and they all contain ele- 
 ments of value. Yet none proves satisfactory. They 
 do not so much enfold the known languages in their 
 embrace as force them down into narrow, straight-backed 
 seats. The difficulties have been of various kinds. First 
 and foremost, it has been difficult to choose a point of 
 view. On what basis shall we classify? A language 
 shows us so many facets that we may well be puzzled. 
 And is one point of view sufficient? Secondly, it is 
 dangerous to generalize from a small number of se- 
 lected languages. To take, as the sum total of our ma- 
 terial, Latin, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, and perhaps Es- 
 kimo or Sioux as an afterthought, is to court disaster. 
 We have no right to assume that a sprinkling of exotic 
 types will do to supplement the few languages nearer
 
 130 LANGUAGE 
 
 home that we are more immediately interested in, 
 Thirdly, the strong craving for a simple formula^ has 
 been the undoing of linguists. There is something irre- 
 sistible about a method of classification that starts with 
 two poles, exemplified, say, by Cliinese and Latin, clus- 
 ters what it conveniently can about these poles, and 
 throws everything else into a "transitional type." 
 Hence has arisen the still popular classification of lan- 
 guages into an "isolating" group, an "agglutinative" 
 group, and an "inflective" group. Sometimes the lan- 
 guages of the American Indians are made to straggle 
 along as an uncomfortable "polysynthetic" rear-guard 
 to the agglutinative languages. There is justification 
 for the use of all of these terms, though not perhaps 
 in quite the spirit in which they are commonly employed. 
 In any case it is very difficult to assign all known 
 languages to one or other of these groups, the more so 
 as they are not mutually exclusive. A language may be 
 both agglutinative and inflective, or inflective and poly- 
 synthetic, or even polysynthetic and isolating, as we 
 shall see a little later on. 
 
 There is a fourth reason why the classification of lan- 
 guages has generally proved a fruitless undertaking. 
 It is probably the most powerful deterrent of all 
 to clear thinking. This is the evolutionary prejudice 
 which instilled itself into the social sciences towards 
 the middle of the last century and which is only now 
 beginning to abate its tyrannical hold on our mind. In- 
 termingled with this scientific prejudice and largely an- 
 ticipating it was another, a more human one. The vast 
 majority of linguistic theorists themselves spoke lan- 
 guages of a certain type, of which the most fully de- 
 veloped varieties were the Latin and Greek that they 
 
 1 If possible, a triune formula.
 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 131 
 
 had learned in their childhood. It was not difficult 
 for them to be persuaded that these familiar languages 
 represented the "highest" development that speech 
 had yet attained and that all other types were 
 but steps on the way to this beloved "inflective" type. 
 Whatever conformed to the pattern of Sanskrit and 
 Greek and Latin and German was accepted as expressive 
 of the "highest," whatever departed from it was 
 frowned upon as a shortcoming or was at best an inter- 
 esting aberration.- Now any classification that starts 
 with preconceived values or that works up to senti- 
 mental satisfactions is self-condemned as unscientific. 
 A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type 
 of morphology as though it were necessarily the high- 
 water mark of linguistic development is like the zoolo- 
 gist that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy to 
 evolve the race-horse or the Jersey cow. Language in 
 its fundamental forms is the symbolic expression of 
 human intuitions. These may shape themselves in a 
 hundred ways, regardless of the material advancement 
 or backwardness of the people that handle the forms, of 
 which, it need hardly be said, they are in the main un- 
 conscious. If, therefore, we wish to understand lan- 
 guage in its true inwardness we must disabuse our 
 minds of preferred "values"^ and accustom ourselves 
 
 2 One celebrated American writer on culture and language de- 
 livered himself of the dictum that, estimable as the speakers of 
 agglutinative languages might be, it was nevertheless a crime for 
 an inflecting woman to marry an agglutinating man. Tremendous 
 spiritual values were evidently at stake. Champions of the "inflec- 
 tive" languages are wont to glory in the very irrationalities of 
 Latin and Greek, except when it suits them to emphasize thoir pro- 
 foundly "logical" character. Yet the sober logic of Turkish or 
 Chinese leaves them cold. The glorious irrationalities and formal 
 complexities of many "savaee" languages they have no stomach 
 for. Sentimentalists are difficult people. 
 
 3 1 have in mind valuations of form as such. Whether or not
 
 132 LANGUAGE 
 
 to look upon English and Hottentot with the same cool, 
 yet interested, detachment. 
 
 We come back to our first difficulty. What point of 
 view shall we adopt for our classification? After all 
 that we have said about grammatical form in the pre- 
 ceding chapter, it is clear that we cannot now make 
 the distinction between form languages and formless 
 languages that used to appeal to some of the older 
 writers. Every language can and must express the fun- 
 damental syntactic relations even though there is not 
 a single affix to be found in its vocabulary. We con- 
 clude that every language is a form language. Aside 
 from the expression of pure relation a language may, of 
 course, be ' ' formless ' ' — formless, that is, in the mechani- 
 cal and rather superficial sense that it is not encumbered 
 by the use of non-radical elements. The attempt has 
 sometimes been made to formulate a distinction on the 
 basis of ''inner form." Chinese, for instance, has no 
 formal elements pure and simple, no "outer form," but 
 it evidences a keen sense of relations, of the difference 
 between subject and object, attribute and predicate, and 
 so on. In other words, it has an "inner form" in the 
 same sense in which Latin possesses it, though it is out- 
 wardly "formless" where Latin is outwardly "formal." 
 On the other hand, there are supposed to be languages * 
 which have no true grasp of the fundamental relations 
 but content themselves with the more or less minute 
 
 a language has a large and useful vocabulary is another matter. 
 The actual size of a vocabulary at a given time is not a thing 
 of real interest to the linguist, as all languages have the resources 
 at their disposal for the creation of new words, should need for 
 them arise. Furthermore, we are not in the least concerned with 
 whether or not a language is of great practical value or is the 
 medium of a great culture. All these considerations, important 
 from other standpoints, have nothing to do with form value. 
 4 E.g., Malay, Polynesian.
 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 133 
 
 expression of material ideas, sometimes with an exu- 
 berant display of "outer form," leaving the pure rela- 
 tions to be merely inferred from the context. I am 
 strongly inclined to believe that this supposed "inner 
 formlessness" of certain languages is an illusion. It 
 may well be that in these languages the relations are 
 not expressed in as immaterial a way as in Chinese or 
 even as in Latin,^ or that the principle of order is sub- 
 ject to greater fluctuations than in Chinese, or that a 
 tendency to complex derivations relieves the language 
 of the necessity of expressing certain relations as ex- 
 plicitly as a more analytic language would have them 
 expressed. ** All this does not mean that the languages 
 in question have not a true feeling for the fundamental 
 relations. We shall therefore not be able to use the no- 
 tion of ' ' inner formlessness, ' ' except in the greatly modi- 
 fied sense that syntactic relations may be fused with 
 notions of another order. To this criterion of classi- 
 fication we shall have to return a little later. 
 
 More justifiable would be a classification according 
 to the formal processes "^ most typically developed in the 
 language. Those languages that always identify the 
 word with the radical element would be set off as an 
 "isolating" group against such as either affix modifying 
 elements (affixing languages) or possess the power to 
 change the significance of the radical element by in- 
 ternal changes (reduplication; vocalic and consonantal 
 change; changes in quantity, stress, and pitch). The 
 latter type might be not inaptly termed "symbolic" 
 
 5 Where, as we have seen, the syntactic relations are by no 
 means free from an alloy of the concrete. 
 
 6 Very much as an English cod-liver oil dodges to some extent 
 the task of explicitly defining the relations of the three nouns. 
 Contrast French huile do foie de morue "oil of liver of cod." 
 
 7 See Chapter IV.
 
 134 LANGUAGE 
 
 languages.^ The affixing languages would naturally sub- 
 divide themselves into such as are prevailingly prefix- 
 ing, like Bantu or Tlingit, and such as are mainly or 
 entirely suffixing, like Eskimo or Algonkin or Latin. 
 There are two serious difficulties with this fourfold clas- 
 sification (isolating, prefixing, suffixing, symbolic). In 
 the first place, most languages fall into more than one 
 of these groups. The Semitic languages, for instance, 
 are prefixing, suffixing, and symbolic at one and the 
 same time. In the second place, the classification in its 
 bare form is superficial. It would throw together lan- 
 guages that differ utterly in spirit merely because of 
 a certain external formal resemblance. There is clearly 
 a world of difference between a prefixing language like 
 Cambodgian, which limits itself, so far as its prefixes 
 (and infixes) are concerned, to the expression of deriva- 
 tional concepts, and the Bantu languages, in which the 
 prefixed elements have a far-reaching significance as 
 symbols of syntactic relations. The classification has 
 much greater value if it is taken to refer to the expres- 
 sion of relational concepts ^ alone. In this modified form 
 we shall return to it as a subsidiary criterion. We shall 
 find that the terms "isolating," "affixing," and "sym- 
 bolic" have a real value. But instead of distinguishing 
 between prefixing and suffixing languages, we shall find 
 that it is of superior interest to make another distinc- 
 tion, one that is based on the relative firmness with 
 
 8 Tliere is probably a real psychological connection between sym- 
 bolism and such significant alternations as drink, drank, drunk 
 or Chinese mai (with rising tone) "to buy" and mai (with fall- 
 ing tone) "to sell." The unconscious tendency toward symbolism 
 is justly emphasized by recent psychological literature. Personally 
 T feel that the passage from sinrj to sang has very much the same 
 feeling as the alternation of symbolic colors — e.g., green for safe, 
 red for danger. But we probably diiTer greatly as to the intensity 
 with which we feel symbolism in linguistic changes of this ty.oe. 
 
 8 Pure or "concrete relational." See Chapter V.
 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 135 
 
 which the affixed elements are united with the core of 
 the word." 
 
 There is another very useful set of distinctions that 
 can be made, but these too must not be applied exclu- 
 sively, or our classification will again be superficial. I 
 refer to the notions of "analytic," "synthetic," and 
 "polysynthetic." The terms explain themselves. An 
 analytic language is one that either does not combine 
 concepts into single words at all (Chinese) or does so 
 economically (English, French). In an analytic lan- 
 guage the sentence is always of prime importance, the 
 word is of minor interest. In a synthetic language 
 (Latin, Arabic, Finnish) the concepts cluster more 
 thickly, the words are more richly chambered, but there 
 is a tendency, on the whole, to keep the range of con- 
 crete significance in the single word down to a mod- 
 erate compass. A polysynthetic language, as its name 
 implies, is more than ordinarily synthetic. The elabora- 
 tion of the word is extreme. Concepts which we should 
 never dream of treating in a subordinate fashion are 
 
 10 In spite of my reluctance to emphasize the difference between 
 a prefixing and a suffixing language, I feel that there is more 
 involved in this difference tlian linguists have generally recog- 
 nized. It seems to me that there is a rather important psycho- 
 logical distinction between a language that settles the formal 
 status of a radical clement before announcing it — and this, in 
 effect, is what such languages as Tlingit and Chinook and Bantu 
 are in the habit of doing — and one that begins with the concrete 
 nucleus of a word and defines the status of this nucleus by suc- 
 cessive limitations, each curtailing in some degree the generality 
 of all that precedes. The spirit of the former method has some- 
 thing diagrammatic or architectural about it, the latter is a 
 method of pruning afterthoughts. In the more highly wrought 
 prefixing languages the word is apt to affect us as a crystalliza- 
 tion of floating elements, the words of the typical suffixing lan- 
 guages (Turkish, Eskimo, Nootka) are "determinative" forma- 
 tions, each added element determining the form of the whole anew. 
 It is so difficult in practice to apply these elusive, yet impor- 
 tant, distinctions that an elementary study has no recourse but to 
 ignore them.
 
 136 LANGUAGE 
 
 symbolized by derivational affixes or ' ' symbolic ' ' changes 
 in the radical element, while the more abstract notions, 
 including the syntactic relations, may also be conveyed 
 by the word. A polysynthetic language illustrates no 
 principles that are not already exemplified in the more 
 familiar synthetic languages. It is related to them 
 very much as a synthetic language is related to our 
 own analytic English.^^ The three terms are purely 
 quantitative — and relative, that is, a language may be 
 "analytic" from one standpoint, "synthetic" from an- 
 other. I believe the terms are more useful in defining 
 certain drifts than as absolute counters. It is often 
 illuminating to point out that a language has been 
 becoming more and more analytic in the course of its 
 history or that it shows signs of having crystallized 
 from a simple analytic base into a highly synthetic 
 form.^^ 
 
 "We now come to the difference between an "inflec- 
 tive" and an "agglutinative" language. As I have al- 
 ready remarked, the distinction is a useful, even a neces- 
 sary, one, but it has been generally obscured by a 
 number of irrelevancies and by the unavailing effort to 
 make the terms cover all languages that are not, like 
 Chinese, of a definitely isolating cast. The meaning that 
 we had best assign to the term ' ' inflective ' ' can be gained 
 by considering very briefly what are some of the basic 
 features of Latin and Greek that have been looked upon 
 
 11 English, however, is only analytic in tendency. Relatively 
 to French, it is still fairly synthetic, at least in certain aspects. 
 
 12 The former process is demonstrable for English, French, Dan- 
 ish, Tibetan, Chinese, and a host of other languages. The latter 
 tendency may be proven, I believe, for a number of American 
 Indian languages, e.g., Chinook, Navaho. Underneath tlieir pres- 
 ent moderately polysynthetic form is discernible an analytic base 
 that in the one case may be roughly described as English-like, 
 in the other, Tibetan-like.
 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 137 
 
 as peculiar to the inflective languages. First of all, 
 they are synthetic rather than analytic. This does not 
 help us much. Relatively to many another language 
 that resembles them in broad structural respects, Latin 
 and Greek are not notably synthetic ; on the other hand, 
 their modern descendants, Italian and Modern G-reek, 
 while far more analytic ^^ than they, have not departed 
 so widely in structural outlines as to warrant their being 
 put in a distinct major group. An inflective language, 
 we must insist, may be analytic, synthetic, or polysyn- 
 thetic. 
 
 Latin and Greek are mainly affixmg in their method, 
 with the emphasis heavily on suffixing. The agglutina- 
 tive languages are just as typically affixing as they, some 
 among them favoring prefixes, others running to the use 
 of suffixes. Affixing alone does not define inflection. 
 Possibly everything depends on just what kind of affix- 
 ing we have to deal with. If we compare our English 
 words farmer and goodness with such words as height 
 and depth, we cannot fail to be struck by a notable dif- 
 ference in the affixing technique of the two sets. The 
 -er and -ness are affixed quite mechanically to radical 
 elements which are at the same time independent words 
 (farm, good). They are in no sense independently sig- 
 nificant elements, but they convey their meaning (agen- 
 tive, abstract quality) with unfailing directness. Their 
 use is simple and regular and we should have no diffi- 
 culty in appending them to any verb or to any adjec- 
 tive, however recent in origin. From a verb to camou- 
 flage we may form the noun camo^iflager "one who 
 camouflages," from an adjective jazzy proceeds with 
 
 13 This applies more particularly to the Romance group: Italian, 
 Spanish, Portuguese, French, Roumanian. Modern Greek is not 
 so clearly analytic.
 
 138 LANGUAGE 
 
 perfect ease the noun jazziness. It is different with 
 JieigJit and deptli. Functionally they are related to 
 JiigJi and deep precisely as is goodness to good, but the 
 degree of coalescence between radical element and affix 
 is greater. Radical element and affix, while measurably 
 distinct, cannot be torn apart quite so readily as could 
 the good and -ness of goodness. The 4 of height is not 
 the typical form of the affix (compare strength, length, 
 filth, breadth, youth), while dep- is not identical with 
 deep. We may designate the two types of affixing as 
 ''fusing" and "juxtaposing." The juxtaposing tech- 
 nique we may call an "agglutinative" one, if w^e like. 
 
 Is the fusing technique thereby set off as the essence 
 of inflection? I am afraid that we have not yet 
 reached our goal. If our language were crammed full 
 of coalescences of the type of depth, but if, on the other 
 hand, it used the plural independently of verb concord 
 (e.g., the hooks falls like the hook falls, or the hook fall 
 like the hooks fall), the personal endings independently 
 of tense (e.g., the hook fells like the hook falls, or the 
 hook fall like the hook fell), and the pronouns inde- 
 pendently of case (e.g., I see he like he sees me, or him 
 see the man like the man sees him), we should hesitate 
 to describe it as inflective. The mere fact of fusion 
 does not seem to satisfy us as a clear indication of the 
 inflective process. There are, indeed, a large number 
 of languages that fuse radical element and affix in as 
 complete and intricate a fashion as one could hope to 
 find anywhere without thereby giving signs of that par- 
 ticular kind of formalism that marks off' sucli languages 
 as Latin and Greek as inflective. 
 
 What is true of fusion is equally true of the "sym- 
 bolic" processes.^* There are linguists that speak of 
 
 14 See pages 133, 134.
 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 139 
 
 alternations like drink and drank as though they repre- 
 sented the high-water mark of inflection, a kind of spir- 
 itualized essence of pure inflective form. In such Greek 
 forms, nevertheless, as pcpom.pJi-a "1 have sent," as con- 
 trasted with penip-o ''I send," with its trebly symbolic 
 change of the radical element (reduplicating pe-, change 
 of e to 0, change of p to ph), it is rather the peculiar 
 alternation of the first person singular -a of the perfect 
 with the -0 of the present that gives them their inflective 
 cast. Nothing could be more erroneous than to imagine 
 that symbolic changes of the radical element, even for 
 the expression of such abstract concepts as those of num- 
 ber and tense, is always associated with the syntactic 
 peculiarities of an inflective language. If by an "ag- 
 glutinative" language we mean one that affixes accord- 
 ing to the juxtaposing technique, then we can only say 
 that there are hundreds of fusing and symbolic lan- 
 guages — non-agglutinative by definition — that are, for 
 all that, quite alien in spirit to the inflective type of 
 Latin and Greek. "We can call such languages inflective, 
 if we like, but we must then be prepared to revise radi- 
 cally our notion of inflective form. 
 
 It is necessary to understand that fusion of the radi- 
 cal element and the affix may be taken in a broader psy- 
 chological sense than I have yet indicated. If every 
 noun plural in English were of the type of hook: hooks, 
 if there were not such conflicting patterns as deer: deer, 
 ox: oxen, goose: geese to complicate the general form 
 picture of plurality, there is little doubt that the fusion 
 of the elements hook and -s into the unified word hooks 
 would be felt as a little less complete than it actually is. 
 One reasons, or feels, unconsciously about the matter 
 somewhat as follows: — If the form pattern represented 
 by the word hooks is identical, as far as use is concerned,
 
 140 LANGUAGE 
 
 with that of the word oxen, the pluralizing elements -s 
 and -en cannot have quite so definite, quite so autono- 
 mous, a value as we might at first be inclined to sup- 
 pose. They are plural elements only in so far as plural- 
 ity is predicated of certain selected concepts. The words 
 hooks and oxen are therefore a little other than mechani- 
 cal combinations of the symbol of a thing {hook, ox) and 
 a clear symbol of plurality. There is a slight psycho- 
 logical uncertainty or haze about the juncture in hooks 
 and ox-en. A little of the force of -s and -en is anticipated 
 by, or appropriated by, the words hook and ox them- 
 selves, just as the conceptual force of -tli in dep-tli is 
 appreciably weaker than that of -ness in good-ness in 
 spite of the functional parallelism between depth and 
 goodness. Where there is uncertainty about the junc- 
 ture, where the affixed element cannot rightly claim to 
 possess its full share of significance, the unity of the 
 complete word is more strongly emphasized. The mind 
 must rest on something. If it cannot linger on the 
 constituent elements, it hastens all the more eagerly 
 to the acceptance of the word as a whole. A word like 
 goodness illustrates ''agglutination," hooks "regular 
 fusion," depth "irregular fusion," geese "symbolic fu- 
 sion" or "symbolism." ^^ 
 
 The psychological distinctness of the affixed elements 
 in an agglutinative term may be even more marked than 
 in the -ness of goodness. To be strictly accurate, the 
 significance of the -ness is not quite as inherently deter- 
 
 15 The following formulie may prove useful to those that are 
 mathcmatipally inclined. Agglutination: c = a-j-t); regular fu- 
 sion: c:=a-|-(b — x)-f-x; irregular fusion: cr=(a — x)-}- 
 (b — y) -)- (x-j-y); symbolism :c=:(a — x)-{-x. I do not wish 
 to imply that there is any mystic value in the process of fusion. 
 It is quite likely to have dev(>loped as a pxirely mechanical prod- 
 uct of phonetic forces that brought about irregularities of various 
 aorts.
 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 141 
 
 mined, as autonomous, as it might be. It is at the mercy 
 of the preceding radical element to this extent, that it 
 requires to be preceded by a particular type of such 
 element, an adjective. Its own power is thus, in a man- 
 ner, checked in advance. The fusion here, however, is 
 so vague and elementary, so much a matter of course in 
 the great majority of all cases of affixing, that it is 
 natural to overlook its reality and to emphasize rather 
 the juxtaposing or agglutinative nature of the affixing 
 process. If the -ness could be affixed as an abstractive 
 element to each and every type of radical element, if 
 we could say figJitness ("the act or quality of fighting") 
 or waterness ("the quality or state of water") or away- 
 ness ("the state of being away") as we can say goodness 
 ("the state of being good"), we should have moved ap- 
 preciably nearer the agglutinative pole, A language 
 that runs to synthesis of this loose-jointed sort may be 
 looked upon as an example of the ideal agglutinative 
 type, particularly if the concepts expressed by the agglu- 
 tinated elements are relational or, at the least, belong to 
 the abstracter class of derivational ideas. 
 
 Instructive forms may be cited from Nootka. We 
 shall return to our ' ' fire in the house. ' ' ^® The Nootka 
 word inikiv-iJil "fire in the house" is not as definitely 
 formalized a word as its translation suggests. The 
 radical element inikw- "fire" is really as much of a 
 verbal as of a nominal term ; it may be rendered now 
 by "fire," now by "burn," according to the syntactic 
 exigencies of the sentence. The derivational element -ihl 
 "in the house" does not mitigate this vagueness or gen- 
 erality; inikiv-ihl is still "fire in the house" or "burn 
 in the house." It may be definitely nominalized or ver- 
 balized by the affixing of elements that are exclusively 
 
 16 See page 110.
 
 142 LANGUAGE 
 
 nominal or verbal in force. For example, inikw-ihl-'i, 
 with its suffixed article, is a clear-cut nominal form: 
 "the burning in the house, the fire in the house"; 
 inikw-ihl-nm, with its indicative suffix, is just as clearly 
 verbal : " it burns in the house. ' ' How weak must be the 
 degree of fusion between "fire in the house" and the 
 nominalizing or verbalizing suffix is apparent from the 
 fact that the formally indifferent inikwilil is not an ab- 
 straction gained by analysis but a full-fledged word, 
 ready for use in the sentence. The nominalizing -'i and 
 the indicative -ma are not fused form-affijxes, they are 
 simply additions of formal import. But we can con- 
 tinue to hold the verbal or nominal nature of inikwihl 
 in abeyance long before we reach the - 'i or -m<i. We can 
 pluralize it: inikw-iJil-'miyiih; it is still either "fires in 
 the house" or "burn plurally in the house." We can 
 diminutivize this plural: inikw-ihl-'minili-'is, "little 
 fires in the house " or " burn plurally and slightly in the 
 house." What if we add the preterit tense suffix -itf 
 Is not hiikw-ilil-'miniJi-'is-it necessarily a verb: "several 
 small fires were burning in the house"? It is not. It 
 may still be nominalized ; imkwiM'minili'isit-'i means 
 "the former small fires in the house, the little fires that 
 were once burning in the house." It is not an un- 
 ambiguous verb until it is given a form that excludes 
 every other possibility, as in the indicative inikwiJil- 
 minih'isit-a "several small fires were burning in the 
 house." We recognize at once that the elements -ilil, 
 -'minih,-'is, and -it, quite aside from the relatively con- 
 crete or abstract nature of their content and aside, fur- 
 ther, from the degree of their outer (phonetic) cohe- 
 sion with the elements that precede them, have a psycho- 
 logical independence that our own affixes never have. 
 They are typically agglutinated elements, though they
 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 143 
 
 have no greater external independence, are no more 
 capable of living apart from the radical element to which 
 they are suffixed, than the -ness and goodness or the -s 
 of books. It does not follow that an agglutinative lan- 
 guage may not make use of the principle of fusion, both 
 external and psychological, or even of symbolism to a 
 considerable extent. It is a question of tendency. Is 
 the formative slant clearly towards the agglutinative 
 method? Then the language is "agglutinative." As 
 such, it may be prefixing or suffixing, analytic, synthetic, 
 or polysynthetic. 
 
 To return to inflection. An inflective language like 
 Latin or Greek uses the method of fusion, and this 
 fusion has an inner psychological as well as an outer 
 phonetic meaning. But it is not enough that the fusion 
 operate merely in the sphere of derivational concepts 
 (group 11),^^ it must involve the syntactic relations, 
 which may either be expressed in unalloyed form (group 
 rV) or, as in Latin and Greek, as "concrete relational 
 concepts" (group III).^® As far as Latin and Greek 
 
 17 See Chapter V. 
 
 IS If we deny the application of the term "inflective" to fusing 
 languages that express the syntactic relations in pure form, that 
 is, witliout the admixture of such concepts as number, gender, and 
 tense, merely because such admixture is familiar to us in Latin 
 and Greek, we make of "inflection" an even more arbitrary con- 
 cept than it need be. At the same time it is trvie that the method 
 of fusion itself tends to break down the wall between our concep- 
 tual groups II and IV, to create group III. Yet the possibility 
 of such "inflective" langviages should not be denied. In modern 
 Tibetan, for Instance, in which concepts of group II are but 
 weakly expressed, if at all, and in which the relational concepts 
 (e.g., the genitive, the agentive or instrumental) are expressed 
 without alloy of the material, we get many interesting examples 
 of fusion, even of symbolism. Mi di, e.g., "man this, the man" 
 is an absolutive form which may be used as the subject of an 
 intransitive verb. Wlien the verb is transitive (really passive), 
 the (logical) subject has to take the agentive form, ^fi di then 
 becomes mi di "by the man," the vowel of the demonstrative pro- 
 noun (or article) being merely lengthened. (There is orobably
 
 144 LANGUAGE 
 
 are concerned, their inflection consists essentially of the 
 fusing of elements that express logically impure rela- 
 tional concepts with radical elements and with elements 
 expressing derivational concepts. Both fusion as a gen- 
 eral method and the expression of relational concepts 
 in the w^ord are necessary to the notion of "inflection." 
 But to have thus defined inflection is to doubt the 
 value of the term as descriptive of a major class. Why 
 emphasize both a technique and a particular content at 
 one and the same time? Surely we should be clear 
 in our minds as to whether we set more store by one 
 or the other. ' ' Fusional ' ' and ' ' symbolic ' ' contrast with 
 "agglutinative," which is not on a par with "inflective" 
 at all. What are we to do with the fusional and sym- 
 bolic languages that do not express relational concepts 
 in the word but leave them to the sentence? And are 
 we not to distinguish between agglutinative languages 
 that express these same concepts in the word — in so far 
 inflective-like — and those that do not? We dismissed 
 the scale: analytic, synthetic, polysynthetic, as too 
 merely quantitative for our purpose. Isolating, afflx- 
 ing, symbolic — this also seemed insufflcient for the reason 
 that it laid too much stress on technical externals. Iso- 
 lating, agglutinative, fusional, and symbolic is a pre- 
 ferable scheme, but still skirts the external. We shall 
 do best, it seems to me, to hold to "inflective" as a val- 
 uable suggestion for a broader and more consistently de- 
 veloped scheme, as a hint for a classification based on 
 the nature of the concepts expressed by the language. 
 
 also a change in the tone of the syllable.) This, of course, is of 
 the very essence of inflection. It is an amusing commentary on 
 the insufficiency of our current linguistic classification, which 
 considers "inflective" and "isolating" as worlds asunder, that 
 modern Tibetan may be not inaptly described as an isolating lan- 
 guage, aside from such examples of fusion and symbolism as the 
 foregoing.
 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 145 
 
 The other two classifications, the first based on degree 
 of synthesis, the second on degree of fusion, may be re- 
 tained as intercrossing schemes that give us the oppor- 
 tunity to subdivide our main conceptual types. 
 
 It is well to recall that all languages must needs ex- 
 press radical concepts (group I) and relational ideas 
 (group IV). Of the two other large groups of con- 
 cepts — derivational (group II) and mixed relational 
 (group III) — both may be absent, both present, or only 
 one present. This gives us at once a simple, incisive, 
 and absolutely inclusive method of classifying all known 
 languages. They are : 
 
 A. Such as express only concepts of groups I and 
 IV; in other words, languages that keep the syntactic 
 relations pure and that do not possess the power to 
 modify the significance of their radical elements by 
 means of affixes or internal changes.^'' We may call 
 these Pure-relational non-deriving languages or, more 
 tersely. Simple Pure-relational languages. These are 
 the languages that cut most to the bone of linguistic 
 expression. 
 
 B. Such as express concepts of groups I, II, and IV; 
 in other words, languages that keep the syntactic rela- 
 tions pure and that also possess the power to modify 
 the significance of their radical elements by means of 
 affixes or internal changes. These are the Pure-rela- 
 tional deriving languages or Complex Pure-relational 
 languages. 
 
 19 1 am eliminating entirely the possibility of compounding 
 two or more radical elements into single words or word-like 
 phrases (see pages 67-70). To expressly consider compounding in 
 the present survey of types would be to complicate our problem 
 unduly. Most languages that possess no derivational affixes of 
 any sort may nevertheless freely compound radical elements (in- 
 dependent words ) . Such compounds often have a fixity that sim- 
 ulates the iinity of single words.
 
 146 LANGUAGE 
 
 C. Srch as express concepts of groups I and III ; ^° 
 in other words, languages in which the syntactic rela- 
 tions are expressed in necessary connection with con- 
 cepts that are not utterly devoid of concrete significance 
 but that do not, apart from such mixture, possess the 
 power to modify the significance of their radical elements 
 by means of affixes or internal changes.-^ These are the 
 Mixed-relational non-deriving languages or Simple 
 Mixed-relational languages. 
 
 D. Such as express concepts of groups I, II, and III ; 
 in other words, languages in which the syntactic rela- 
 tions are expressed in mixed form, as in C, and that 
 also possess the power to modify the significance of their 
 radical elements by means of affixes or internal changes. 
 These are the Mixed-relational deriving languages or 
 Complex Mixed-relational languages. Here belong the 
 '^ inflective" languages that we are most familiar with 
 as well as a great many "agglutinative" languages, some 
 "polysynthetic," others merely synthetic. 
 
 This conceptual classification of languages, I must re- 
 peat, does not attempt to take account of the technical 
 externals of language. It answers, in effect, two funda- 
 
 20 We may assume that in these languages and in those of 
 type ]) all or most of the relational concepts are expressed in 
 "mixed" form, that such a concept as that of subjectivity, for 
 instance, cannot be expressed without simultaneously involving 
 number or gender or that an active verb form must be possessed 
 of a definite tense. Hence groiip III will be iinderstood to include, 
 or ratlier absorb, group IV. Tlieoretically, of course, certain rela- 
 tional concepts may be expressed pure, others mixed, but in prac- 
 tice it will not be found easy to make tlie distinction. 
 
 21 The line between types C and D cannot be very sharply 
 drawn. It is a matter largely of degree. A language of mark- 
 edly mixed-relational type, but of little power of derivation pure 
 and simple, such as Bantu or French, may be conveniently put 
 into type C, even though it is not devoid of a number of deriva- 
 tional affixes. Roughly speaking, languages of type C may be 
 considered as highly analytic ("purified") forms of type D.
 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 14? 
 
 mental questions concerning the translation of concepts 
 into linguistic symbols. Does the language, in the first 
 place, keep its radical concepts pure or does it build up 
 its concrete ideas by an aggregation of inseparable ele- 
 ments (types A and C versus types B and D) ? And, 
 in the second place, does it keep the basic relational con- 
 cepts, such as are absolutely unavoidable in the ordering 
 of a proposition, free of an admixture of the concrete or 
 not (types A and B versus types C and D) ? The sec- 
 ond question, it seems to me, is the more fundamental of 
 the two. We can therefore simplify our classification 
 and present it in the following form : 
 
 I. Pure-relational Languages 
 II. Mixed-relational Languages 
 
 ^ A. Simple 
 
 I B. Complex 
 
 ( C. Simple 
 
 ] D. Complex 
 
 The classification is too sweeping and too broad for 
 an easy, descriptive survey of the many varieties of 
 human speech. It needs to be amplified. Each of the 
 types A, B, C, D may be subdivided into an agglutina- 
 tive, a fusional, and a symbolic sub-type, according to the 
 prevailing method of modification of the radical 
 element. In type A we distinguish in addition an 
 isolating sub-type, characterized by the absence of 
 all affixes and modifications of the radical element. In 
 the isolating languages the syntactic relations are ex- 
 pressed by the position of the words in the sentence. 
 This is also true of many languages of type B, the terms 
 "agglutinative," ''fusional." and ''symbolic" applying 
 in their case merely to the treatment of the derivational, 
 not the relational, concepts. Such languages could be
 
 148 LANGUAGE 
 
 termed "agglutinative-isolating," "fusional-isolating" 
 and ' ' symbolic-isolating. ' ' 
 
 This brings up the important general consideration 
 that the method of handling one group of concepts need 
 not in the least be identical with that used for another. 
 Compound terms could be used to indicate this differ- 
 ence, if desired, the first element of the compound re- 
 ferring to the treatment of the concepts of group II, 
 the second to that of the concepts of groups III and 
 IV. An "agglutinative" language would normally be 
 taken to mean one that agglutinates all of its affixed ele- 
 ments or that does so to a preponderating extent. In 
 an " agglutinative-f usional " language the derivational 
 elements are agglutinated, perhaps in the form of pre- 
 fixes, while the relational elements (pure or mixed) are 
 fused with the radical element, possibly as another set 
 of prefixes following the first set or in the form of suf- 
 fixes or as part prefixes and part suffixes. By a ''fu- 
 sional-agglutinative" language we would understand one 
 that fuses its derivational elements but allows a greater 
 independence to those that indicate relations. All these 
 and similar distinctions are not merely theoretical pos- 
 sibilities, they can be abundantly illustrated from the 
 descriptive facts of linguistic morphology. Further, 
 should it prove desirable to insist on the degree of elabo- 
 ration of the word, the terms "analytic," "synthetic," 
 and *'polysynthetic" can be added as descriptive terms. 
 It goes without saying that languages of type A are nec- 
 essarily analytic and that languages of type C also are 
 prevailingly analytic and are not likely to develop be- 
 yond the synthetic stage. 
 
 But we must not make too much of terminology. 
 Much depends on the relative emphasis laid on this or 
 that feature or point of view. The method of classifying
 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 149 
 
 languages here developed has this great advantage, that 
 it can be refined or simplified according to the needs 
 of a particular discussion. The degree of synthesis may 
 be entirely ignored; "fusion" and "symbolism" may 
 often be combined with advantage under the head of 
 "fusion"; even the difference between agglutination 
 and fusion may, if desired, be set aside as either too 
 difficult to draw or as irrelevant to the issue. Languages, 
 after all, are exceedingly complex historical structures. 
 It is of less importance to put each language in a neat 
 pigeon-hole than to have evolved a flexible method which 
 enables us to place it, from two or three independent 
 standpoints, relatively to another language. All this is 
 not to deny that certain linguistic types are more stable 
 and frequently represented than others that are just as 
 possible from a theoretical standpoint. But we are too 
 ill-informed as yet of the structural spirit of great num- 
 bers of languages to have the right to frame a classifica- 
 tion that is other than flexible and experimental. 
 
 The reader will gain a somewhat livelier idea of the 
 possibilities of linguistic morphology by glancing down 
 the subjoined analytical table of selected types. The 
 columns II, III, IV refer to the groups of concepts so 
 numbered in the preceding chapter. The letters a, h, c, 
 d refer respectively to the processes of isolation (posi- 
 tion in the sentence), agglutination, fusion, and sym- 
 bolism. Where more than one technique is employed, 
 they are put in the order of their importance.^- 
 
 22 In defining the type to which a language belongs one must 
 be careful not to be misled by structural features which are 
 mere survivals of an older stage, which have no productive 
 life and do not enter into the unconscious patterning of the 
 language. All languages are littered with such petrified bodies. 
 The English -ster of spinster and Wehster is an old agentive 
 suflSx, but, as far as the feeling of the present English-speaking 
 generation is concerned, it cannot be said to really exist at
 
 150 
 
 LANGUAGE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^^^ 
 
 
 ^__ 
 
 <i) 
 
 a o 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 
 a 
 
 o 
 
 "3 
 
 a 
 
 ^4> 
 
 5 
 
 < 1 
 a> O 
 
 (V 
 
 a a 
 3 s: 
 
 H 
 a 
 
 o 
 
 
 a 
 a ,2 
 .5 "3) 
 "=^ _. '= 
 
 o j2 =^ 
 
 
 a 
 
 "3 
 
 — 2. 
 
 
 
 u a 
 
 s 
 
 
 ti S O 
 
 H 
 
 H 
 
 O M 
 
 a; !» 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 t> 
 
 
 _o 
 
 0) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 "9 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 .a 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 a> 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 s 
 
 
 
 
 Xi 
 
 o 
 
 g 
 
 o >» o >ia 
 
 o 
 
 « 
 
 o o 
 
 o 
 
 
 ^ a .^ 
 
 
 a 
 
 
 ~ o 
 
 
 
 
 
 B ^ B 
 
 0) 
 
 >> 
 
 tSa £a^ 
 
 0) -*-» 
 
 Si 
 
 i? ^ 
 
 Oi 
 
 
 ■a 
 
 XJ >> 
 
 
 
 
 "5 ^ rt 
 
 
 >. 
 
 
 S5 
 
 "3 "5 
 
 dj 
 
 
 a 
 
 aw a--D. 
 
 a S 
 
 
 a a 
 
 a 
 
 
 a o 
 
 >3 
 
 o 
 
 >i >i 
 
 >> a 
 
 
 < < 
 
 <^ 
 
 
 < 04 < 
 
 M 
 
 04 
 
 SQ &Q 
 
 cc ■< 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 <D 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 
 to 
 
 > 
 
 i i 
 
 ? 
 
 a> 
 
 i: i 
 
 
 
 
 
 a^~. 
 
 13 u'-" bJO 
 
 u'^ 
 
 >o 
 
 . ^ O OS c3 
 
 
 .^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 •^ C3 
 
 rt S 03 S , 
 
 a rt 
 
 rt o 
 
 
 s 
 
 to tt^ 
 
 a H^ 
 
 — 3^ 
 
 t: a 
 — .2 
 
 93? « a 
 -o-o2 
 M "^ bij a 
 
 - a 
 
 *-5 
 
 r a 
 
 -■:5t;-='-aa 
 
 o.2Ss;-fl5§ 
 
 *^ a "^ *^ ib^ 
 
 "3 -^ 
 a o 
 o ^ 
 
 m a 
 
 a t*4 
 
 
 
 ^1^ 
 
 
 
 a;>. 
 be 
 
 
 w to 
 
 -!3 
 
 
 <1 <J fc. 
 
 <J 
 
 <J 
 
 U* < 
 
 fe 02 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 ■«'« 
 
 
 eS .3"cj 
 
 j= 
 
 XI 
 
 X! 
 
 « ":oi 
 
 >--( 
 
 es 
 
 d 
 
 
 03^ 
 
 
 
 cd 
 
 •o 
 
 ■^1 
 
 I 1 
 
 1 
 
 
 1 1 I 
 
 1 
 
 _ 
 
 t 1 
 
 _ 
 
 ►^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 XI 
 
 
 1 s 
 
 ■-s 
 
 1 1 
 
 1 
 
 
 1 1 1 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 I 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■a 
 
 
 >« 
 
 -^3 ^ 
 
 <y 
 
 •^H 
 
 1 "O 
 
 2' 
 
 
 Z, £i V 
 
 XJ 
 
 , 
 
 t> 
 
 1 -^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 X! 
 
 v^^ 
 
 -o 
 
 
 
 
 
 XJ 
 
 
 
 
 
 to 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 , 
 
 
 
 
 
 5 
 
 
 
 
 0) 
 
 
 
 
 
 c^ 
 
 3cr 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 '^^ 
 
 Qj ea 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 a 
 
 "a 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 u 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 C,aj 
 
 
 
 ftrt 
 
 
 
 
 
 5 
 
 a-3 
 
 
 
 a«3 
 
 
 
 
 
 ■s 
 
 s'' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 5 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 t^ 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 
 
 151 
 
 
 ■5^ to 
 
 a .^ 
 
 O S-r 
 
 a b 
 
 MS 
 
 a 03 
 
 Scs -S 
 
 aa 
 
 4) -M—J-l 
 
 M <1 
 
 <! fe 
 
 So 
 m 
 
 "U^-.O) 
 
 
 J3 >,ja 
 
 
 
 
 a-o a 
 
 
 to ca CO 
 t»-.n fc% 
 
 >-.j3 
 
 «C1 
 
 
 
 a >> 
 
 (In Ch 
 
 Km 
 
 1 tljO 
 
 "•C.2 
 
 3 CS 
 tC o 
 
 — .— . '^ 
 
 ;^ fa 
 
 pa a?, 
 
 to to^S 
 
 T ti g O 
 
 1 I 
 
 TC^ 'OT3 
 
 ag 
 
 "O 
 
 ^ 
 
 a 
 
 oj 
 
 D 
 
 
 
 
 
 0) 
 
 ^ 
 
 H 
 
 oj 
 
 
 
 
 
 u 
 
 «p 
 
 4) 
 
 i> 
 
 Ul 
 
 ca 
 
 3 
 
 d 
 
 ft 
 
 — 
 
 M 
 
 
 
 
 
 ts ft 
 
 ~ 0) 
 
 • -I-
 
 152 LANGUAGE 
 
 I need hardly point out that these examples are far 
 from exhausting the possibilities of linguistic structure. 
 Nor that the fact that two languages are similarly classi- 
 fied does not necessarily mean that they present a great 
 similarity on the surface. We are here concerned with 
 the most fundamental and generalized features of the 
 spirit, the technique, and the degree of elaboration of 
 a given language. Nevertheless, in numerous instances 
 we may observe this highly suggestive and remarkable 
 fact, that languages that fall into the same class have 
 a way of paralleling each other in many details or in 
 structural features not envisaged by the scheme of clas- 
 sification. Thus, a most interesting parallel could be 
 drawn on structural lines between Takelma and Greek,^^ 
 languages that are as geographically remote from each 
 other and as unconnected in a historical sense as two 
 languages selected at random can well be. Their simi- 
 larity goes beyond the generalized facts registered in 
 the table. It would almost seem that linguistic features 
 that are easily thinkable apart from each other, that 
 seem to have no necessary connection in theory, have 
 nevertheless a tendency to cluster or to follow together 
 in the wake of some deep, controlling impulse to form 
 
 all; spinster and Webster have been completely disconnected 
 from the etymological group of spin and of weave ( web ) . Simi- 
 larly, there are hosts of related words in Chinese which differ 
 in the initial consonant, the vowel, the tone, or in the presence 
 or absence of a final consonant. Even where the Chinaman feels 
 the etymological relationship, as in certain cases he can hardly 
 help doing, he can assign no particular function to the phonetic 
 variation as such. Hence it forms no live feature of the language- 
 mechanism and must be ignored in defining the general form of 
 the language. The caution is all the more necessary, as it is 
 precisely the foreigner, who approaches a new language with a 
 certain prying inquisitiveness, that is most apt to see life in 
 vestigial features which the native is either completely unaware of 
 or feels merely as dead form. 
 
 23 Not Greek specifically, of course, but aa a typical representa- 
 tive of Indo-European.
 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 153 
 
 that dominates their drift. If, therefore, we can only 
 be sure of the intuitive similarity of two given lan- 
 guages, of their possession of the same submerged form- 
 feeling, we need not be too much surprised to find that 
 they seek and avoid certain linguistic developments in 
 common. We are at present very far from able to de- 
 fine just what these fundamental form intuitions are. 
 We can only feel them rather vaguely at best and must 
 content ourselves for the most part with noting their 
 symptoms. These symptoms are being garnered in our 
 descriptive and historical grammars of diverse lan- 
 guages. Some day, it may be, we shall be able to read 
 from them the great underlying ground-plans. 
 
 Such a purely technical classification of languages as 
 the current one into ''isolating," ''agglutinative," and 
 "inflective" (read "fusional") cannot claim to have 
 great value as an entering wedge into the discovery of 
 the intuitional forms of language. I do not know 
 whether the suggested classification into four conceptual 
 groups is likely to drive deeper or not. My own feel- 
 ing is that it does, but classifications, neat constructions 
 of the speculative mind, are slippery things. They have 
 to be tested at every possible opportunity before they 
 have the right to cry for acceptance. Meanwhile we 
 may take some encouragement from the application of 
 a rather curious, yet simple, historical test. Languages 
 are in constant process of change, but it is only reason- 
 able to suppose that they tend to preserve longest what 
 is most fundamental in their structure. Now if we take 
 great groups of genetically related languages,-* we find 
 that as we pass from one to another or trace the course 
 
 24 Such, in other words, as can be shown by documentary or 
 comparative evidence to have been derived from a common source. 
 See Chapter VII.
 
 154 LANGUAGE 
 
 of their development we frequently encounter a gradual 
 change of morphological type. This is not surprising, 
 for there is no reason why a language should remain per- 
 manently true to its original form. It is interesting, 
 however, to note that of the three intercrossing classifi- 
 cations represented in our table (conceptual type, tech- 
 nique, and degree of synthesis), it is the degree of syn- 
 thesis that seems to change most readily, that the tech- 
 nique is modifiable but far less readily so, and that the 
 conceptual type tends to persist the longest of all. 
 
 The illustrative material gathered in the table is far 
 too scanty to serve as a real basis of proof, but it is 
 highly suggestive as far as it goes. The only changes 
 of conceptual type within groups of related languages 
 that are to be gleaned from the table are of B to A 
 (Shilluk as contrasted with Ewe; -^ Classical Tibetan as 
 contrasted with Modern Tibetan and Chinese) and of 
 D to C (French as contrasted with Latin -*'). But types 
 A : B and C : D are respectively related to each other as 
 a simple and a complex form of a still more fundamental 
 type (pure-relational, mixed-relational). Of a passage 
 from a pure-relational to a mixed-relational type or vice 
 versa I can give no convincing examples. 
 
 The table shows clearly enough how little relative per- 
 manence there is in the technical features of language. 
 That highly synthetic languages (Latin; Sanskrit) have 
 frequently broken down into analytic forms (French; 
 
 25 These are far-eastorn and far-western representatives of the 
 "Soudan" group recently proposed by D. Westermann. The 
 genetic relationship between Ewe and Shilluk is exceedingly re- 
 mote at best. 
 
 26 This case is doubtful at that. I have put French in C rather 
 than in D with considerable misgivings. Everything depends on 
 how one evaluates elements like -al in national, -U in bont4, or 
 re- in retourner. They are common enough, but are they as alive, 
 as little petrified or bookish, as our English -ness and -ful and 
 un-?
 
 TYPES OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE 155 
 
 Bengali) or that agglutinative languages (Finnish) have 
 in many instances gradually taken on "inflective" fea- 
 tures are well-known facts, but the natural inference does 
 not seem to have been often drawn that possibly the 
 contrast between synthetic and analytic or agglutinative 
 and "inflective" (fusional) is not so fundamental after 
 all. Turning to the Indo-Chinese languages, we find that 
 Chinese is as near to being a perfectly isolating language 
 as any example we are likely to find, while Classical Ti- 
 betan has not only fusional but strong symbolic features 
 (e.g., g-tong-ba "to give," past h-tang, future g-tang, 
 imperative tliong) ; but both are pure-relational lan- 
 guages. Ewe is either isolating or only barely agglutina- 
 tive, while Shilluk, though soberly analytic, is one of the 
 most definitely symbolic languages I know ; both of these 
 Soudanese languages are pure-relational. The relation- 
 ship between Polynesian and Cambodgian is remote, 
 though practically certain; while the latter has more 
 markedly fusional features than the former,-^ both con- 
 form to the complex pure-relational type. Yana and 
 Salinan are superficially very dissimilar languages. 
 Yana is highly polysynthetic and quite typically agglu- 
 tinative, Salinan is no more synthetic than and as irreg- 
 ularly and compactly fusional ("inflective") as Latin; 
 both are pure-relational. Chinook and Takelma, re- 
 motely related languages of Oregon, have diverged very 
 far from each other, not only as regards technique and 
 synthesis in general but in almost all the details of 
 their structure ; both are complex mixed-relational lan- 
 guages, though in very different ways. Facts such as 
 these seem to lend color to the suspicion that in the 
 contrast of pure-relational and mixed-relational (or con- 
 crete-relational) we are confronted by something deeper, 
 27 In spite of its more isolating cast.
 
 156 LANGUAGE 
 
 more far-reaching, than the contrast of isolating, agglu- 
 tinative, and fusional.^* 
 
 28 In a book of this sort it is naturally impossible to give an 
 adequate idea of linguistic structure in ii,s varying forms. Only 
 a few schematic indications are possible. A separate volume 
 would be needed to breathe life into the sclieme. Such a volume 
 would point out the salient structural characteristics of a num- 
 ber of languages, so selected as to give the reader an insight into 
 the formal economy of strikingly divergent types.
 
 VII 
 
 LANGUAGE AS A HISTORICAL PEODUCT: 
 DRIFT 
 
 Every one knows that language is variable. Two in- 
 dividuals of the same generation and locality, speaking 
 precisely the same dialect and moving in the same social 
 circles, are never absolutely at one in their speech 
 habits. A minute investigation of the speech of each 
 individual would reveal countless differences of detail — 
 in choice of words, in sentence structure, in the relative 
 frequency with which particular forms or combinations 
 of words are used, in the pronunciation of particular 
 vowels and consonants and of combinations of vowels 
 and consonants, in all those features, such as speed, 
 stress, and tone, that give life to spoken language. In 
 a sense they speak slightly divergent dialects of the 
 same language rather than identically the same language. 
 
 There is an important difference, however, between 
 individual and dialectic variations. If we take two 
 closely related dialects, say English as spoken by the 
 "middle classes" of London and English as spoken by 
 the average New Yorker, we observe that, however much 
 the individual speakers in each city differ from 
 each other, the body of Londoners forms a compact, rela- 
 tively unified group in contrast to the body of New 
 Yorkers. The individual variations are swamped in or 
 absorbed by certain major agreements — say of pronun- 
 ciation and vocabulary — which stand out very strongly 
 
 157
 
 158 LANGUAGE 
 
 when the language of the group as a whole is contrasted 
 with that of the other group. This means that there is 
 something like an ideal linguistic entity dominating the 
 speech habits of the members of each group, that the 
 sense of almost unlimited freedom which each individual 
 feels in the use of his language is held in leash by a 
 tacitly directing norm. One individual plays on the 
 norm in a way peculiar to himself, the next individual 
 is nearer the dead average in that particular respect in 
 which the first speaker most characteristically departs 
 from it but in turn diverges from the average in a way 
 peculiar to himself, and so on. What keeps the indi- 
 vidual's variations from rising to dialectic importance 
 is not merely the fact that they are in any event of 
 small moment — there are well-marked dialectic variations 
 that are of no greater magnitude than individual varia- 
 tions within a dialect — it is chiefly that they are silently 
 "corrected" or canceled by the consensus of usage. If 
 all the speakers of a given dialect were arranged in 
 order in accordance with the degree of their conformity 
 to average usage, there is little doubt that they would 
 constitute a very finely intergrading series clustered 
 about a well-defined center or norm. The differences 
 between any two neighboring speakers of the series ^ 
 would be negligible for any but the most microscopic 
 linguistic research. The differences between the outer- 
 most members of the series are sure to be considerable, 
 in all likelihood considerable enough to measure up to 
 a true dialectic variation. What prevents us from say- 
 ing that these untypical individuals speak distinct dia- 
 lects is that their peculiarities, as a unified whole, are 
 
 1 In so far as tlioy do not fall out of the normal speech pjroup 
 by reason of a marked speech defect or because they are isolated 
 foreigners that have acQuired the language late in life.
 
 DRIFT 159 
 
 not referable to another norm than the norm of their 
 own series. 
 
 If the speech of any member of the series could actu- 
 ally be made to fit into another dialect series,^ we should 
 have no true barriers between dialects (and languages) 
 at all. We should merely have a continuous series of 
 individual variations extending over the whole range 
 of a historically unified linguistic area, and the cutting 
 up of this large area (in some cases embracing parts of 
 several continents) into distinct dialects and languages 
 would be an essentially arbitrary proceeding with no 
 warrant save that of practical convenience. But such a 
 conception of the nature of dialectic variation does not 
 correspond to the facts as we know them. Isolated in- 
 dividuals may be found who speak a compromise be- 
 tween two dialects of a language, and if their number 
 and importance increases they may even end by creat- 
 ing a new dialectic norm of their own, a dialect in which 
 the extreme peculiarities of the parent dialects are ironed 
 out. In course of time the compromise dialect may ab- 
 sorb the parents, though more frequently these will tend 
 to linger indefinitely as marginal forms of the enlarged 
 dialect area. But such phenemena — and they are com- 
 mon enough in the history of language — are evidently 
 quite secondary. They are closely linked with such so- 
 cial developments as the rise of nationality, the forma- 
 tion of literatures that aim to have more than a local 
 appeal, the movement of rural populations into the cities, 
 and all those other tendencies that break up the intense 
 localism that unsophisticated man has always found 
 natural. 
 
 2 Observe that we are speaking of an individual's speech as a 
 whole. It is not a question of isolating some particular pecu- 
 liarity of pronunciation or usage and noting its resemblance to 
 or identity with a feature in another dialect.
 
 160 LANGUAGE 
 
 The explanation of primary dialectic differences is 
 still to seek. It is evidently not enough to say that if 
 a dialect or language is spoken in two distinct localities 
 or by two distinct social strata it naturally takes on 
 distinctive forms, which in time come to be divergent 
 enough to deserve the name of dialects. This is cer- 
 tainly true as far as it goes. Dialects do belong, in the 
 first instance, to very definitely circumscribed social 
 groups, homogeneous enough to secure the common feel- 
 ing and purpose needed to create a norm. But the em- 
 barrassing question immediately arises, If all the indi- 
 vidual variations within a dialect are being constantly 
 leveled out to the dialectic norm, if there is no appre- 
 ciable tendency for the individual's peculiarities to 
 initiate a dialectic schism, why should we have dialectic 
 variations at all? Ought not the norm, wherever and 
 whenever threatened, automatically to reassert itself? 
 Ought not the individual variations of each locality, even 
 in the absence of intercourse between them, to cancel 
 out to the same accepted speech average? 
 
 If individual variations ''on a flat" were the only 
 kind of variability in language, I believe we should be 
 at a loss to explain why and how dialects arise, why 
 it is that a linguistic prototype gradually breaks up 
 into a number of mutually unintelligible languages. But 
 language is not merely something that is spread out 
 in space, as it were — a series of reflections in indi- 
 vidual minds of one and the same timeless picture. Lan- 
 guage moves down time in a current of its own making. 
 It has a drift. If there were no breaking up of a lan- 
 guage into dialects, if each language continued as a firm, 
 self-contained unity, it would still be constantly moving 
 away from any assignable norm, developing new fea- 
 tures unceasingly and gradually transforming itself into
 
 DRIFT 161 
 
 a lan^age so different from its starting point as to be 
 in effect a new language. Now dialects arise not be- 
 cause of the mere fact of individual variation but be- 
 cause two or more groups of individuals have become 
 sufficiently disconnected to drift apart, or independently, 
 instead of together. So long as they keep strictly to- 
 gether, no amount of individual variation would lead 
 to the formation of dialects. In practice, of course, no 
 language can be spread over a vast territory or even 
 over a considerable area without showing dialectic va- 
 riations, for it is impossible to keep a large population 
 from segregating itself into local groups, the language 
 of each of which tends to drift independently. Under 
 cultural conditions such as apparently prevail to-day, 
 conditions that fight localism at every turn, the tend- 
 ency to dialectic cleavage is being constantly counter- 
 acted and in part "corrected" by the uniformizing fac- 
 tors already referred to. Yet even in so young a coun- 
 try as America the dialectic differences are not incon- 
 siderable. 
 
 Under primitive conditions the political groups are 
 small, the tendency to localism exceedingly strong. It 
 is natural, therefore, that the languages of primitive 
 folk or of non-urban populations in general are differ- 
 entiated into a great number of dialects. There are 
 parts of the globe where almost every village has its 
 own dialect. The life of the geographically limited 
 community is narrow and intense ; its speech is corre- 
 spondingly peculiar to itself. It is exceedingly doubtful 
 if a language will ever be spoken over a wide area with- 
 out multiplying itself dialectically. No sooner are the 
 old dialects ironed out by compromises or ousted by the 
 spread and influence of the one dialect which is cul- 
 turally predominant when a new crop of dialects arises
 
 162 LANGUAGE 
 
 to "undo the leveling work of the past. This is pre- 
 cisely what happened in Greece, for instance. In 
 classical antiquity there were spoken a large number 
 of local dialects, several of which are represented in 
 the literature. As the cultural supremacy of Athens 
 grew, its dialect, the Attic, spread at the expense 
 of the rest, until, in the so-called Hellenistic period 
 following the Macedonian conquest, the Attic dia- 
 lect, in the vulgarized form known as the ' ' Koine, ' ' be- 
 came the standard speech of all Greece. But this lin- 
 guistic uniformity ^ did not long continue. During the 
 two millennia that separate the Greek of to-day from 
 its classical prototype the Koine gradually split up into 
 a number of dialects. Now Greece is as richly diversi- 
 fied in speech as in the time of Homer, though the pres- 
 ent local dialects, aside from those of Attica itself, are 
 not the lineal descendants of the old dialects of pre- 
 Alexandrian days.* The experience of Greece is not 
 exceptional. Old dialects are being continually wiped 
 out only to make room for new ones. Languages can 
 change at so many points of phonetics, morphology, and 
 vocabulary that it is not surprising that once the lin- 
 guistic community is broken it should slip off in differ- 
 ent directions. It would be too much to expect a locally 
 diversified language to develop along strictly parallel 
 lines. If once the speech of a locality has begun to drift 
 on its own account, it is practically certain to move fur- 
 ther and further away from its linguistic fellows. Fail- 
 
 3 It is doubtful if we have the right to speak of linguistic uni- 
 formity even during the predominance of the Koine. It is liardly 
 conceivable that when the various groups of non-Attic Greeks 
 took on the Koine they did not at once tinge it with dialectic 
 peculiarities induced by tlieir previous speech habits. 
 
 4 The Zaconic dialect of Lacedaemon is tlie sole exception. It 
 is not derived from the Koine, but stems directly from the Doric 
 dialect of Sparta.
 
 DRIFT 163 
 
 ing the retarding effect of dialectic interinfluences, 
 which I have already touched upon, a group of dialects 
 is bound to diverge on the whole, each from all of the 
 others. 
 
 In course of time each dialect itself splits up into sub- 
 dialects, which gradually take on the dignity of dialects 
 proper while the primary dialects develop into mutu- 
 ally unintelligible languages. And so the budding proc- 
 ess continues, until the divergences become so great that 
 none but a linguistic student, armed with his docu- 
 mentary evidence and with his comparative or recon- 
 structive method, would infer that the languages in 
 question were genealogically related, represented inde- 
 pendent lines of development, in other words, from 
 a remote and common starting point. Yet it is as 
 certain as any historical fact can be that languages so 
 little resembling each other as Modern Irish, English, 
 Italian, Greek, Russian, Armenian, Persian, and Ben- 
 gali are but end-points in the present of drifts that 
 converge to a meeting-point in the dim past. There is 
 naturally no reason to believe that this earliest "Indo- 
 European" (or "Aryan") prototype which we can in 
 part reconstruct, in part but dimly guess at, is itself 
 other than a single "dialect" of a group that has either 
 become largely extinct or is now further represented by 
 languages too divergent for us, with our limited means, 
 to recognize as clear kin.^ 
 
 All languages that are known to be genetically re- 
 lated, i.e., to be divergent forms of a single prototype, 
 may be considered as constituting a "linguistic stock." 
 There is nothing final about a linguistic stock. When 
 
 5 Though indications are not lacking of what these remoter kin 
 of the Indo-European languages may be. This is disputed ground, 
 however, and hardly fit subject for a purely general study of 
 speech.
 
 164 LANGUAGE 
 
 we set it up, we merely say, in effect, that thus far we 
 can go and no farther. At any point in the progress 
 of our researches an unexpected ray of light may reveal 
 the "stock" as but a "dialect" of a larger group. The 
 terms dialect, language, branch, stock — it goes without 
 saying — are purely relative terms. They are convertible 
 as our perspective widens or contracts.^ It would be 
 vain to speculate as to whether or not we shall ever be 
 able to demonstrate that all languages stem from a com- 
 mon source. Of late years linguists have been able to 
 make larger historical syntheses than were at one time 
 deemed feasible, just as students of culture have been 
 able to show historical connections between culture areas 
 or institutions that were at one time believed to be totally 
 isolated from each other. The human world is con- 
 tracting not only prospectively but to the backward- 
 probing eye of culture-history. Nevertheless we are as 
 yet far from able to reduce the riot of spoken 
 languages to a small number of ' ' stocks. ' ' "We must still 
 operate with a quite considerable number of these stocks. 
 Some of them, like Indo-European or Indo-Chinese, are 
 spoken over tremendous reaches; others, like Basque,'^ 
 have a curiously restricted range and are in all likeli- 
 hood but dwindling remnants of groups that were at 
 one time more widely distributed. As for the single 
 or multiple origin of speech, it is likely enough that lan- 
 guage as a human institution (or, if one prefers, as a 
 human "faculty") developed but once in the history 
 of the race, that all the complex history of language is 
 a unique cultural event. Such a theory constructed 
 "on general principles" is of no real interest, however, 
 
 6 "Dialect" in contrast to an accepted literary norm is a use of 
 the term that we are not considering. 
 
 7 Spoken in France and Spain in the region of the Pyrenees.
 
 DRIFT 165 
 
 to linguistic science. What lies beyond the demonstrable 
 must be left to the philosopher or the romancer. 
 
 We must return to the conception of "drift" in lan- 
 guage. If the historical changes that take place in a 
 language, if the vast accumulation of minute modifica- 
 tions which in time results in the complete remodeling of 
 the language, are not in essence identical with the indi- 
 vidual variations that we note on every hand about us, 
 if these variations are born only to die without a trace, 
 while the equally minute, or even minuter, changes that 
 make up the drift are forever imprinted on the history 
 of the language, are we not imputing to this history a 
 certain mystical quality? Are we not giving language 
 a power to change of its own accord over and above the 
 involuntary tendency of individuals to vary the norm? 
 And if this drift of language is not merely the familiar 
 set of individual variations seen in vertical perspective, 
 that is historically, instead of horizontally, that is in 
 daily experience, what is it? Language exists only 
 in so far as it is actually used — spoken and heard, writ- 
 ten and read. What significant changes take place in it 
 must exist, to begin with, as individual variations. This 
 is perfectly true, and yet it by no means follows that 
 the general drift of language can be understood * from 
 an exhaustive descriptive study of these variations alone. 
 They themselves are random phenomena,^ like the waves 
 of the sea, moving backward and forward in purposeless 
 flux. The linguistic drift has direction. In other words, 
 only those individual variations embody it or carry it 
 which move in a certain direction, just as only certain 
 wave movements in the bay outline the tide. The drift 
 
 8 Or rather apprehended, for we do not, in sober fact, entirely 
 understand it as yet. 
 
 S'Not ultimately random, of course, only relatively so.
 
 166 LANGUAGE 
 
 of a language is constituted by the unconscious selection 
 on the part of its speakers of those individual variations 
 that are cumulative in some special direction. This di- 
 rection may be inferred, in the main, from the past 
 history of the language. In the long run any new fea- 
 ture of the drift becomes part and parcel of the com- 
 mon, accepted speech, but for a long time it may exist 
 as a mere tendency in the speech of a few, perhaps of 
 a despised few. As we look about us and observe cur- 
 rent usage, it is not likely to occur to us that our lan- 
 guage has a "slope," that the changes of the next few 
 centuries are in a sense prefigured in certain obscure 
 tendencies of the present and that these changes, when 
 consummated, will be seen to be but continuations of 
 changes that have been already effected. We feel 
 rather that our language is practically a fixed system and 
 that what slight changes are destined to take place in 
 it are as likely to move in one direction as another. The 
 feeling is fallacious. Our very uncertainty as to the 
 impending details of change makes the eventual con- 
 sistency of their direction all the more impressive. 
 
 Sometimes we can feel where the drift is taking us 
 even while we struggle against it. Probably the ma- 
 jority of those who read these words feel that it is 
 quite "incorrect" to say "Who did you see?" We 
 readers of many books are still very careful to say 
 "Whom did you see?" but we feel a little uncomfort- 
 able (uncomfortably proud, it may be) in the process. 
 We are likely to avoid the locution altogether and to 
 say "Who was it you saw?" conserving literary tradi- 
 tion (the "whom") with the dignity of silence.^" The 
 
 10 In relative clauses too we tend to avoid tlie objective form of 
 who." Instead of "The man whom I saw" we are likely to say 
 The man that I saw" or "The man I saw."
 
 DRIFT 167 
 
 folk makes no apology. ''Whom did you see?" might 
 do for an epitaph, but "Who did you see?" is the natu- 
 ral form for an eager inquiry. It is of course the un- 
 controlled speech of the folk to which we must look 
 for advance information as to the general linguistic 
 movement. It is safe to prophesy that within a couple 
 of hundred years from to-day not even the most learned 
 jurist will be saying "Whom did you see?" By that 
 time the "whom" will be as delightfully archaic as the 
 Elizabethan "his" for "its."" No logical or histori- 
 cal argument will avail to save this hapless "whom." 
 The demonstration " I : me = he : him = who : whom ' ' 
 will be convincing in theory and will go unheeded 
 in practice. 
 
 Even now we may go so far as to say that the 
 majority of us are secretly wishing they could say "Who 
 did you see?" It would be a weight off their uncon- 
 scious minds if some divine authority, overruling the 
 lifted finger of the pedagogue, gave them carte hlanche. 
 But we cannot too frankly anticipate the drift and 
 maintain caste. We must affect ignorance of whither 
 we are going and rest content with our mental 
 conflict — uncomfortable conscious acceptance of the 
 "whom," unconscious desire for the "who."^- Mean- 
 
 11 "Its" was at one time as impertinent a departure as the 
 "who" of "Wlio did you see?" It forced itself into English be- 
 cause the old cleavage between masculine, feminine, and neuter 
 was being slowly and powerfully supplemented by a new one 
 between thing-class and animate-class. The latter classification 
 proved too vital to allow usage to couple males and things ( "his" ) 
 as against females ('Hier"). The form "its" had to be created 
 on the analogy of words like "man's," to satisfy the growing form 
 feeling. The drift was strong enough to sanction a grammatical 
 blunder. 
 
 12 Psychoanalysts will recognize the mechanism. The mechan- 
 isms of "repression of impulse" and of its symptomatic sym- 
 bolization can be illustrated in the most unexpected corners of 
 individual and group psychology. A more general psychology
 
 168 LANGUAGE 
 
 while we indulge our sneaking desire for the forbidden 
 locution by the use of the "who" in certain twilight 
 cases in which we can cover up our fault by a bit of 
 unconscious special pleading. Imagine that some one 
 drops the remark when you are not listening attentively, 
 "John Smith is coming to-night." You have not caught 
 the name and ask, not "Wliom did you say?" but "Who 
 did you say?" There is likely to be a little hesitation 
 in the choice of the form, but the precedent of usages 
 like ' ' Whom did you see ? " will probably not seem quite 
 strong enough to induce a "Whom did you say?" Not 
 quite relevant enough, the grammarian may remark, 
 for a sentence like "Who did you say?" is not strictly 
 analogous to "Whom did you see?" or "Whom did you 
 mean?" It is rather an abbreviated form of some such 
 sentence as "Who, did you say, is coming to-night*?" 
 This is the special pleading that I have referred to, and 
 it has a certain logic on its side. Yet the case is more 
 hollow than the grammarian thinks it to be, for in reply 
 to such a query as "You're a good hand at bridge, 
 John, aren't you?" John, a little taken aback, might 
 mutter "Did you say me?" hardly "Did you say I?" 
 Yet the logic for the latter ("Did you say I was a good 
 hand at bridge?") is evident. The real point is that 
 there is not enough vitality in the "whom" to carry it 
 over such little difficulties as a "me" can compass with- 
 out a thought. The proportion " I : me = he : him =: 
 who: whom" is logically and historically sound, but 
 psychologically shaky. "Whom did you see?" is cor- 
 rect, but there is something false about its correctness. 
 It is worth looking into the reason for our curious 
 
 than Freud'a will eventually prove them to be as applicable to 
 the groping for abstract form, the logical or estlictic ordering 
 of experience, aa to the life of the fundamental instincts.
 
 DRIFT 169 
 
 reluctance to use locutions involving the word "whom,** 
 particularly in its interrogative sense. The only distinc- 
 tively objective forms which we still possess in English 
 are me, liini, Tier (a little blurred because of its identity 
 with the possessive Jier), us, tliem, and whom. In all 
 other cases the objective has come to be identical with 
 the subjective — that is, in outer form, for we are not 
 now taking account of position in the sentence. We ob- 
 serve immediately in looking through the list of objec- 
 tive forms that whom, is psychologically isolated. Me, 
 Mm, her, us, and them form a solid, well-integrated 
 group of objective personal pronouns parallel to the 
 subjective series I, he, she, we, they. The forms who 
 and whom are technically ''pronouns" but they are not 
 felt to be in the same box as the personal pronouns. 
 Whom has clearly a weak position, an exposed flank, 
 for words of a feather tend to flock together, and if one 
 strays behind, it is likely to incur danger of life. Now 
 the other interrogative and relative pronouns (which, 
 what, that), with which whom should properly flock, do 
 not distinguish the subjective and objective forms. It 
 is psychologically unsound to draw the line of form 
 cleavage between whom and the personal pronouns on 
 the one side, the remaining interrogative and relative 
 pronouns on the other. The form groups should be sym- 
 metrically related to, if not identical with, the function 
 groups. Had which, what, and that objective forms 
 parallel to whom, the position of this last would be more 
 secure. As it is, there is something unesthetic about 
 the word. It suggests a form pattern which is not filled 
 out by its fellows. The only way to remedy the irregu- 
 larity of form distribution is to abandon the whom alto- 
 gether, for we have lost the power to create new objec- 
 tive forms and cannot remodel our which-what-that group
 
 170 LANGUAGE 
 
 so as to make it parallel with the smaller group wJio- 
 wTiom. Once this is done, who joins its flock and our 
 unconscious desire for form symmetry is satisfied. "We 
 do not secretly chafe at ' * Whom did you see ? ' ' without 
 reason." 
 
 But the drift away from wlwm has still other deter- 
 minants. The words wlio and wliovi in their interroga- 
 tive sense are psychologically related not merely to the 
 pronouns which and what, but to a group of interroga- 
 tive adverbs — where, when, how — al\ of which are in- 
 variable and generally emphatic. I believe it is safe 
 to infer that there is a rather strong feeling in English 
 that the interrogative pronoun or adverb, typically an 
 emphatic element in the sentence, should be invariable. 
 The inflective -m of whom is felt as a drag upon the 
 rhetorical effectiveness of the word. It needs to be 
 eliminated if the interrogative pronoun is to receive all 
 its latent power. There is still a third, and a very 
 powerful, reason for the avoidance of whom. The con- 
 trast between the subjective and objective series of per- 
 sonal pronouns (/, he, she, we, tlicy:me, him, her, us, 
 them) is in English associated with a difference of posi- 
 tion. We say / see the man but the man sees me; he 
 told him-, never him he told or him told he. Such usages 
 as the last two are distinctly poetic and archaic ; they 
 are opposed to the present drift of the language. Even 
 in the interrogative one does not say Him did you see? 
 It is only in sentences of the type Whom did you see? 
 that an inflected objective before the verb is now used 
 
 13 Note that it is different witli irhose. Tliis has not the 
 support of analogous possessive forma in its own functional group, 
 but the analogical power of tlie great body of possessives of 
 nouns {man's, boi/'s) as well as of certain personal pronouns {his, 
 its; as predicated possessive also hers, yours, theirs) is sufticient 
 to give it vitality.
 
 DRIFT 171 
 
 at all. On the other hand, the order in Whom did you 
 see? is imperative because of its interrogative form; the 
 interrogative pronoun or adverb normally comes first in 
 the sentence {What are yon doing? When did he go? 
 Where are you from?). In the "whom" of Whom did 
 you see? there is concealed, therefore, a conflict between 
 the order proper to a sentence containing an inflected ob- 
 jective and the order natural to a sentence with an inter- 
 rogative pronoun or adverb. The solution Did you see 
 whom? or You saw whom? ^* is too contrary to the idio- 
 matic drift of our language to receive acceptance. The 
 more radical solution Who did you see? is the one the 
 language is gradually making for. 
 
 These three conflicts — on the score of form grouping, 
 of rhetorical emphasis, and of order — are supplemented 
 by a fourth difficulty. The emphatic whom, with its 
 heavy build (half -long vowel followed by labial con- 
 sonant), should contrast with a lightly tripping syllable 
 immediately following. In whom did, however, we have 
 an involuntary retardation that makes the locution sound 
 "clumsy." This clumsiness is a phonetic verdict, quite 
 apart from the dissatisfaction due to the grammatical 
 factors which we have analyzed. The same prosodic ob- 
 jection does not apply to such parallel locutions as what 
 did and ivhen did. The vowels of what and when are 
 shorter and their final consonants melt easily into the 
 following d, which is pronounced in the same tongue 
 position as t and n. Our instinct for appropriate 
 rhythms makes it as difficult for us to feel content with 
 whom did as for a poet to use words like dreamed and 
 
 1* Aside from certain idiomatic usages, as when You saw tvhomf 
 is equivalent to You saw so and so and that so and so is ichof 
 In such sentences whom is pronounced high and lingeringly to 
 emphasize the fact that the person just referred to by the listener 
 is not known or recognized.
 
 172 LANGUAGE 
 
 hummtd in a rapid line. Neither common feeling nor 
 the poet's choice need be at all conscious. It may be 
 that not all are equally sensitive to the rhythmic flow 
 of speech, but it is probable that rhythm is an uncon- 
 scious linguistic determinant even with those who set 
 little store by its artistic use. In any event the poet's 
 rhythms can only be a more sensitive and stylicized ap- 
 plication of rhythmic tendencies that are characteristic 
 of the daily speech of his people. 
 
 We have discovered no less than four factors which 
 enter into our subtle disinclination to say "Whom did 
 you see?" The uneducated folk that says "Who did 
 you see?" with no twinge of conscience has a more acute 
 flair for the genuine drift of the language than its 
 students. Naturally the four restraining factors do 
 not operate independently. Their separate energies, if 
 we may make bold to use a mechanical concept, are 
 "canalized" into a single force. This force or minute 
 embodiment of the general drift of the language is psy- 
 chologically registered as a slight hesitation in using 
 the word whom. The hesitation is likely to be quite un- 
 conscious, though it may be readily acknowledged when 
 attention is called to it. The analysis is certain to be 
 unconscious, or rather unknown, to the normal speaker.^^ 
 How, then, can we be certain in such an analysis as we 
 have undertaken that all of the assigned determinants 
 are really operative and not merely some one of them? 
 Certainly they are not equally powerful in all eases. 
 Their values are variable, rising and falling according 
 to the individual and the locution.^^ But that they really 
 
 15 students of language cannot be entirely normal in their atti- 
 tude towards their own speech. Perhaps it would be better to 
 say "naiVe" than "normal." 
 
 16 It is probably this variability of value in the sigriificant 
 compounds of a general linguistic drift that is responsible for
 
 DRIFT 173 
 
 exist, each in its own right, may sometimes be tested 
 by the method of elimination. If one or other of the 
 factors is missing and we observe a slight diminution in 
 the corresponding psychological reaction ("hesitation" 
 in our case), we may conclude that the factor is in other 
 uses genuinely positive. The second of our four factors 
 applies only to the interrogative use of ivJiom, the fourth 
 factor applies with more force to the interrogative than 
 to the relative. We can therefore understand why a sen- 
 tence like 7s he the man whom you referred tof though 
 not as idiomatic as 7s he the man (that) you referred tof 
 (remember that it sins against counts one and three), 
 is still not as difficult to reconcile with our innate feel- 
 ing for English expression as Whom did you see? If 
 we eliminate the fourth factor from the interrogative 
 usage,^^ say in Whom are you looking atf where the 
 vowel following whom relieves this word of its phonetic 
 weight, we can observe, if I am not mistaken, a lesser 
 reluctance to use the whom. Who are you looking at? 
 might even sound slightly offensive to ears that welcome 
 Who did you see? 
 
 We may set up a scale of ''hesitation values" some- 
 what after this fashion: 
 
 Value 1: factors 1, 3. "The man whom I referred to." 
 
 Value 2 : factors 1, 3, 4. "The man whom they referred to." 
 
 Value 3: factors 1, 2, 3. "Whom are you looking at?" 
 
 Value 4: factors 1, 2, 3, 4. "Whom did you see?" 
 
 the rise of dialectic variations. Each dialect continues the gen- 
 eral drift of the common parent, but has not been able to hold 
 fast to constant values for each component of the drift. Devia- 
 tions as to the drift itself, at first slight, later cumulative, are 
 therefore unavoidable. 
 
 17 Most sentences beginning with interrogative whom are likely 
 to be followed by did or does, do. Yet not all.
 
 174 LANGUAGE 
 
 We may venture to surmise that while wJiom will ulti- 
 mately disappear from English speech, locutions of the 
 type WJiojn did you see? will be obsolete when phrases 
 like The man whom I referred to are still in lingering 
 use. It is impossible to be certain, however, for we can 
 never tell if we have isolated all the determinants of a 
 drift. In our particular case we have ignored what may 
 well prove to be a controlling factor in the history of 
 who and whom in the relative sense. This is the uncon- 
 scious desire to leave these words to their interrogative 
 function and to concentrate on that or mere word order 
 as expressions of the relative (e.g., The man that- 1 re- 
 ferred to or The man I referred to). This drift, which 
 does not directly concern the use of whom as such 
 (merely of whom as a form of who), may have made 
 the relative who obsolete before the other factors af- 
 fecting relative whom have run their course. A consid- 
 eration like this is instructive because it indicates that 
 knowledge of the general drift of a language is insuffi- 
 cient to enable us to see clearly what the drift is head- 
 ing for. We need to know something of the relative 
 potencies and speeds of the components of the drift. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to say that the particular drifts 
 involved in the use of whom are of interest to us not for 
 their own sake but as symptoms of larger tendencies at 
 work in the language. At least three drifts of major 
 importance are discernible. Each of these has oper- 
 ated for centuries, each is at work in other parts of our 
 linguistic mechanism, each is almost certain to continue 
 for centuries, possibly millennia. The first is the fa- 
 miliar tendency to level the distinction between the sub- 
 jective and the objective, itself but a late chapter in 
 the steady reduction of the old Indo-European system 
 of syntactic cases. This system, which is at present best
 
 DRIFT 175 
 
 preserved in Lithuanian,^^ was already considerably re- 
 duced in the old Germanic language of which English, 
 Dutch, German, Danish, and Swedish are modern dia- 
 lectic forms. The seven Indo-European cases (nomi- 
 native, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative, in- 
 strumental) had been already reduced to four (nomi- 
 native, genitive, dative, accusative). We know this from 
 a careful comparison of and reconstruction based on 
 the oldest Germanic dialects of which we still have rec- 
 ords (Gothic, Old Icelandic, Old High German, Anglo- 
 Saxon). In the group of West Germanic dialects, for 
 the study of which Old High German, Anglo-Saxon, 
 Old Frisian, and Old Saxon are our oldest and most 
 valuable sources, we still have these four cases, but the 
 phonetic form of the case syllables is already greatly 
 reduced and in certain paradigms particular cases have 
 coalesced. The case system is practically intact but it 
 is evidently moving towards further disintegration. 
 Within the Anglo-Saxon and early Middle English 
 period there took place further changes in the same 
 direction. The phonetic form of the case syllables be- 
 came still further reduced and the distinction between 
 the accusative and the dative finally disappeared. The 
 new "objective" is really an amalgam of old accusative 
 and dative forms; thus, Tim, the old dative (we still say 
 7 give him the hook, not ''abbreviated" from I give 
 to him; compare Gothic imma, modern German ihm), 
 took over the functions of the old accusative (Anglo- 
 Saxon hine; compare Gothic ina, Modern German ihn) 
 and dative. The distinction between the nominative and 
 accusative was nibbled away by phonetic processes and 
 
 18 Better, indeed, than in our oldest Latin and Greek records. 
 The old Indo-Iranian languages alone (Sanskrit, Avestan) show 
 an equally or more archaic status of the Indo-European parent 
 tongue as regards case forms.
 
 176 LANGUAGE 
 
 morphological levelings until only certain pronouns re- 
 tained distinctive subjective and objective forms. 
 
 In later medieval and in modern times there have been 
 comparatively few apparent changes in our case system 
 apart from the gradual replacement of thou — thee (sin- 
 gular) and subjective ye — objective you (plural) by a 
 single undifferentiated form you. All the while, how- 
 ever, the case system, such as it is (subjective-objective, 
 really absolutive, and possessive in nouns; subjective, 
 objective, and possessive in certain pronouns) has been 
 steadily weakening in psychological respects. At pres- 
 ent it is more seriously undermined than most of us 
 realize. The possessive has little vitality except in the 
 pronoun and in animate nouns. Theoretically we can 
 still say the moon's phases or a newspaper's vogue; prac- 
 tically we limit ourselves pretty much to analytic locu- 
 tions like the phases of the moon and the vogue of a 
 newspaper. The drift is clearly toward the limitation, 
 of possessive forms to animate nouns. All the possessive 
 pronominal forms except its and, in part, their and 
 theirs, are also animate. It is significant that theirs 
 is hardly ever used in reference to inanimate nouns, that 
 there is some reluctance to so use their, and that its also 
 is beginning to give way to of it. The appearance 
 of it or the looks of it is more in the current of the 
 language than its appearance. It is curiously sig- 
 nificant that its young (referring to an animal's cubs) 
 is idiomatically preferable to the young of it. The form 
 is only ostensibly neuter, in feeling it is animate; psy- 
 chologically it belongs with his children, not with the 
 pieces of it. Can it be that so common a word as its is 
 actually beginning to be difficult? Is it too doomed to 
 disappear? It would be rash to say that it shows signs 
 of approaching obsolescence, but that it is steadily weak-
 
 DRIFT 177 
 
 ening is fairly clear.^'' lu any events it is not too much 
 to say that there is a strong drift towards the restriction 
 of the inflected possessive forms to animate nouns and 
 pronouns. 
 
 How is it with the alternation of subjective and ob- 
 jective in the pronoun? Granted that wJiom is a weak 
 sister, that the two cases have been leveled in you (in it, 
 that, and wliat they were never distinct, so far as we can 
 tell-®), and that her as an objective is a trifle weak be- 
 cause of its formal identity with the possessive her, is 
 there any reason to doubt the vitality of such alterna- 
 tions as / see the man and the man sees mef Surely the 
 distinction between subjective / and objective me, be- 
 tween subjective he and objective him, and correspond- 
 ingly for other personal pronouns, belongs to the very 
 core of the language. We can throw whom to the dogs, 
 somehow make shift to do without an its, but to level / 
 and me to a single case — would that not be to un- 
 English our language beyond recognition? There is no 
 drift toward such horrors as Me see him or / see he. 
 True, the phonetic disparity between / and me, he and 
 Mm, ive and us, has been too great for any serious pos- 
 sibility of form leveling. It does not follow that the 
 case distinction as such is still vital. One of the most j 
 insidious peculiarities of a linguistic drift is that where 
 it cannot destroy what lies in its way it renders it innoc- 
 uous by washing the old significance out of it. It turns 
 its very enemies to its own uses. This brings us to the ' 
 second of the major drifts, the tendency to fixed posi- 
 
 19 Should its eventually drop out, it will have had a curious 
 history. It will have played the role of a stop-gap between his 
 in its non-personal use (see footnote 11, page 167) and the later 
 analytic of it. 
 
 20 Except in so far as that has absorbed other functions than 
 such as originally belonged to it. It was only a nominative- 
 accusative neuter to begin with.
 
 178 LANGUAGE 
 
 tion in the sentence, determined by the syntactic relation 
 of the word. 
 
 We need not go into the history of this all-important 
 drift. It is enough to know that as the inflected forms 
 of English became scantier, as the syntactic relations 
 were more and more inadequately expressed by the forms 
 of the words themselves, position in the sentence gradu- 
 ally took over functions originally foreign to it. The 
 man in the man sees the dog is subjective; in the dog 
 sees the man, objective. Strictly parallel to these sen- 
 tences are he sees the dog and the dog sees him. Are 
 the subjective value of he and the objective value of 
 him entirely, or even mainly, dependent on the difference 
 of form? I doubt it. We could hold to such a view 
 if it were possible to say the dog sees he or him sees the 
 dog. It was once possible to say such things, but we 
 have lost the power. In other words, at least part of 
 the case feeling in he and him is to be credited to their 
 position before or after the verb. May it not be, then, 
 that he and hi^n, we and lis, are not so much subjective 
 and objective forms as pre-verbal and post-verbal ^^ 
 forms, very much as my and mijie are now pre-nominal 
 and post-nominal forms of the possessive (my father but 
 father mine; it is my hook but the hook is mine) ? That 
 this interpretation corresponds to the actual drift of 
 the English language is again indicated by the language 
 of the folk. The folk says it is me, not it is I, which is 
 "correct" but just as falsely so as the whom did you 
 see? that we have analyzed. I'm the one, it's me; we're 
 
 21 Aside from the interrogative: am I? is he? Emphasis counts 
 for something. There is a strong tendency for the old "objec- 
 tive" forms to bear a stronger stress than the "subjective" forms. 
 This is why the stress in locutions like He didn't go, did he? and 
 isn't he? is thrown back on the verb; it is not a matter of logical 
 emphasis.
 
 DRIFT 179 
 
 the ones, it's us that will win out — such are the live 
 parallelisms in English to-day. There is little doubt 
 that it is I will one day be as impossible in English as 
 c'est je, for c'est moi, is now in French. 
 
 How differently our /; me feels than in Chaucer's day 
 is shown by the Chaucerian it am I. Here the dis- 
 tinctively subjective aspect of the / was enough to influ- 
 ence the form of the preceding verb in spite of the intro- 
 ductory it; Chaucer's locution clearly felt more like a 
 Latin sum ego than a modern it is I or colloquial it is me. 
 We have a curious bit of further evidence to prove that 
 the English personal pronouns have lost some share of 
 their original syntactic force. Were he and she sub- 
 jective forms pure and simple, were they not striving, 
 so to speak, to become caseless absolutives, like man or 
 any other noun, we should not have been able to coin 
 such compounds as he-goat and she-goat, words that are 
 psychologically analogous to hull-moose and mother-hear. 
 Again, in inquiring about a new-born baby, we ask Is it 
 a he or a she? quite as though he and she were the equiv- 
 alents of male and female or hoy and girl. All in all, 
 we may conclude that our English case system is weaker 
 than it looks and that, in one way or another, it is des- 
 tined to get itself reduced to an absolutive (caseless) 
 form for all nouns and pronouns but those that are 
 animate. Animate nouns and pronouns are sure to have 
 distinctive possessive forms for an indefinitely long 
 period. 
 
 Meanwhile observe that the old alignment of case 
 forms is being invaded by two new categories — a posi- 
 tional category (pre-verbal, post- verbal) and a clas- 
 sificatory category (animate, inanimate). The facts 
 that in the possessive animate nouns and pronouns are 
 destined to be more and more sharply distinguished
 
 180 LANGUAGE 
 
 from inanimate nouns and pronouns {the man's, but 
 of the house; his, but of it) and that, on the whole, it 
 is only animate pronouns that distinguish pre-verbal 
 and post-verbal forms "^ are of the greatest theoretical 
 interest. They show that, however the language strive 
 for a more and more analytic form, it is by no means 
 manifesting a drift toward the expression of "pure" 
 relational concepts in the Indo-Chinese manner.^^ The 
 insistence on the concreteness of the relational concepts 
 is clearly stronger than the destructive power of the 
 most sweeping and persistent drifts that we know of in 
 the history and prehistory of our language. 
 
 The drift toward the abolition of most case distinc- 
 tions and the correlative drift toward position as an 
 all-important grammatical method ave accompanied, 
 in a sense dominated, by the last of the three major 
 drifts that I have referred to. This is the drift toward 
 the invariable word. In analyzing the "whom" sen- 
 tence I pointed out that the rhetorical emphasis natural 
 to an interrogative pronoun lost something by its form 
 variability {who, whose, whom). This striving for a 
 simple, unnuanced correspondence between idea and 
 word, as invariable as may be, is very strong in Eng- 
 lish. It accounts for a number of tendencies which at 
 first sight seem unconnected. Certain well-established 
 forms, like the present third person singular -s of 
 works or the plural -s of hooks, have resisted the 
 drift to invariable words, possibly because they sym- 
 bolize certain stronger form cravings that we do 
 not yet fully understand. It is interesting to note 
 that derivations that get away sufficiently from the 
 
 22 They: them as an inanimate group may be looked upon as a 
 kind of borrowing from the animate, to which, in feeling, it more 
 properly belongs. 
 
 23 See page 155.
 
 DRIFT 181 
 
 concrete notion of the radical word to exist as inde- 
 pendent conceptual centers are not affected by this elu- 
 sive drift. As soon as the derivation runs danger of 
 being felt as a mere nuancing of, a finicky play on, the 
 primary concept, it tends to be absorbed by the radical 
 word, to disappear as such. English words crave spaces 
 between them, they do not like to huddle in clusters 
 of slightly divergent centers of meaning, each edging 
 a little away from the rest. Goodness, a noun of qual- 
 ity, almost a noun of relation, that takes its cue from 
 the concrete idea of "good" without necessarily predi- 
 cating that quality (e.g., I do not think much of his 
 goodness) is sufficiently spaced from good itself not to 
 need fear absorption. Similarly, unable can hold its 
 own against able because it destroys the latter 's sphere 
 of influence ; unable is psychologically as distinct from 
 able as is blundering or stupid. It is different with 
 adverbs in -ly. These lean too heavily on their adjec- 
 tives to have the kind of vitality that English demands 
 of its words. Do it quickly! drags psychologically. 
 The nuance expressed by quickly is too close to that of 
 quick, their circles of concreteness are too nearly the 
 same, for the two words to feel comfortable together. 
 The adverbs in -ly are likely to go to the wall in the not 
 too distant future for this very reason and in face of 
 their obvious usefulness. Another instance of the sac- 
 rifice of highly useful forms to this impatience of 
 nuancing is the group whence, whither, hence, hither, 
 thence, thither. They could not persist in live usage 
 because they impinged too solidly upon the circles of 
 meaning represented by the words where, here and there. 
 In saying whither we feel too keenly that we repeat all 
 of where. That we add to where an important nuance 
 of direction irritates rather than satisfies. We prefer
 
 182 LANGUAGE 
 
 to merge the static and the directive {WJiere do you live? 
 like Where are you going?) or, if need be, to overdo 
 a little the concept of direction ( Where are you running 
 to'i). 
 
 Now it is highly symptomatic of the nature of the 
 drift away from word clusters that we do not object to 
 nuances as such, we object to having the nuances for- 
 mally earmarked for us. As a matter of fact our vo- 
 cabulary is rich in near-synonyms and in groups of 
 words that are psychologically near relatives, but these 
 near-synonyms and these groups do not hang together 
 by reason of etymology. "We are satisfied with believe 
 and credible just because they keep aloof from each 
 other. Good and ivell go better together than quick and 
 quickly. The English vocabulary is a rich medley be- 
 cause each English word wants its own castle. Has 
 English long been peculiarly receptive to foreign words 
 because it craves the staking out of as many word areas 
 as possible, or, conversely, has the mechanical imposi- 
 tion of a flood of French and Latin loan-words, un- 
 rooted in our earlier tradition, so dulled our feeling for 
 the possibilities of our native resources that we are 
 allowing these to shrink by default? I suspect that 
 both propositions are true. Each feeds on the other. 
 I do not think it likely, however, that the borrowings 
 in English have been as mechanical and external a 
 process as they are generally represented to have been. 
 There was something about the English drift as early 
 as the period following the Norman Conquest that wel- 
 comed the new words. They were a compensation for 
 something that was weakening within.
 
 VIII 
 
 LANGUAGE AS A HISTORICAL PRODUCT: 
 PHONETIC LAW 
 
 I HAVE preferred to take up in some detail the analysis 
 of our hesitation in using a locution like "Whom did 
 you see?" and to point to some of the English drifts, 
 particular and general, that are implied by this hesi- 
 tation than to discuss linguistic change in the abstract. 
 What is true of the particular idiom that we started 
 with is true of everything else in language. Nothing 
 is perfectly static. Every word, every grammatical ele- 
 ment, every locution, every sound and accent is a slowly 
 changing configuration, molded by the invisible and im- 
 personal drift that is the life of language. The evidence 
 is overwhelming that this drift has a certain consistent 
 direction. Its speed varies enormously according to cir- 
 cumstances that it is not always easy to define. We have 
 already seen that Lithuanian is to-day nearer its Indo- 
 European prototype than was the hypothetical Germanic 
 mother-tongue five hundred or a thousand years before 
 Christ. German has moved more slowly than English; 
 in some respects it stands roughly midway between Eng- 
 lish and Anglo-Saxon, in others it has of course diverged 
 from the Anglo-Saxon line. When I pointed out in the 
 preceding chapter that dialects formed because a lan- 
 guage broken up into local segments could not move 
 along the same drift in all of these segments, I meant of 
 course that it could not move along identically the same 
 drift. The general drift of a language has its depthSt 
 
 183
 
 184 LANGUAGE 
 
 At the surface the current is relatively fast. In certain 
 features dialects drift apart rapidly. By that very fact 
 these features betray themselves as less fundamental to 
 the genius of the language than the more slowly modi- 
 fiable features in which the dialects keep together long 
 after they have grown to be mutually alien forms of 
 speech. But this is not all. The momentum of the 
 more fundamental, the pre-dialectic, drift is often such 
 that languages long disconnected will pass through the 
 same or strikingly similar phases. In many such cases 
 it is perfectly clear that there could have been no dia- 
 lectic interinfluencing. 
 
 These parallelisms in drift may operate in the phonetic 
 as well as in the morphological sphere, or they may 
 affect both at the same time. Here is an interesting 
 example. The English type of plural represented by 
 foot: feet, mouse: mice is strictly parallel to the Ger- 
 man Fuss : Filsse, Maus : Mliuse. One would be inclined 
 to surmise that these dialectic forms go back to old 
 Germanic or West-Germanic alternations of the same 
 type. But the documentary evidence shows conclusively 
 that there could have been no plurals of this type in 
 primitive Germanic. There is no trace of such vocalic 
 mutation ("umlaut") in Gothic, our most archaic Ger- 
 manic language. More significant still is the fact that 
 it does not appear in our oldest Old High German texts 
 and begins to develop only at the very end of the Old 
 High German period (circa 1000 a.d.). In the Middle 
 High German period the mutation was carried through 
 in all dialects. The typical Old High German forms 
 are singular fuoss, plural fuossi; ^ singular mus, plural 
 
 1 1 have cliangcd the Old and Middle High German orthography 
 slightly in order to bring it into accord with modern usage. These 
 purely orthographical changes are immaterial. The u of mus is 
 a long vowel, very nearly like the oo of English moose.
 
 PHONETIC LAW 185 
 
 musi. The corresponding Middle High German forms 
 are fuoss, fiiesse; mus, miise. Modern German Fuss: 
 Filsse, Maus: Mduse are the regular developments of 
 these medieval forms. Turning to Anglo-Saxon, we 
 find that our modern English forms correspond to fot, 
 fet; mus, mysr These forms are already in use in the 
 earliest English monuments that we possess, dating from 
 the eighth century, and thus antedate the Middle High 
 German forms by three hundred years or more. In 
 other words, on this particular point it took German 
 at least three hundred years to catch up with a phonetic- 
 morphological drift ^ that had long been under way in 
 English. The mere fact that the affected vowels of 
 related words (Old High German uo, Anglo-Saxon o) 
 are not always the same shows that the affection took 
 place at different periods in German and English.* 
 There was evidently some general tendency or group 
 of tendencies at work in early Germanic, long before 
 English and German had developed as such, that eventu- 
 ally drove both of these dialects along closely parallel 
 paths. 
 
 How did such strikingly individual alternations as 
 fot: fet, fuoss: fiiesse develop? We have now reached 
 
 2 The vowels of these four words are long ; o as in rode, e like 
 o of fade, u like oo of brood, y like German il. 
 
 3 Or rather stage in a drift. 
 
 4 Anglo-Saxon fet is "unrounded" from an older fot, which is 
 phonetically related to fot precisely as is mys (i.e., miis) to mus. 
 Middle High German ue (Modern German it) did not develop from 
 an "umlauted" prototype of Old High German uo and Anglo- 
 Saxon 0, but was based directly on the dialectic uo. The unaf- 
 fected prototype was long o. Had this been affected in the 
 earliest Germanic or West-Germanic period, we should have had 
 a pre-German alternation fot: foti; this older o could not well 
 have resulted in He. Fortunately we do not need inferential evi- 
 dence in this case, yet inferential comparative methods, if handled 
 with care, may be exceedingly useful. They are indeed indis- 
 pensable to the historian of language.
 
 186 LANGUAGE 
 
 what is probably the most central problem in linguistic 
 history, gradual phonetic change. "Phonetic laws" 
 make up a large and fundamental share of the subject- 
 matter of linguistics. Their influence reaches far be- 
 yond the proper sphere of phonetics and invades that 
 of morphology, as we shall see. A drift that begins as 
 a slight phonetic readjustment or unsettlement may in 
 the course of millennia bring about the most profound 
 structural changes. The mere fact, for instance, that 
 there is a growing tendency to throw the stress auto- 
 matically on the first syllable of a word may eventually 
 change the fundamental type of the language, reducing 
 its final syllables to zero and driving it to the use of 
 more and more analytical or symbolic ^ methods. The 
 English phonetic laws involved in the rise of the words 
 foot, feet, mouse and mice from their early West-Ger- 
 manic prototypes fot, foti, mus, musi^ may be briefly 
 summarized as follows: 
 
 1. In foti "feet" the long o was colored by the fol- 
 lowing * to long 0, that is, o kept its lip-rounded quality 
 and its middle height of tongue position but anticipated 
 the front tongue position of the i; o is the resulting com- 
 promise. This assimilatory change was regular, i.e., 
 every accented long o followed by an i in the following 
 syllable automatically developed to long o; hence totlii 
 *' teeth" became totJii, fodian "to feed" became fodian. 
 At first there is no doubt the alternation between o and 
 was not felt as intrinsically significant. It could only 
 have been an unconscious mechanical adjustment such as 
 may be observed in the speech of many to-day who mod- 
 ify the "oo" sound of words like you and feiv in the 
 
 5 See page 13.3. 
 
 6 Primitive Germanic fot{s),fotiz, mus,m.vsiz; Indo-European 
 pods,podes, mus,inuses. The vowels of the first syllables are all 
 long.
 
 PHONETIC LAW 187 
 
 direction of German ii without, however, actually de- 
 parting far enough from the "oo" vowel to prevent their 
 acceptance of wlio and you as satisfactory rhyming 
 words. Later on the quality of the o vowel must have 
 departed widely enough from that of o to enable o to 
 rise in consciousness ^ as a neatly distinct vowel. As 
 soon as this happened, the expression of plurality in 
 foti, tdtlii, and analogous words became symbolic and 
 fusional, not merely fusional. 
 
 2. In 7nusi "mice" the long u was colored by the 
 following i to long il. This change also was regular; 
 liisi "lice" became lilsi, kui "cows" became kili (later 
 simplified to kit; still preserved as ki- in kine), fulian 
 "to make foul" became fulian (still preserved as -iile in 
 defile). The psychology of this phonetic law is entirely 
 analogous to that of 1. 
 
 3. The old drift toward reducing final syllables, a 
 rhythmic consequence of the strong Germanic stress on 
 the first syllable, now manifested itself. The final -*, 
 originally an important functional element, had long 
 lost a great share of its value, transferred as that was 
 to the symbolic vowel change {o: o). It had little power 
 of resistance, therefore, to the drift. It became dulled 
 to a colorless -e; foti became fote. 
 
 4. The weak -e finally disappeared. Probably the 
 forms fijie and fot long coexisted as prosodic variants 
 according to the rhythmic requirements of the sentence, 
 very much as Fiisse and Fiiss' now coexist in German. 
 
 5. The of fot became "unrounded" to long e (our 
 present a of fade). The alternation of fot: foti, transi- 
 tionally fot: foti, fote, fot, now appears as fot: fet. 
 Analogously, toth appears as tetli, fodian as fedian, later 
 
 7 Or in that unconscious sound patterning which is ever on the 
 point of becoming conscious. See page 57.
 
 188 LANGUAGE 
 
 fedan. The new long <?-vowel "fell together" with the 
 older e- vowel already existent (e.g., Iter "here," he 
 "he"). Henceforward the two are merged and their 
 later history is in common. Thus our present lie has 
 the same vowel as feet, teetli, and feed. In other words, 
 the old sound pattern o, e, after an interim of o, o, e, 
 reappeared as o, e, except that now the e had greater 
 "weight" than before. 
 
 6. Fot: fet, mus: 7mls (written mys) are the typical 
 forms of Anglo-Saxon literature. At the very end of 
 the Anglo-Saxon period, say about 1050 to 1100 a.d., 
 the a, whether long or short, became unrounded to i. 
 Mys was then pronounced mis with long i ( rhyming with 
 present niece). The change is analogous to 5, but takes 
 place several centuries later. 
 
 7. In Chaucer's day (circa 1350-1400 a.d.) the forms 
 were still fot: fet (written foot, feet) and mus: mis 
 (written very variably, but mous, myse are typical). 
 About 1500 all the long i-vowels, whether original (as 
 in write, ride, wine) or unrounded from Anglo-Saxon 
 it (as in hide, hride, mice, defile), became diphthongized 
 to ei (i.e., e of met -\- short i). Shakespeare pronounced 
 mice as meis (almost the same as the present Cockney 
 pronunciation of mace). 
 
 8. About the same time the long u- vowels were diph- 
 thongized to ou (i.e., of present Scotch not -j- w of full). 
 The Chaucerian mus: mis now appears as the Shake- 
 spearean mous: meis. This change may have mani- 
 fested itself somewhat later than 7 ; all English dialects 
 have diphthongized old Germanic long i,^ but the long 
 undiphthongized u is still preserved in Lowland Scotch, 
 in which house and mouse rhyme with our loose. 7 
 and 8 are analogous developments, as were 5 and 6; 8 
 
 8 As have most Dutch and German dialects.
 
 PHONETIC LAW 189 
 
 apparently lags behind 7 as 6, centuries earlier, lagged 
 behind 7. 
 
 9. Some time before 1550 the long e of fet (written 
 feet) took the position that had been vacated by the old 
 long i, now diphthongized (see 7), i.e., e took the higher 
 tongue position of i. Our (and Shakespeare's) "long 
 e" is, then, phonetically the same as the old long i. Feet 
 now rhymed with the old ivrite and the present heat. 
 
 10. About the same time the long o of fot (written 
 foot) took the position that had been vacated by the old 
 long w, now diphthongized (see 8), i.e., o took the higher 
 tongue position of w. Our (and Shakespeare's) "long 
 00 " is phonetically the same as the old long w. Foot now 
 rhymed with the old out and the present hoot. To sum- 
 marize 7 to 10, Shakespeare pronounced meis, mous, fit, 
 fut, of which meis and mous would affect our ears as a 
 rather "mincing" rendering of our present mice and 
 mouse, fit would sound practically identical with (but 
 probably a bit more "drawled" than) our present feet, 
 while foot, rhyming with hoot, would now be set down 
 as "broad Scotch." 
 
 11. Gradually the first vowel of the diphthong in 
 mice (see 7) was retracted and lowered in position. The 
 resulting diphthong now varies in different English dia- 
 lects, but ai (i.e., a of father, but shorter, -\- short i) 
 may be taken as a fairly accurate rendering of its aver- 
 age quality.^ What we now call the "long i" (of words 
 like ride, hite, mice) is, of course, an a^-diphthong. 
 Mice is now pronounced mais. 
 
 12. Analogously to 11, the first vowel of the diph- 
 thong in mouse (see 8) was unrounded and lowered in 
 position. The resulting diphthong may be phonetically 
 rendered au, though it too varies considerably accord- 
 
 9 At least in America.
 
 190 LANGUAGE 
 
 ing to dialect. Mouse, then, is now pronounced mans. 
 13. The vowel of foot (see 10) became "open" in 
 quality and shorter in quantity, i.e., it fell together with 
 the old short H-vowel of words like full, icolf, wool. 
 This change has taken place in a number of words with 
 an originally long u (Chaucerian long close o), such 
 as forsook, liook, book, look, rook, shook, all of which 
 formerly had the vowel of hoot. The older vowel, how- 
 ever, is still preserved in most words of this class, such 
 as fool, moon, spool, stoop. It is highly significant of 
 the nature of the slow spread of a "phonetic law" that 
 there is local vacillation at present in several words. 
 One hears roof, soot, and Jwop, for instance, both with 
 the "long" vowel of hoot and the "short" of foot. It 
 is impossible now, in other words, to state in a definitive 
 manner what is the "phonetic law" that regulated the 
 change of the older foot (rhyming with hoot) to the 
 present foot. We know that there is a strong drift 
 towards the short, open vowel of foot, but whether or 
 not all the old "long oo" words will eventually be af- 
 fected we cannot presume to say. If they all, or prac- 
 tically all, are taken by the drift, phonetic law 13 will 
 be as "regular," as sweeping, as most of the twelve that 
 have preceded it. If not, it may eventually be possible, 
 if past experience is a safe guide, to show that the modi- 
 fied words form a natural phonetic group, that is, that 
 the "law" will have operated under certain definable 
 limiting conditions, e.g., that all words ending in a voice- 
 less consonant (such as p, t, k, f) were affected (e.g., 
 Jioof, foot, look, roof), but that all words ending in the 
 oo-vowel or in a voiced consonant remained unaffected 
 (e.g., do, food, move, fool). Whatever the upshot, we 
 may be reasonably certain that when the "phonetic 
 law" has run its course, the distribution of "long" and
 
 PHONETIC LAW 191 
 
 "short" vowels in the old oo-words will not seem quite 
 as erratic as at the present transitional moment.^^ We 
 learn, incidentally, the fundamental fact that phonetic 
 laws do not work with spontaneous automatism, that 
 they are simply a formula for a consummated drift that 
 sets in at a psychologically exposed point and gradually 
 worms its way through a gamut of phonetically 
 analogous forms. 
 
 It will be instructive to set down a table of form 
 sequences, a kind of gross history of the words foot, feet, 
 mouse, mice for the last 1500 years : ^^ 
 
 I. fot: foti; mus: musi (West Germanic) 
 
 XL fot: foti; mus: miisi 
 
 III. fot: fote; mus: milse 
 
 IV. fot: fot; mus: mils 
 
 V. fot: fet; mus: mils (Anglo-Saxon) 
 
 VI. fot: fet; mus: mis (Chaucer) 
 
 VII. fot: fet; mous: meis 
 
 VIII. fut (rhymes with boot) : fit; mous: meis (Shakespeare) 
 
 IX. fut: fit; maus: mais 
 
 X. fut (rhymes with put) : fit; maus: mais (English of 
 1900) 
 
 It will not be necessary to list the phonetic laws that 
 gradually differentiated the modern German equiva- 
 lents of the original West Germanic forms from their 
 English cognates. The following table gives a rough 
 idea of the form sequences in German : " 
 
 9a It is possible that other than purely phonetic factors are also 
 at work in the history of these vowels. 
 
 10 The orthography is roughly phonetic. Pronounce all ac- 
 cented vowels long except where otherwise indicated, unaccented 
 vowels short; give continental values to vowels, not present Eng- 
 lish ones. 
 
 11 After I. the numbers are not meant to correspond chronologi- 
 cally to those of the English table. The orthography is again 
 roughly phonetic.
 
 192 LANGUAGE 
 
 I. fot: foti; mus: musi (West Germanic) 
 
 II. foss : ^^ fossi; mus : musi 
 
 III. fuoss: fuossi; mus: musi (Old High German) 
 
 IV. fuoss: fiiessi; mus: milsi 
 
 V. fuoss: f Hesse; mus: miise (Middle High German) 
 
 VI. fuoss: f Hesse J mus: miise '^^ 
 
 VII. fuos: fiiese; mus: miize 
 
 VIII. fuos: fiiese; mous: moiize 
 
 IX. fus: fiise; mous: moiize (Luther) 
 
 X. fus: fiise; maus: moize (German of 1900) 
 
 We cannot even begin to ferret out and discuss all 
 the psychological problems that are concealed behind 
 these bland tables. Their general parallelism is obvious. 
 Indeed we might say that to-day the English and Ger- 
 man forms resemble each other more than does either 
 set the West Germanic prototypes from which each is 
 independently derived. Each table illustrates the tend- 
 ency to reduction of unaccented syllables, the vocalic 
 modification of the radical element under the influence 
 of the following vowel, the rise in tongue position of the 
 long middle vowels (English o to u, e to i; German o to 
 uo to u, lie to ii), the diphthongizing of the old high 
 vowels (English i to ei to ai; English and German u to 
 
 12 I use ss to indicate a peculiar long, voiceless s-sound that 
 was etymologically and phonetically distinct from the old Ger- 
 manic s. It always goes back to an old t. In the old sources it 
 is generally written as a variant of z, though it is not to be con- 
 fused with the modern German z {=: ts) . It was probably a 
 dental (lisped) s. 
 
 13 Z is to be understood as French or English z, not in its 
 German use. Strictly speaking, this "z" (intervocalic -s-) was 
 not voiced but was a soft voiceless sound, a sibilant intermediate 
 between our s and z. In modern North German it has become 
 voiced to z. It is important not to confouna this s — z with the 
 voiceless intervocalic s that soon arose from the older lisped ss. 
 In Modern German (aside from certain dialects), old s and ss are 
 not now differentiated when final {}[aus and Fuss have identical 
 sibilants), but can still be distinguished as voiced and voice- 
 less s between vowels (Mduse and Fiisse).
 
 PHONETIC LAW 193 
 
 ou to au; German ii to oil to oi). These dialectic par- 
 allels cannot be accidental. They are rooted in a com- 
 mon, pre-dialectic drift. 
 
 Phonetic changes are "regular." All but one (Eng- 
 lish table, X.), and that as yet uncompleted, of the 
 particular phonetic laws represented in our tables affect 
 all examples of the sound in question or, if the phonetic 
 change is conditional, all examples of the same sound 
 that are analogously circumstanced." An example of 
 the first type of change is the passage in English of all 
 old long i-vowels to diphthongal ai via ei. The passage 
 could hardly have been sudden or automatic, but it was 
 rapid enough to prevent an irregularity of development 
 due to cross drifts. The second type of change is illus- 
 trated in the development of Anglo-Saxon long o to long 
 e, via 0, under the influence of a following i. In the 
 first case we may say that au mechanically replaced long 
 «, in the second that the old long o "split" into two 
 sounds — long o, eventually u, and long e, eventually i. 
 The former type of change did no violence to the old 
 phonetic pattern, the formal distribution of sounds into 
 groups; the latter type rearranged the pattern some- 
 what. If neither of the two sounds into which an old 
 one "splits" is a new sound, it means that there has 
 been a phonetic leveling, that two groups of words, each 
 with a distinct sound or sound combination, have fallen 
 together into one group. This kind of leveling is quite 
 frequent in the history of language. In English, for 
 
 14 In practice phonetic laws have their exceptions, but more 
 Intensive study almost invariably shows that these exceptions 
 are more apparent than real. They are generally due to the dis- 
 turbing influence of morphological groupings or to special psycho- 
 logical reasons which inhibit the normal progress of the phonetic 
 drift. It is remarkable with how few exceptions one need operate 
 in linguistic history, aside from "analogical leveling" (morpho- 
 logical replacement).
 
 194 LANGUAGE 
 
 instance, we have seen that all the old long w-vowels, 
 after they had become unrounded, were indistinguishable 
 from the mass of long i-vowels. This meant that the 
 long i-vowel became a more heavily weighted point of 
 the phonetic pattern than before. It is curious to ob- 
 serve how often languages have striven to drive orig- 
 inally distinct sounds into certain favorite positions, 
 regardless of resulting confusions.^^ In Modern Greek, 
 for instance, the vowel i is the historical resultant of no 
 less than ten etymologically distinct vowels (long and 
 short) and diphthongs of the classical speech of Athens. 
 There is, then, good evidence to show that there are 
 general phonetic drifts toward particular sounds. 
 
 More often the phonetic drift is of a more general 
 character. It is not so much a movement toward a par- 
 ticular set of sounds as toward particular types of articu- 
 lation. The vowels tend to become higher or lower, the 
 diphthongs tend to coalesce into monophthongs, the voice- 
 less consonants tend to become voiced, stops tend to 
 become spirants. As a matter of fact, practically all 
 the phonetic laws enumerated in the two tables are but 
 specific instances of such far-reaching phonetic drifts. 
 The raising of English long o to u and of long e to i, 
 for instance, was part of a general tendency to raise the 
 position of the long vowels, just as the change of t to ss 
 in Old High German was part of a general tendency to 
 make voiceless spirants of the old voiceless stopped con- 
 sonants. A single sound change, even if there is no 
 phonetic leveling, generally threatens to upset the old 
 phonetic pattern because it brings about a disharmony 
 in the grouping of sounds. To reestablish the old pattern 
 
 15 These confusions are more theoretical than real, however. 
 A language has countless methods of avoiding practical ambigui- 
 ties.
 
 PHONETIC LAW 195 
 
 without going back on the drift the only possible method 
 is to have the other sounds of the series shift in analogous 
 fashion. If, for some reason or other, p becomes shifted 
 to its voiced correspondent h, the old series p, t, k ap- 
 pears in the unsymmetrical form b, t, k. Such a series 
 is, in phonetic effect, not the equivalent of the old series, 
 however it may answer to it in etymology. The gen- 
 eral phonetic pattern is impaired to that extent. But 
 if t and k are also shifted to their voiced correspondents 
 d and g, the old series is reestablished in a new form : 
 h, d, g. The pattern as such is preserved, or restored. 
 Provided that the new series h, d, g does not become con- 
 fused with an old series h, d, g of distinct historical 
 antecedents. If there is no such older series, the crea- 
 tion of ah, d, g series causes no difficulties. If there is, 
 the old patterning of sounds can be kept intact only by 
 shifting the old h, d, g sounds in some way. They may 
 become aspirated to hh, dli, gh or spirantized or nasalized 
 or they may develop any other peculiarity that keeps 
 them intact as a series and serves to differentiate them 
 from other series. And this sort of shifting about with- 
 out loss of pattern, or with a minimum loss of it, is 
 probably the most important tendency in the history of 
 speech sounds. Phonetic leveling and "splitting" coun- 
 teract it to some extent but, on the whole, it remains the 
 central unconscious regulator of the course and speed 
 of sound changes. 
 
 The desire to hold on to a pattern, the tendency to 
 "correct" a disturbance by an elaborate chain of sup- 
 plementary changes, often spread over centuries or even 
 millennia — these psychic undercurrents of language are 
 exceedingly difficult to understand in terms of individual 
 psychology, though there can be no denial of their his- 
 torical reality. What is the primary cause of the un-
 
 196 LANGUAGE 
 
 settling of a phonetic pattern and what is the cumulative 
 force that selects these or those particular variations of 
 the individual on which to float the pattern readjust- 
 ments we hardly know. Many linguistic students have 
 made the fatal error of thinking of sound change as a 
 quasi-physiological instead of as a strictly psychological 
 phenomenon, or they have tried to dispose of the problem 
 by bandying such catchwords as "the tendency to in- 
 creased ease of articulation" or ''the cumulative result 
 of faulty perception" (on the part of children, say, in 
 learning to speak). These easy explanations will not 
 do. "Ease of articulation" may enter in as a factor, 
 but it is a rather subjective concept at best. Indians 
 find hopelessly difficult sounds and sound combinations 
 that are simple to us ; one language encourages a phonetic 
 drift that another does everything to fight. "Faulty 
 perception" does not explain that impressive drift in 
 speech sounds which I have insisted upon. It is much 
 better to admit that we do not yet understand the pri- 
 mary cause or causes of the slow drift in phonetics, 
 though we can frequently point to contributing factors. 
 It is likely that we shall not advance seriously until we 
 study the intuitional bases of speech. How can we un- 
 derstand the nature of the drift that frays and reforms 
 phonetic patterns when we have never thought of study- 
 ing sound patterning as such and the "weights" and 
 psychic relations of the single elements (the individual 
 sounds) in these patterns? 
 
 Every linguist knows that phonetic change is fre- 
 quently followed by morphological rearrangements, but 
 he is apt to assume that morphology exercises little or 
 no influence on the course of phonetic history. I am 
 inclined to believe that our present tendency to 
 isolate phonetics and grammar as mutually irrelevant
 
 PHONETIC LAW 197 
 
 linguistic provinces is unfortunate. There are likely to 
 be fundamental relations between them and their re- 
 spective histories that we do not yet fully grasp. After 
 all, if speech sounds exist merely because they are the 
 symbolic carriers of significant concepts and groupings 
 of concepts, why may not a strong drift or a permanent 
 feature in the conceptual sphere exercise a furthering 
 or retarding influence on the phonetic drift? I believe 
 that such influences may be demonstrated and that they 
 deserve far more careful study than they have received. 
 This brings us back to our unanswered question : How 
 is it that both English and German developed the curi- 
 ous alternation of unmodified vowel in the singular 
 {foot, Fuss) and modified vowel in the plural {feet, 
 Fiisse) 1 Was the pre-Anglo-Saxon alternation of fat 
 and foti an absolutely mechanical matter, without other 
 than incidental morphological interest? It is always 
 so represented, and, indeed, all the external facts sup- 
 pprt such a view. The change from o to o, later e, is by 
 no means peculiar to the plural. It is found also in the 
 dative singular {fet), for it too goes back to an older 
 foti. Moreover, fet of the plural applies only to the 
 nominative and accusative; the genitive has fota, the 
 dative fotuni. Only centuries later was the alternation 
 of and e reinterpreted as a means of distinguishing 
 number; o was generalized for the singular, e for the 
 plural. Only when this reassortment of forms took 
 place ^^ was the modern symbolic value of the foot: feet 
 alternation clearly established. Again, we must not for- 
 get that was modified to o (e) in all manner of other 
 grammatical and derivative formations. Thus, a pre- 
 Anglo-Saxon hohan (later hoii) "to hang" corresponded 
 
 16 A type of adjustment generally referred to as "analogical 
 leveling.''
 
 198 LANGUAGE 
 
 to a IwlutJi, hcliith (later liehth) "hangs"; to dom 
 "doom," Mod "blood," and fod "food" corresponded 
 the verbal derivatives domian (later demmi) "to deem," 
 hlodian (later hledan) "to bleed," and fodian (later 
 fedan) "to feed." All this seems to point to the purely 
 mechanical nature of the modification of o to o to e. So 
 many unrelated functions Avere ultimately served by the 
 vocalic change that we cannot believe that it was mo- 
 tivated by any one of them. 
 
 The German facts are entirely analogous. Only later 
 in the history of the language was the vocalic alterna- 
 tion made significant for number. And yet consider 
 the following facts. The change of foti to foti ante- 
 dated that of foti to fote, fot. This may be looked upon 
 as a "lucky accident," for if foti had become fote, fot 
 before the -i had had the chance to exert a retroactive 
 influence on the o, there would have been no difference 
 between the singular and the plural. This would have 
 been anomalous in Anglo-Saxon for a masculine noun. 
 But was the sequence of phonetic changes an "acci- 
 dent"? Consider two further facts. All the Germanic 
 languages were familiar with vocalic change as pos- 
 sessed of functional significance. Alternations like smg, 
 sang, sung (Anglo-Saxon singan, sang, sungen) were 
 ingrained in the linguistic consciousness. Further, the 
 tendency toward the weakening of final syllables was 
 very strong even then and had been manifesting itself 
 in one way and another for centuries. I believe that 
 these further facts help us to understand the actual se- 
 quence of phonetic changes. We may go so far as to 
 say that the o (and u) could afford to stay the change 
 to o (and u) until the destructive drift had advanced 
 to the point where failure to modify the vowel would 
 soon result in morphological embarrassment. At a cer-
 
 PHONETIC LAW 199^ 
 
 tain moment the -i ending of the plural (and analogous 
 endings with i in other formations) was felt to be too 
 weak to quite bear its functional burden. The uncon- 
 scious Anglo-Saxon mind, if I may be allowed a some- 
 what summary way of putting the complex facts, was 
 glad of the opportunity afforded by certain individual 
 variations, until then automatically canceled out, to 
 have some share of the burden thrown on them. These 
 particular variations won through because they so beau- 
 tifully allowed the general phonetic drift to take its 
 course without unsettling the morphological contours of 
 the language. And the presence of symbolic variation 
 (sing, sang, sung) acted as an attracting force on the 
 rise of a new variation of similar character. All these 
 factors were equally true of the German vocalic shift. 
 Owing to the fact that the destructive phonetic drift was 
 proceeding at a slower rate in German than in English, 
 the preservative change of uo to He {u to it) did not need 
 to set in until 300 years or more after the analogous Eng- 
 lish change. Nor did it. And this is to my mind a 
 highly significant fact. Phonetic changes may some- 
 times be unconsciously encouraged in order to keep in- 
 tact the psychological spaces between words and word 
 forms. The general drift seizes upon those individual 
 sound variations that help to preserve the morphological 
 balance or to lead to the new balance that the language 
 is striving for. 
 
 I w^ould suggest, then, that phonetic change is com- 
 pacted of at least three basic strands: (1) A general 
 drift in one direction, concerning the nature of which 
 we know almost nothing but which may be suspected to 
 be of prevailingly dynamic character (tendencies, e.g., 
 to greater or less stress, greater or less voicing of ele- 
 ments) ; (2) A readjusting tendency which aims to pre-
 
 200 LANGUAGE 
 
 serve or restore the fundamental phonetic pattern of the 
 language; (3) A preservative tendency which sets in 
 when a too serious morphological unsettlement is threat- 
 ened by the main drift. I do not imagine for a moment 
 that it is always possible to separate these strands or 
 that this purely schematic statement does justice to the 
 complex forces that guide the phonetic drift. The 
 phonetic pattern of a language is not invariable, but 
 it changes far less readily than the sounds that compose 
 it. Every phonetic element that it possesses may change 
 radically and yet the pattern remain unaffected. It 
 would be absurd to claim that our present English pat- 
 tern is identical with the old Indo-European one, yet it 
 is impressive to note that even at this late day the Eng- 
 lish series of initial consonants: 
 
 p t k 
 b d g 
 f th h 
 
 corresponds point for point to the Sanskrit series: 
 
 h d g 
 bh dh gli 
 p t k 
 
 The relation between phonetic pattern and individual 
 sound is roughly parallel to that which obtains between 
 the morphologic type of a language and one of its spe- 
 cific morphological features. Both phonetic pattern and 
 fundamental type are exceedingly conservative, all su- 
 perficial appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. 
 Which is more so we cannot say. I suspect that they 
 hang together in a way that we cannot at present quite 
 "understand. 
 
 If all the phonetic changes brought about by the 
 phonetic drift were allowed to stand, it is probable that
 
 PHONETIC LAW 201 
 
 most languages would present such irregularities of mor- 
 phological contour as to lose touch with their formal 
 ground-plan. Sound changes work mechanically. Hence 
 they are likely to affect a whole morphological group 
 here — this does not matter — , only part of a morphologi- 
 cal group there — and this may be disturbing. Thus, 
 the old Anglo-Saxon paradigm : 
 
 
 Sing. 
 
 Plur. 
 
 N. Ac. 
 
 fot 
 
 fet (older foti) 
 
 G. 
 
 fotes 
 
 fota 
 
 D. 
 
 fet (older foti) 
 
 fotum 
 
 could not long stand unmodified. The o — e alternation 
 was welcome in so far as it roughly distinguished the 
 singular from the plural. The dative singular fet, how- 
 ever, though justified historically, was soon felt to be 
 an intrusive feature. The analogy of simpler and more 
 numerously represented paradigms created the form fote 
 (compare, e.g., fisc ''fish," dative singular fisce). Fet 
 as a dative becomes obsolete. The singular now had o 
 throughout. But this very fact made the genitive and 
 dative o-forms of the plural seem out of place. The 
 nominative and accusative fet was naturally far more 
 frequently in use than were the corresponding forms of 
 the genitive and dative. These, in the end, could not 
 but follow the analogy of fet. At the very beginning 
 of the Middle English period, therefore, we find that the 
 old paradigm has yielded to a more regular one : 
 
 
 Sing. 
 
 Plur. 
 
 N. Ac. 
 
 *fot 
 
 *fet 
 
 G. 
 
 * fotes 
 
 fete 
 
 D. 
 
 fote 
 
 feten 
 
 The starred forms are the old nucleus around which the 
 new paradigm is built. The unstarred forms are not
 
 202 LANGUAGE 
 
 genealogical kin of their formal prototypes. They are 
 analogical replacements. 
 
 The history of the English language teems with such 
 levelings or extensions. Elder and eldest were at one 
 time the only possible comparative and superlative forms 
 of old (compare German alt, alter, der dlteste; the vowel 
 following the old-, alt- was originally an i, which modified 
 the quality of the stem vowel). The general analogy of 
 the vast majority of English adjectives, however, has 
 caused the replacement of the forms elder and eldest by 
 the forms with unmodified vowel, older and oldest. Elder 
 and eldest survive only as somewhat archaic terms for 
 the older and oldest brother or sister. This illustrates 
 the tendency for words that are psychologically discon- 
 nected from their etymological or formal group to pre- 
 serve traces of phonetic laws that have otherwise left no 
 recognizable trace or to preserve a vestige of a morpho- 
 logical process that has long lost its vitality. A careful 
 study of these survivals or atrophied forms is not without 
 value for the reconstruction of the earlier history of a 
 language or for suggestive hints as to its remoter affilia- 
 tions. 
 
 Analogy may not only refashion forms within the con- 
 fines of a related cluster of forms (a "paradigm") but 
 may extend its influence far beyond. Of a number of 
 functionally equivalent elements, for instance, only one 
 may survive, the rest yielding to its constantly widening 
 influence. This is what happened with the English -s 
 plural. Originally confined to a particular class of mas- 
 culines, though an important class, the -s plural was 
 gradually generalized for all nouns but a mere handful 
 that still illustrate plural types now all but extinct 
 {foot: feet, goose: geese, tootli: teetli, mouse: mice, louse: 
 lice; ox: oxen; child: children; sheep: sheep, deer: deer).
 
 PHONETIC LAW 203 
 
 Thus analogy not only regularizes irregularities that 
 have come in the wake of phonetic processes but intro- 
 duces disturbances, generally in favor of greater sim- 
 plicity or regularity, in a long established system of 
 forms. These analogical adjustments are practically al- 
 ways symptoms of the general morphological drift of 
 the language, 
 
 A morphological feature that appears as the incidental 
 consequence of a phonetic process, like the English plural 
 with modified vowel, may spread by analogy no less read- 
 ily than old features that owe their origin to other than 
 phonetic causes. Once the e-vowel of Middle English 
 fet had become confined to the plural, there was no the- 
 oretical reason why alternations of the type fot: fet and 
 mais: mis might not have become established as a pro- 
 ductive type of number distinction in the noun. As a 
 matter of fact, it did not so become established. The 
 fot: fet type of plural secured but a momentary foothold. 
 It was swept into being by one of the surface drifts of 
 the language, to be swept aside in the Middle English 
 period by the more powerful drift toward the use of 
 simple distinctive forms. It was too late in the day for 
 our language to be seriously interested in such pretty 
 symbolisms as foot: feet. "What examples of the type 
 arose legitimately, in other words via purely phonetic 
 processes, were tolerated for a time, but the type as such 
 never had a serious future. 
 
 It was different in German. The whole series of 
 phonetic changes comprised under the term "umlaut," 
 of which u: ii and au: oi (written du) are but specific 
 examples, struck the German language at a time when 
 the general drift to morphological simplification was not 
 so strong but that the resulting formal types (e.g.. Fuss: 
 Fusse; fallen "to ialV: fallen "to fell"; fi"orn "horn":
 
 204 LANGUAGE 
 
 Gehorne "group of horns"; Haus "house": Hduslein 
 "little house") could keep themselves intact and even 
 extend to forms that did not legitimately come within 
 their sphere of influence. "Umlaut" is still a very live 
 symbolic process in German, possibly more alive to-day 
 than in medieval times. Such analogical plurals as Baum 
 "tree": Bdume (contrast Middle High German houm: 
 houme) and derivatives as lacJien "to laugh": Geldcliter 
 "laughter" (contrast Middle High German greZac/i) show 
 that vocalic mutation has won through to the status of 
 a productive morphologic process. Some of the dialects 
 have even gone further than standard German, at least 
 in certain respects. In Yiddish,^^ for instance, "um- 
 laut" plurals have been formed where there are no 
 Middle High German prototypes or modern literary par- 
 allels, e.g., tog "day": teg "days" (but German Tag: 
 Tags) on the analogy of gast "guest": gest "guests" 
 (German Gast: Gdste) , sliucJi^^ "shoe": shicli "shoes" 
 (but German SchuJi: SchuJie) on the analogy of fus 
 "foot": fis "feet." It is possible that "umlaut" will 
 run its course and cease to operate as a live functional 
 process in German, but that time is still distant. Mean- 
 while all consciousness of the merely phonetic nature of 
 "umlaut" vanished centuries ago. It is now a strictly 
 morphological process, not in the least a mechanical 
 phonetic adjustment. We have in it a splendid example 
 of how a simple phonetic law, meaningless in itself, may 
 eventually color or transform large reaches of the mor- 
 phology of a language. 
 
 17 Isolated from other German dialects in the late fifteenth 
 and early sixteenth centuries. It is therefore a good test for 
 gauging the strength of the tendency to "umlaut," particularly as 
 it has developed a strong drift towards analytic methods, 
 
 18 Ch as in German Buch.
 
 IX 
 
 HOW LANGUAGES INFLUENCE EACH OTHER 
 
 Languages, like cultures, are rarely sufficient unto 
 themselves. The necessities of intercourse bring the 
 speakers of one language into direct or indirect contact 
 with those of neighboring or culturally dominant lan- 
 guages. The intercourse may be friendly or hostile. It 
 may move on the humdrum plane of business and trade 
 relations or it may consist of a borrowing or interchange 
 of spiritual goods — art, science, religion. It would be 
 difficult to point to a completely isolated language or 
 dialect, least of all among the primitive peoples. The 
 tribe is often so small that intermarriages with alien 
 tribes that speak other dialects or even totally unrelated 
 languages are not uncommon. It may even be doubted 
 whether intermarriage, intertribal trade, and general 
 cultural interchanges are not of greater relative sig- 
 nificance on primitive levels than on our own. What- 
 ever the degree or nature of contact between neighboring 
 peoples, it is generally sufficient to lead to some kind of 
 linguistic interinfluencing. Frequently the influence 
 runs heavily in one direction. The language of a people 
 that is looked upon as a center of culture is naturally 
 far more likely to exert an appreciable influence on other 
 languages spoken in its vicinity than to be influenced by 
 them. Chinese has flooded the vocabularies of Corean, 
 Japanese, and Annamite for centuries, but has received 
 nothing in return. In the western Europe of medieval 
 and modern times French has exercised a similar, though 
 
 205
 
 206 LANGUAGE 
 
 probably a less overwhelming, influence. English bor- 
 rowed an immense number of words from the French of 
 the Norman invaders, later also from the court French 
 of Isle de France, appropriated a certain number of 
 affixed elements of derivational value (e.g., -ess of prin- 
 cess, -ard of drunkard, -ty of royalty), may have been 
 somewhat stimulated in its general analytic drift by 
 contact with French,^ and even allowed French to modify 
 its phonetic pattern slightly (e.g., initial v and j in words 
 like veal and judge; in words of Anglo-Saxon origin v 
 and j can only occur after vowels, e.g., over, hedge) . But 
 English has exerted practically no influence on French. 
 The simplest kind of influence that one language may 
 exert on another is the "borrowing" of words. When 
 there is cultural borrowing there is always the likelihood 
 that the associated words may be borrowed too. When 
 the early Germanic peoples of northern Europe first 
 learned of wine-culture and of paved streets from their 
 commercial or warlike contact with the Romans, it was 
 only natural that they should adopt the Latin words 
 for the strange beverage {vinum, English wine, German 
 Wein) and the unfamiliar type of road {strata [via], 
 English street, German Strasse). Later, when Chris- 
 tianity was introduced into England, a number of asso- 
 ciated words, such as hisliop and angel, found their 
 way into English. And so the process has continued un- 
 interruptedly down to the present day, each cultural 
 wave bringing to the language a new deposit of loan- 
 words. The careful study of such loan-words consti- 
 tutes an interesting commentary on the history of cul- 
 ture. One can almost estimate the role which various 
 
 1 The earlier students of English, however, grossly exaggerated 
 the general "disintegrating" effect of French on middle English. 
 Eiiijlish was moving fast toward a more analytic structure long 
 hcfore the French influence set in.
 
 LANGUAGES INFLUENCE EACH OTHER 207 
 
 peoples have played in the development and spread of 
 cultural ideas by taking note of the extent to which 
 their vocabularies have filtered into those of other peo- 
 ples. When we realize that an educated Japanese can 
 hardly frame a single literary sentence without the use 
 of Chinese resources, that to this day Siamese and Bur- 
 mese and Cambodgian bear the unmistakable imprint of 
 the Sanskrit and Pali that came in with Hindu Bud- 
 dhism centuries ago, or that whether we argue for or 
 against the teaching of Latin and Greek our argument 
 is sure to be studded with words that have come to us 
 from Rome and Athens, we get some inkling of what 
 early Chinese culture and Buddhism and classical Medi- 
 terranean civilization have meant in the world's history. 
 There are just five languages that have had an over- 
 whelming significance as carriers of culture. They are 
 classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, and Latin. 
 In comparison with these even such culturally important 
 languages as Hebrew and French sink into a secondary 
 position. It is a little disappointing to learn that the 
 general cultural influence of English has so far been all 
 but negligible. The English language itself is spread- 
 ing because the English have colonized immense terri- 
 tories. But there is nothing to show that it is any- 
 where entering into the lexical heart of other languages 
 as French has colored the English complexion or as 
 Arabic has permeated Persian and Turkish. This fact 
 alone is significant of the power of nationalism, cultural 
 as well as political, during the last century. There are 
 now psychological resistances to borrowing, or rather 
 to new sources of borrowing,^ that were not greatly alive 
 in the Middle Ages or during the Renaissance. 
 
 2 For we still name our new scientific instruments and patent 
 medicines from Greek and Latin.
 
 208 LANGUAGE 
 
 Are there resistances of a more intimate nature to the 
 borrowing of words? It is generally assumed that the 
 nature and extent of borrowing depend entirely on the 
 historical facts of culture relation ; that if German, for 
 instance, has borrowed less copiously than English from 
 Latin and French it is only because Germany has had 
 less intimate relations than England with the culture 
 spheres of classical Rome and France. This is true to 
 a considerable extent, but it is not the whole truth. We 
 must not exaggerate the physical importance of the Nor- 
 man invasion nor underrate the significance of the fact 
 that Germany's central geographical position made it 
 peculiarly sensitive to French influences all through the 
 Middle Ages, to humanistic influences in the latter fif- 
 teenth and early sixteenth centuries, and again to the 
 powerful French influences of the seventeenth and eight- 
 eenth centuries. It seems very probable that the psycho- 
 logical attitude of the borrowing language itself towards 
 linguistic material has much to do with its receptivity 
 to foreign words. English has long been striving for 
 the completely unified, unanalyzed word, regardless of 
 whether it is monosyllabic or polysyllabic. Such words 
 as credible, certitude, intangible are entirely welcome in 
 English because each represents a unitary, well-nuanced 
 idea and because their formal analysis {cred-ihle, cert- 
 itude, in-tang-ihle) is not a necessary act of the uncon- 
 scious mind {cred-, cert-, and tang- have no real exist- 
 ence in English comparable to that of good- in goodness). 
 A word like intangible, once it is acclimated, is nearly 
 as simple a psychological entity as any radical mono- 
 syllable (say vague, tliin, grasp). In German, however, 
 polysyllabic words strive to analyze themselves into 
 significant elements. Hence vast numbers of French 
 and Latin words, borrowed at the height of certain cul-
 
 LANGUAGES INrLUENCE EACH OTHER 209 
 
 tural influences, could not maintain themselves in the 
 language. Latin-German words like kredibel "credi- 
 ble" and French-German words like reussieren "to suc- 
 ceed" offered nothing that the unconscious mind could 
 assimilate to its customary method of feeling and han- 
 dling words. It is as though this unconscious mind said : 
 "I am perfectly willing to accept kredibel if you will 
 just tell me what you mean by kred-." Hence German 
 has generally found it easier to create new words out of 
 its own resources, as the necessity for them arose. 
 
 The psychological contrast between English and Ger- 
 man as regards the treatment of foreign material is a 
 contrast that may be studied in all parts of the world. 
 The Athabaskan languages of America are spoken by 
 peoples that have had astonishingly varied cultural con- 
 tacts, yet nowhere do we find that an Athabaskan dia- 
 lect has borrowed at all freely ^ from a neighboring lan- 
 guage. These languages have always found it easier 
 to create new words by compounding afresh elements 
 ready to hand. They have for this reason been highly 
 resistant to receiving the linguistic impress of the ex- 
 ternal cultural experiences of their speakers. Cam- 
 bodgian and Tibetan ofPer a highly instructive contrast 
 in their reaction to Sanskrit influence. Both are ana- 
 lytic languages, each totally different from the highly- 
 wrought, inflective language of India. Cambodgian is 
 isolating, but, unlike Chinese, it contains many poly- 
 syllabic words whose etymological analysis does not mat- 
 ter. Like English, therefore, in its relation to French 
 and Latin, it welcomed immense numbers of Sanskrit 
 loan-words, many of which are in common use to-day. 
 There was no psychological resistance to them. Classi- 
 cal Tibetan literature was a slavish adaptation of Hindu 
 
 3 One might all but say, "has borrowed at all."
 
 210 LANGUAGE 
 
 Buddhist literature and nowhere has Buddhism im- 
 planted itself more firmly than in Tibet, yet it is strange 
 how few Sanskrit words have found their way into the 
 language. Tibetan was highly resistant to the poly- 
 syllabic words of Sanskrit because they could not auto- 
 matically fall into significant syllables, as they should 
 have in order to satisfy the Tibetan feeling for form. 
 Tibetan was therefore driven to translating the great 
 majority of these Sanskrit words into native equivalents. 
 The Tibetan craving for form was satisfied, though the 
 literally translated foreign terms must often have done 
 violence to genuine Tibetan idiom. Even the proper 
 names of the Sanskrit originals were carefully trans- 
 lated, element for element, into Tibetan ; e.g., Surya- 
 garhha "Sun-bosomed" was carefully Tibetanized into 
 Nyi-mai snying-po "Sun-of heart-the, the heart (or es- 
 sence) of the sun." The study of how a language reacts 
 to the presence of foreign words — rejecting them, trans- 
 lating them, or freely accepting them — may throw much 
 valuable light on its innate formal tendencies. 
 
 The borrowing of foreign words always entails their 
 phonetic modification. There are sure to be foreign 
 sounds or accentual peculiarities that do not fit the native 
 phonetic habits. They are then so changed as to do as 
 little violence as possible to these habits. Frequently 
 we have phonetic compromises. Such an English word 
 as the recently introduced camouflage, as now ordi- 
 narily pronounced, corresponds to the typical phonetic 
 usage of neither English nor French. The aspirated k, 
 the obscure vowel of the second syllable, the precise 
 quality of the I and of the last a, and, above all, the 
 strong accent on the first syllable, are all the results 
 of unconscious assimilation to our English habits of pro- 
 nunciation. They differentiate our camouflage clearly
 
 LANGUAGES INFLUENCE EACH OTHER 211 
 
 from the same word as pronounced by the French. On 
 the other hand, the long, heavy vowel in the third sylla- 
 ble and the final position of the ''zh" sound (like z in 
 Q,zure) are distinctly un-English, just as, in Middle Eng- 
 lish, the initial j and v * must have been felt at first as 
 not strictly in accord with English usage, though the 
 strangeness has worn off by now. In all four of these 
 cases — initial j, initial v, final "zh," and unaccented a 
 of fatJier — English has not taken on a new sound but has 
 merely extended the use of an old one. 
 
 Occasionally a new sound is introduced, but it is 
 likely to melt away before long. In Chaucer's day the 
 old Anglo-Saxon il (written y) had long become un- 
 rounded to i, but a new set of ii- vowels had come in from 
 the French (in such words as due, value, nature). The 
 new u did not long hold its own ; it became diphthongized 
 to iu and was amalgamated with the native iw of words 
 like new and slew. Eventually this diphthong appears 
 as yu, with change of stress — dew (from Anglo-Saxon 
 deaw) like due (Chaucerian dil). Facts like these show 
 how stubbornly a language resists radical tampering with 
 its phonetic pattern. 
 
 Nevertheless, we know that languages do influence 
 each other in phonetic respects, and that quite aside 
 from the taking over of foreign sounds with borrowed 
 words. One of the most curious facts that linguistics 
 has to note is the occurrence of striking phonetic par- 
 allels in totally unrelated or very remotely related lan- 
 guages of a restricted geographical area. These par- 
 allels become especially impressive when they are seen 
 contrastively from a wide phonetic perspective. Here 
 are a few examples. The Germanic languages as a whole 
 have not developed nasalized vowels. Certain Upper 
 
 4 See page 206.
 
 212 LANGUAGE 
 
 German (Suabian) dialects, however, have now nasalized 
 vowels in lieu of the older vowel + nasal consonant (n). 
 Is it only accidental that these dialects are spoken in 
 proximity to French, which makes abundant use of nasal- 
 ized vowels? Again, there are certain general phonetic 
 features that mark off Dutch and Flemish in contrast, 
 say, to North German and Scandinavian dialects. One 
 of these is the presence of unaspirated voiceless stops 
 (p, t, k), which have a precise, metallic quality remi- 
 niscent of the corresponding French sounds, but which 
 contrast with the stronger, aspirated stops of English, 
 North German, and Danish. Even if we assume that 
 the unaspirated stops are more archaic, that they are 
 the unmodified descendants of the old Germanic con- 
 sonants, is it not perhaps a significant historical fact 
 that the Dutch dialects, neighbors of French, were in- 
 hibited from modifying these consonants in accordance 
 with what seems to have been a general Germanic 
 phonetic drift ? Even more striking than these instances 
 is the peculiar resemblance, in certain special phonetic 
 respects, of Russian and other Slavic languages to the 
 unrelated Ural-Altaic languages ^ of the Volga region. 
 The peculiar, dull vowel, for instance, known in Russian 
 as ' ' yeri ' ' ^ has Ural-Altaic analogues, but is entirely 
 wanting in Germanic, Greek, Armenian, and Indo- 
 Iranian, the nearest Indo-European congeners of Slavic. 
 "We may at least suspect that the Slavic vowel is not 
 historically unconnected with its Ural-Altaic parallels. 
 One of the most puzzling cases of phonetic parallelism 
 is afforded by a large number of American Indian lan- 
 guages spoken west of the Rockies. Even at the most 
 
 5 Ugro-Finnic and Turkish (Tartar). 
 
 e Probably, in Sweet's terminology, high-back (or, better, be- 
 tween back and "mixed" positions) -narrow-unrounded. It gen« 
 erally corresponds to an Indo-Europeau long u.
 
 LANGUAGES INFLUENCE EACH OTHER 213 
 
 radical estimate there are at least four totally unrelated 
 linguistic stocks represented in the region from southern 
 Alaska to central California. Nevertheless all, or prac- 
 tically all, the languages of this immense area have 
 some important phonetic features in common. Chief of 
 these is the presence of a "glottalized" series of stopped 
 consonants of very distinctive formation and of quite un- 
 usual acoustic effect.'^ In the northern part of the area 
 all the languages, whether related or not, also possess 
 various voiceless Z-sounds and a series of "velar" (back- 
 guttural) stopped consonants which are etymologically 
 distinct from the ordinary A'-series. It is difficult to 
 believe that three such peculiar phonetic features as I 
 have mentioned could have evolved independently in 
 neighboring groups of languages. 
 
 How are we to explain these and hundreds of similar 
 phonetic convergences? In particular cases we may 
 really be dealing with archaic similarities due to a 
 genetic relationship that it is beyond our present power 
 to demonstrate. But this interpretation will not get 
 us far. It must be ruled entirely out of court, for in- 
 stance, in two of the three European examples I have 
 instanced; both nasalized vowels and the Slavic "yeri" 
 are demonstrably of secondary origin in Indo-European. 
 However we envisage the process in detail, we cannot 
 avoid the inference that there is a tendency for speech 
 sounds or certain distinctive manners of articulation to 
 spread over a continuous area in somewhat the same 
 way that elements of culture ray out from a geographi- 
 cal center. We may suppose that individual variations 
 arising at linguistic borderlands — whether by the un- 
 conscious suggestive influence of foreign speech habits 
 
 7 There seem to be analogous or partly analogous sounds in cer- 
 tain languages of the Caucasus.
 
 214 LANGUAGE 
 
 or by the actual transfer of foreign sounds into the 
 speech of bilingual individuals — have gradually been in- 
 corporated into the phonetic drift of a language. So 
 long as its main phonetic concern is the preservation of 
 its sound patterning, not of its sounds as such, there 
 is really no reason why a language may not uncon- 
 sciously assimilate foreign sounds that have succeeded 
 in worming their way into its gamut of individual va- 
 riations, provided always that these new variations (or 
 reinforced old variations) are in the direction of the 
 native drift. 
 
 A simple illustration will throw light on this con- 
 ception. Let us suppose that two neighboring and un- 
 related languages, A and B, each possess voiceless l- 
 sounds (compare Welsh II). We surmise that this is 
 not an accident. Perhaps comparative study reveals 
 the fact that in language A the voiceless Z-sounds cor- 
 respond to a sibilant series in other related languages, 
 that an old alternation s: sh has been shifted to the new 
 alternation I (voiceless) : s.^ Does it follow that the 
 voiceless I of language B has had the same history ? Not 
 in the least. Perhaps B has a strong tendency toward 
 audible breath release at the end of a word, so that the 
 final I, like a final vowel, was originally followed by a 
 marked aspiration. Individuals perhaps tended to an- 
 ticipate a little the voiceless release and to "unvoice" 
 the latter part of the final Z-sound (very much as the I 
 of English words like felt tends to be partly voiceless 
 in anticipation of the voieelessness of the t). Yet this 
 final I with its latent tendency to unvoicing might never 
 have actually developed into a fully voiceless I had not 
 the presence of voiceless Z-sounds in A acted as an un- 
 
 8 This can actually be demonstrated for one of the Athabaskan 
 dialects of the Yukon.
 
 LANGUAGES INFLUENCE EACH OTHER 215 
 
 conscious stimulus or suggestive push toward a more 
 radical change in the line of B's own drift. Once the 
 final voiceless I emerged, its alternation in related words 
 with medial voiced I is very likely to have led to its 
 analogical spread. The result would be that both A and B 
 have an important phonetic trait in common. Even- 
 tually their phonetic systems, judged as mere assem- 
 blages of sounds, might even become completely assimi- 
 lated to each other, though this is an extreme case hardly 
 ever realized in practice. The highly significant thing 
 about such phonetic interinfluencings is the strong tend- 
 ency of each language to keep its phonetic pattern in- 
 tact. So long as the respective alignments of the similar 
 sounds is different, so long as they have differing ''val- 
 ues" and "weights" in the unrelated languages, these 
 languages cannot be said to have diverged materially 
 from the line of their inherent drift. In phonetics, as 
 in vocabulary, we must be careful not to exaggerate the 
 importance of interlinguistic influences. 
 
 I have already pointed out in passing that English 
 has taken over a certain number of morphological ele- 
 ments from French. English also uses a number of 
 affixes that are derived from Latin and Greek. Some 
 of these foreign elements, like the -ize of ^materialize or 
 the -ahle of breakable, are even productive to-day. Such 
 examples as these are hardly true evidences of a mor- 
 phological influence exerted by one language on an- 
 other. Setting aside the fact that they belong to the 
 sphere of derivational concepts and do not touch the cen- 
 tral morphological problem of the expression of relational 
 ideas, they have added nothing to the structural pecu- 
 liarities of our language. English was already prepared 
 for the relation of pity to piteous by such a native pair 
 as luck and lucky; material and materialize merely
 
 216 LANGUAGE 
 
 swelled the ranks of a form pattern familiar from such 
 instances as wide and widen. In other words, the mor- 
 phological influence exerted by foreign languages on Eng- 
 lish, if it is to be gauged by such examples as I have 
 cited, is hardly different in kind from the mere borrow- 
 ing of words. The introduction of the suffix -ize made 
 hardly more difference to the essential build of the lan- 
 guage than did the mere fact that it incorporated a 
 given number of words. Had English evolved a new 
 future on the model of the synthetic future in French 
 or had it borrowed from Latin and Greek their employ- 
 ment of reduplication as a functional device (Latin 
 tango: tetigi; Greek leipo: leloipa), we should have the 
 right to speak of true morphological influence. But such 
 far-reaching influences are not demonstrable. Within 
 the whole course of the history of the English language 
 we can hardly point to one important morphological 
 change that was not determined by the native drift, 
 though here and there we may surmise that this drift 
 was hastened a little by the suggestive influence of 
 French forms.** 
 
 It is important to realize the continuous, self-contained 
 morphological development of English and the very 
 modest extent to which its fundamental build has been 
 affected by influences from without. The history of the 
 English language has sometimes been represented as 
 though it relapsed into a kind of chaos on the arrival 
 of the Normans, who proceeded to play nine-pins with 
 the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Students are more con- 
 servative today. That a far-reaching analytic develop- 
 ment may take place without such external foreign 
 
 9 In the sphere of syntax one may point to certain French -and 
 Latin influences, but it is doubtful if they ever reached deeper 
 than the written language. Much of this type of influence be- 
 longs rather to literary style than to morphology proper
 
 LANGUAGES INFLUENCE EACH OTHER 217 
 
 influence as English was subjected to is clear from 
 the history of Danish, which has gone even further than 
 English in certain leveling tendencies. English may 
 be conveniently used as an a fortiori test. It was flooded 
 with French loan-words during the later Middle Ages, 
 at a time when its drift toward the analytic type was 
 especially strong. It was therefore changing rapidly 
 both within and on the surface. The wonder, then, is 
 not that it took on a number of external morphological 
 features, mere accretions on its concrete inventory, but 
 that, exposed as it was to remolding influences, it re- 
 mained so true to its own type and historic drift. The 
 experience gained from the study of the English lan- 
 guage is strengthened by all that we know of documented 
 linguistic history. Nowhere do we find any but super- 
 ficial morphological interinfluencings. We may infer 
 one of several things from this: — That a really serious 
 morphological influence is not, perhaps, impossible, but 
 that its operation is so slow that it has hardly ever had 
 the chance to incorporate itself in the relatively small 
 portion of linguistic history that lies open to inspec- 
 tion ; or that there are certain favorable conditions that 
 make for profound morphological disturbances f^'oni 
 without, say a peculiar instability of linguistic typo 
 or an unusual degree of cultural contact, conditions that 
 do not happen to be realized in our documentary ma- 
 terial; or, finally, that we have not the right to assume 
 that a language may easily exert a remolding morphologi- 
 cal influence on another. 
 
 Meanwhile we are confronted by the baffling fact that 
 important traits of morphology are frequently found dis- 
 tributed among widely differing languages within a 
 large area, so widely differing, indeed, that it is cus^ 
 tomary to consider them genetically unrelated. Some-
 
 218 LANGUAGE 
 
 times we may suspect that the resemblance is due to a 
 mere convergence, that a similar morphological feature 
 has grown up independently in unrelated languages. 
 Yet certain morphological distributions are too specific 
 in character to be so lightly dismissed. There must be 
 some historical factor to account for them. Now it 
 should be remembered that the concept of a "linguistic 
 stock" is never definitive^" in an exclusive sense. We 
 can only say, with reasonable certainty, that such 
 and such languages are descended from a common 
 source, but we cannot say that such and such 
 other languages are not genetically related. All we 
 can do is to say that the evidence for relationship 
 is not cumulative enough to make the inference of 
 common origin absolutely necessary. May it not be, 
 then, that many instances of morphological similarity 
 between divergent languages of a restricted area are 
 merely the last vestiges of a community of type and 
 phonetic substance that the destructive work of diverg- 
 ing drifts has now made unrecognizable? There is 
 probably still enough lexical and morphological resem- 
 blance between modern English and Irish to enable us 
 to make out a fairly conclusive case for their genetic 
 relationship on the basis of the present-day descriptive 
 evidence alone. It is true that the case would seem 
 weak in comparison to the case that we can actually 
 make with the help of the historical and the compara- 
 tive data that we possess. It would not be a bad case 
 nevertheless. In another two or three millennia, how- 
 ever, the points of resemblance are likely to have be- 
 come so obliterated that English and Irish, in the ab- 
 sence of all but their own descriptive evidence, will 
 have to be set down as "unrelated" languages. They 
 
 10 See page 163.
 
 LANGUAGES INFLUENCE EACH OTHER 219 
 
 will still have in common certain fundamental morpho- 
 logical features, but it will be difficult to know how to 
 evaluate them. Only in the light of the contrastive 
 perspective afforded by still more divergent languages, 
 such as Basque and Finnish, will these vestigial resem- 
 blances receive their true historic value. 
 
 I cannot but suspect that many of the more signifi- 
 cant distributions of morphological similarities are to 
 be explained as just such vestiges. The theory of "bor- 
 rowing" seems totally inadequate to explain those fun- 
 damental features of structure, hidden away in the very 
 core of the linguistic complex, that have been pointed 
 out as common, say, to Semitic and Hamitic, to the 
 various Soudanese languages, to Malayo-Polynesian and 
 Mon-Khmer ^^ and Munda,^- to Athabaskan and Tlingit 
 and Haida. We must not allow ourselves to be fright- 
 ened away by the timidity of the specialists, who are 
 often notably lacking in the sense of what I have called 
 ** contrastive perspective." 
 
 Attempts have sometimes been made to explain the 
 distribution of these fundamental structural features by 
 the theory of diffusion. We know that myths, religious 
 ideas, types of social organization, industrial devices, 
 and other features of culture may spread from point 
 to point, gradually making themselves at home in cul- 
 tures to which they were at one time alien. We also 
 know that words may be diffused no less freely than 
 cultural elements, that sounds also may be "borrowed," 
 and that even morphological elements may be taken over. 
 We may go further and recognize that certain lan- 
 guages have, in all probability, taken on structural fea- 
 
 11 A group of languages spoken in southeastern Asia, of which 
 Khmer (Cambodgian) is the best known representative. 
 
 12 A group of languages spoken in northeastern India.
 
 220 LANGUAGE 
 
 tures owing to the suggestive influence of neighboring 
 languages. An examination of such cases/^ however, 
 almost invariably reveals the significant fact that they 
 are but superficial additions on the morphological kernel 
 of the language. So long as such direct historical testi- 
 mony as we have gives us no really convincing examples 
 of profound morphological influence by diffusion, we 
 shall do well not to put too much reliance in diffusion 
 theories. On the whole, therefore, we shall ascribe the 
 major concordances and divergences in linguistic form — 
 phonetic pattern and morphology — to the autonomous 
 drift of language, not to the complicating effect of sing- 
 diffused features that cluster now this way, now that. 
 Language is probably the most self-contained, the most 
 massively resistant of all social phenomena. It is easier 
 to kill it off than to disintegrate its individual form. 
 
 13 I have in mind, e.g., the presence of postpositions in Upper 
 Chinook, a feature that is clearly due to the influence of neigh- 
 boring Sahaptin languages; or the use by Takelma of instrumen- 
 tal prefixes, which are likely to have been suggested by neigh- 
 boring "Hokan" languages (Shasta, Karok).
 
 LANGUAGE, RACE AND CULTURE 
 
 Language has a setting. The people that speak it 
 belong to a race (or a number of races), that is, to a 
 group which is set off by physical characteristics from 
 other groups. Again, language does not exist apart from 
 culture, that is, from the socially inherited assemblage 
 of practices and beliefs that determines the texture of 
 our lives. Anthropologists have been in the habit of 
 studying man under the three rubrics of race, language, 
 and culture. One of the first things they do with a 
 natural area like Africa or the South Seas is to map 
 it out from this threefold point of view. These maps 
 answer the questions :What and where are the major 
 divisions of the human animal, biologically considered 
 (e.g., Congo Negro, Egyptian White; Australian Black, 
 Polynesian) ? What are the most inclusive linguistic 
 groupings, the "linguistic stocks," and what is the dis- 
 tribution of each (e.g., the Hamitic languages of north- 
 ern Africa, the Bantu languages of the south ; the 
 Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Melanesia, 
 Micronesia, and Polynesia) ? How do the peoples of 
 the given area divide themselves as cultural beings? 
 what are the outstanding "cultural areas" and what 
 are the dominant ideas in each (e.g., the Mohammedan 
 north of Africa ; the primitive hunting, non-agricultural 
 culture of the Bushmen in the south ; the culture of the 
 Australian natives, poor in physical respects but richly 
 
 221
 
 222 LANGUAGE 
 
 developed in ceremonialism; the more advanced and 
 highly specialized culture of Polynesia) ? 
 
 The man in the street does not stop to analyze his 
 position in the general scheme of humanity. He feels 
 that he is the representative of some strongly integrated 
 portion of humanity — now thought of as a "nation- 
 ality," now as a "race" — and that everything that per- 
 tains to him as a typical representative of this large 
 group somehow belongs together. If he is an Eng- 
 lishman, he feels himself to be a member of the ' ' Anglo- 
 Saxon" race, the "genius" of which race has fashioned 
 the English language and the "Anglo-Saxon" culture 
 of which the language is the expression. Science is 
 colder. It inquires if these three types of classification 
 — racial, linguistic, and cultural — are congruent, if their 
 association is an inherently necessary one or is merely 
 a matter of external history. The answer to the inquiry 
 is not encouraging to "race" sentimentalists. Histori- 
 ans and anthropologists find that races, languages, and 
 cultures are not distributed in parallel fashion, that their 
 areas of distribution intercross in the most bewildering 
 fashion, and that the history of each is apt to follow 
 a distinctive course. Races intermingle in a way that 
 languages do not. On the other hand, languages may 
 spread far beyond their original home, invading the 
 territory of new races and of new culture spheres. A 
 language may even die out in its primary area and 
 live on among peoples violently hostile to the persons 
 of its original speakers. Further, the accidents of his- 
 tory are constantly rearranging the borders of culture 
 areas without necessarily effacing the existing linguistic 
 cleavages. If we can once thoroughly convince our- 
 selves that race, in its only intelligible, that is biological,
 
 LANGUAGE, RACE AND CULTURE 223 
 
 sense, is supremely indifferent to the history of lan- 
 guages and cultures, that these are no more directly ex- 
 plainable on the score of race than on that of the laws 
 of physics and chemistry, we shall have gained a view- 
 point that allows a certain interest to such mystic slogans 
 as Slavophilism, Anglo-Saxondom, Teutonism, and the 
 Latin genius but that quite refuses to be taken in by any 
 of them. A careful study of linguistic distributions and 
 of the history of such distributions is one of the driest 
 of commentaries on these sentimental creeds. 
 
 That a group of languages need not in the least cor- 
 respond to a racial group or a culture area is easily dem- 
 onstrated. "We may even show how a single language in- 
 tercrosses with race and culture lines. The English 
 language is not spoken by a unified race. In the United 
 States there are several millions of negroes who know 
 no other language. It is their mother-tongue, the formal 
 vesture of their inmost thoughts and sentiments. It is 
 as much their property, as inalienably "theirs," as the 
 King of England's. Nor do the English-speaking whites 
 of America constitute a definite race except by way of 
 contrast to the negroes. Of the three fundamental white 
 races in Europe generally recognized by physical an- 
 thropologists — the Baltic or North European, the Alpine, 
 and the Mediterranean — each has numerous English- 
 speaking representatives in America. But does not the 
 historical core of English-speaking peoples, those rela- 
 tively "unmixed" populations that still reside in Eng- 
 land and its colonies, represent a race, pure and single? 
 I cannot see that the evidence points that way. The 
 English people are an amalgam of many distinct strains. 
 Besides the old "Anglo-Saxon," in other words North 
 German, element which is conventionally represented
 
 224 LANGUAGE 
 
 as the basic strain, the English blood comprises Norman 
 French/ Scandinavian, "Celtic,"- and pre-Celtic ele- 
 ments. If by " English ' ' we mean also Scotch and Irish,^ 
 then the term "Celtic" is loosely used for at least two 
 quite distinct racial elements — the short, dark-complex- 
 ioned type of Wales and the taller, lighter, often ruddy- 
 haired type of the Highlands and parts of Ireland. Even 
 if we confine ourselves to the Saxon element, which, 
 needless to say, nowhere appears "pure," we are 
 not at the end of our troubles. We may roughly iden- 
 tif}^ this strain with the racial type now predominant 
 in southern Denmark and adjoining parts of northern 
 Germany. If so, we must content ourselves with the 
 reflection that while the English language is historically 
 most closely affiliated Avith Frisian, in second degree with 
 the other West Germanic dialects (Low Saxon or "Platt- 
 deutsch," Dutch, High German), only in third degree 
 with Scandinavian, the specific ' ' Saxon ' ' racial type that 
 overran England in the fifth and sixth centuries was 
 largely the same as that now represented by the Danes, 
 who speak a Scandinavian language, while the High Ger- 
 
 1 Itself an amalgam of North 'Trench" and Scandinavian ele- 
 ments. 
 
 2 The "Celtic" blood of what is now England and Wales is by 
 no means confined to the Celtic-speaking regions— Wales and, 
 until recently, Cornwall. There is every reason to believe that 
 the invading Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) did not 
 exterminate tlie Brythonic Celts of England nor yet drive them 
 altogether into Wales and Cornwall (there has been far too much 
 "driving" of conquered peoples into mountain fastnesses and 
 land's ends in our histories), but simply intermingled with them 
 and imposed their rule and language upon them. 
 
 3 In practice these three peoples can hardly be kept altogether 
 distinct. The terms have rather a local-sentimental than a 
 clearly racial value. Intermarriage has gone on steadily for 
 centuries and it is only in certain outlying regions that we get 
 relatively pure types, e.g., the Highland Scotch of the Hebrides. 
 In America, English, Scotch, and Irish strands have become 
 inextricably interwoven.
 
 LANGUAGE, RACE AND CULTURE 225 
 
 man-speaking population of central and southern Ger- 
 many * is markedly distinct. 
 
 But what if we ignore these finer distinctions and 
 simply assume that the "Teutonic" or Baltic or North 
 European racial type coincided in its distribution with 
 that of the Germanic languages? Are we not on safe 
 ground then? No, we are now in hotter water than 
 ever. First of all, the mass of the German-speaking 
 population (central and southern Germany, German 
 Switzerland, German Austria) do not belong to the tall, 
 blond-haired, long-headed^ "Teutonic" race at all, but 
 to the shorter, darker-complexioned, short-headed ^ Al- 
 pine race, of which the central population of France, 
 the French Swiss, and many of the western and north- 
 ern Slavs (e.g., Bohemians and Poles) are equally good 
 representatives. The distribution of these "Alpine" 
 populations corresponds in part to that of the old con- 
 tinental "Celts," whose language has everywhere given 
 way to Italic, Germanic, and Slavic pressure. We shall 
 do well to avoid speaking of a "Celtic race," but if we 
 were driven to give the term a content, it would prob- 
 ably be more appropriate to apply it to, roughly, the 
 western portion of the Alpine peoples than to the two 
 island types that I referred to before. These latter were 
 certainly "Celticized," in speech and, partly, in blood, 
 precisely as, centuries later, most of England and part 
 of Scotland was "Teutonized" by the Angles and Sax- 
 ons. Linguistically speaking, the "Celts" of to-day 
 (Irish Gaelic, Manx, Scotch Gaelic, Welsh, Breton) are 
 
 4 The High German now spoken in northern Germany is not of 
 great age, but is due to the spread of standardized German, uased 
 on Upper Saxon, a High German dialect, at the expense of 
 "Plattdeutsch." 
 
 5 "Dolichocephalic." 
 « "Brachycephalic."
 
 226 LANGUAGE 
 
 Celtic and most of the Germans of to-day are Germanic 
 precisely as the American Negro, Americanized Jew, 
 Minnesota Swede, and German- American are "English." 
 But, secondly, the Baltic race was, and is, by no means 
 an exclusively Germanic-speaking people. The north- 
 ernmost "Celts," such as the Highland Scotch, are in 
 all probability a specialized offshoot of this race. What 
 these people spoke before they were Celticized nobody 
 knows, but there is nothing whatever to indicate that 
 they spoke a Germanic language. Their language may 
 quite well have been as remote from any known Indo- 
 European idiom as are Basque and Turkish to-day. 
 Again, to the east of the Scandinavians are non-Germanic 
 members of the race — the Finns and related peoples, 
 speaking languages that are not definitely known to be 
 related to Indo-European at all. 
 
 We cannot stop here. The geographical position of 
 the Germanic languages is such '^ as to make it highly 
 probable that they represent but an outlying transfer of 
 an Indo-European dialect (possibly a Celto-Italic pro- 
 totype) to a Baltic people speaking a language or a 
 group of languages that was alien to Indo-European.* 
 Not only, then, is English not spoken by a unified race 
 at present but its prototype, more likely than not, was 
 originally a foreign language to the race with which 
 
 7 By working back from such data as we possess we can make 
 it probable that these languages were o'-iginally confined to a 
 comparatively small area in northern Germany and Scandinavia. 
 This area is clearly marginal to the total area of distribution of 
 the Indo-European-speaking peoples. Their center of gravity, 
 say 1000 B.C., seems to have lain in southern Riissia. 
 
 8 While this is only a theory, the technical evidence for it ia 
 stronger than one might suppose. There are a surprising 
 number of common and characteristic Germanic words which can- 
 not be connected with known Indo-European radical elements 
 and which may well be survivals of the hypothetical pre-Ger- 
 manic language; such are house, stone, sea, loife (German Haus, 
 Stein, See. Weib).
 
 LANGUAGE, RACE AND CULTURE 227 
 
 English is more particularly associated. We need not 
 seriously entertain the idea that English or the group 
 of languages to which it belongs is in any intelligible 
 sense the expression of race, thi t there are embedded 
 in it qualities that reflect the temperament or "genius" 
 of a particular breed of human beings. 
 
 Many other, and more striking, examples of the lack 
 of correspondence between race and language could be 
 given if space permitted. One instance will do for many. 
 The Malayo-Polynesian languages form a well-defined 
 group that takes in the southern end of the Malay Penin- 
 sula and the tremendous island world to the south and 
 east (except Australia and the greater part of New 
 Guinea). In this vast region we find represented no 
 less than three distinct races — the Negro-like Papuans of 
 New Guinea and Melanesia, the Malay race of Indonesia, 
 and the Polynesians of the outer islands. The Polyne- 
 sians and Malays all speak languages of the Malayo- 
 Polynesian group, while the languages of the Papuans 
 belong partly to this group (Melanesian), partly to the 
 unrelated languages ("Papuan") of New Guinea.® In 
 spite of the fact that the greatest race cleavage in this 
 region lies between the Papuans and the Polynesians, the 
 major linguistic division is of Malayan on the one sidC; 
 Melanesian and Polynesian on the other. 
 
 As with race, so with culture. Particularly in more 
 primitive levels, where the secondarily unifying power 
 of the * ' national ' ' ^° ideal does not arise to disturb the 
 
 9 Only the easternmost part of this island is occupied by 
 Melanesian-speaking Papuans. 
 
 10 A "nationality" is a major, sentimentally unified, group. 
 The historical factors that lead to the feeling of national unity 
 are various — political, cultural, linguistic, geographic, sometimes 
 specifically religious. True racial factors also may enter in, 
 though the accent on "race" has generally a psychological rather 
 than a strictly biological value. In an area dominated by the
 
 228 LANGUAGE 
 
 flow of what we might call natural distributions, is it 
 easy to show that language and culture are not intrinsi- 
 cally associated. Totally unrelated languages share in 
 one culture, closely related languages — even a single lan- 
 guage — belong to distinct culture spheres. There are 
 many excellent examples in aboriginal America. The 
 Athabaskan languages form as clearly unified, as struc- 
 turally specialized, a group as any that I know of.^^ 
 The speakers of these languages belong to four distinct 
 culture areas — the simple hunting culture of western 
 Canada and the interior of Alaska (Loucheux, Chipe- 
 wyan), the buffalo culture of the Plains (Sarcee), the 
 highly ritualized culture of the southwest (Navaho), and 
 the peculiarly specialized culture of northwestern Cali- 
 fornia (Hupa). The cultural adaptability of the Atha- 
 baskan-speaking peoples is in the strangest contrast to 
 the inaccessibility to foreign influences of the languages 
 themselves.^- The Hupa Indians are very typical of the 
 culture area to which they belong. Culturally identical 
 with them are the neighboring Yurok and Karok. There 
 is the liveliest intertribal intercourse between the Hupa, 
 Yurok, and Karok, so much so that all three generally 
 attend an important religious ceremony given by any 
 one of them. It is difficult to say what elements in their 
 combined culture belong in origin to this tribe or that, 
 so much at one are they in communal action, feeling, and 
 
 national sentiment there is a tendency for language and culture 
 to become uniform and specific, so that linguistic and cultural 
 boundaries at least tend to coincide. Even at beat, however, 
 the linguistic unification is never absolute, while the cultural 
 unity is apt to be superficial, of a quasi-political nature, rather 
 than deep and far-reaching. 
 
 11 The Semitic languages, idiosyncratic as they are, are no 
 more definitely ear-marked. 
 
 12 See page 209.
 
 LANGUAGE, RACE AND CULTURE 229 
 
 thought. But their languages are not merely alien to 
 each other; they belong to three of the major American 
 linguistic groups, each with an immense distribution on 
 the northern continent. Hupa, as we have seen, is Atha- 
 baskan and, as such, is also distantly related to Haida 
 (Queen Charlotte Islands) and Tlingit (southern 
 Alaska) ; Yurok is one of the two isolated Californian 
 languages of the Algonkin stock, the center of gravity 
 of which lies in the region of the Great Lakes; Karok 
 is the northernmost member of the Hokan group, which 
 stretches far to the south beyond the confines of Cali- 
 fornia and has remoter relatives along the Gulf of 
 Mexico. 
 
 Returning to English, most of us would readily admit, 
 I believe, that the community of language between Great 
 Britain and the United States is far from arguing a like 
 community of culture. It is customary to say that they 
 possess a common "Anglo-Saxon" cultural heritage, but 
 are not many significant differences in life and feeling 
 obscured by the tendency of the ' ' cultured ' ' to take this 
 common heritage too much for granted? In so far as 
 America is still specifically "English," it is only coloni- 
 ally or vestigially so ; its prevailing cultural drift is 
 partly towards autonomous and distinctive developments, 
 partly towards immersion in the larger European cul- 
 ture of which that of England is only a particular facet. 
 "VVe cannot deny that the possession of a common lan- 
 guage is still and will long continue to be a smoother 
 of the way to a mutual cultural understanding between 
 England and America, but it Is very clear that other 
 factors, some of them rapidly cumulative, are working 
 powerfully to counteract this leveling influence. A com- 
 mor. language cannot indefinitely set the seal on a com-
 
 230 LANGUAGE 
 
 mon culture when the geographical, political, and eco- 
 nomic determinants of the culture are no longer the 
 same throughout its area. 
 
 Language, race, and culture are not necessarily cor- 
 related. This does not mean that they never are. There 
 is some tendency, as a matter of fact, for racial and 
 cultural lines of cleavage to correspond to linguistic ones, 
 though in any given case the latter may not be of the 
 same degree of importance as the others. Thus, there 
 is a fairly definite line of cleavage between the Poly- 
 nesian languages, race, and culture on the one hand and 
 those of the Melanesians on the other, in spite of a con- 
 siderable amount of overlapping.^^ The racial and cul- 
 tural division, however, particularly the former, are of 
 major importance, while the linguistic division is of quite 
 minor significance, the Polynesian languages constituting 
 hardly more than a special dialectic subdivision of the 
 combined Melanesian-Polynesian group. Still clearer- 
 cut coincidences of cleavage may be found. The lan- 
 guage, race, and culture of the Eskimo are markedly 
 distinct from those of their neighbors ; ^* in southern 
 Africa the language, race, and culture of the Bushmen 
 offer an even stronger contrast to those of their Bantu 
 neighbors. Coincidences of this sort are of the greatest 
 significance, of course, but this significance is not one 
 of inherent psychological relation between the three fac- 
 tors of race, language, and culture. The coincidences of 
 cleavage point merely to a readily intelligible historical 
 association. If the Bantu and Bushmen are so sharply 
 
 13 The Fijians, for instance, while of Papuan (negroid) race, 
 are Polynesian rather than Melanesian in their cultural and lin- 
 guistic affinities. 
 
 14 Though even here there is some significant overlapping. The 
 southernmost Eskimo of Alaska were assimilated in culture to 
 their Tlingit neighbors. In northeastern Siberia, too, there is 
 no sharp cultural line between the Eskimo and the Chukchi.
 
 LANGUAGE, RACE AND CULTURE 231 
 
 differentiated in all respects, the reason is simply that 
 the former are relatively recent arrivals in southern Af- 
 rica. The two peoples developed in complete isolation 
 from each other ; their present propinquity is too recent 
 for the slow process of cultural and racial assimilation 
 to have set in very powerfully. As we go back in time, 
 we shall have to assume that relatively scanty popula- 
 tions occupied large territories for untold generations 
 and that contact with other masses of population was 
 not as insistent and prolonged as it later became. The 
 geographical and historical isolation that brought about 
 race differentiations was naturally favorable also to far- 
 reaching variations in language and culture. The very 
 fact that races and cultures which are brought into his- 
 torical contact tend to assimilate in the long run, while 
 neighboring languages assimilate each other only casually 
 and in superficial respects,^^ indicates that there is no 
 profound causal relation between the development of 
 language and the specific development of race and of 
 culture. 
 
 But surely, the wary reader will object, there must 
 be some relation between language and culture, and be- 
 tween language and at least that intangible aspect of race 
 that we call "temperament." Is it not inconceivable 
 that the particular collective qualities of mind that have 
 fashioned a culture are not precisely the same as were 
 responsible for the growth of a particular linguistic 
 morphology? This question takes us into the heart of 
 the most difficult problems of social psychology. It is 
 doubtful if any one has yet attained to sufficient clarity 
 on the nature of the historical process and on the ulti- 
 mate psychological factors involved in linguistic and cul- 
 
 15 The supersession of one language by another is of course not 
 truly a matter of linguistic assimilation.
 
 232 LANGUAGE 
 
 tural drifts to answer it intelligently. I can only very 
 briefly set forth my own views, or rather my general 
 attitude. It would be very difficult to prove that "tem- 
 perament," the general emotional disposition of a peo- 
 ple,^'' is basically responsible for the slant and drift of 
 a culture, however much it may manifest itself in an 
 individual's handling of the elements of that culture. 
 But granted that temperament has a certain value for 
 the shaping of culture, difficult though it be to say just 
 how, it does not follow that it has the same value for 
 the shaping of language. It is impossible to show that 
 the form of a language has the slightest connection with 
 national temperament. Its line of variation, its drift, 
 runs inexorably in the channel ordained for it by its his- 
 toric antecedents; it is as regardless of the feelings and 
 sentiments of its speakers as is the course of a river of the 
 atmospheric humors of the landscape. I am convinced 
 that it is futile to look in linguistic structure for dif- 
 ferences corresponding to the temperamental variationts 
 which are supposed to be correlated with race. In this 
 connection it is well to remember that the emotional 
 aspect of our psychic life is but meagerly expressed in 
 the build of language.^^ 
 
 Language and our thought-grooves are inextricably in- 
 terwoven, are, in a sense, one and the same. As there is 
 nothing to show that there are significant racial differ- 
 
 16 "Temperament" is a difficult term to work with. A great 
 deal of what is loosely charged to national "temperament" is 
 really notliing but customary behavior, the effect of traditional 
 ideals of conduct. In a culture, for instance, that does not look 
 kindly upon demonstrativeness, the natural tendency to the dis- 
 play of emotion becomes more than normally inhibited. It would 
 be quite misleading to argue from tlie customary inhibition, a 
 cultural fact, to the native temperament. But ordinarily we can 
 get at human conduct only as it is culturally modifie'. Tem- 
 perament in the raw is a highly elusive thing. 
 
 17 See pages 39, 40.
 
 LANGUAGE, RACE AND CULTURE 233 
 
 ences in the fundamental conformation of thought, it 
 follows that the infinite variability of linguistic form, 
 another name for the infinite variability of the actual 
 process of thought, cannot be an index of such significant 
 racial differences. This is only apparently a paradox. 
 The latent content of all languages is the same — the in- 
 tuitive science of experience. It is the manifest form 
 that is never twice the same, for this form, which we call 
 linguistic morphology, is nothing more nor less than a 
 collective art of thought, an art denuded of the irrele- 
 vancies of individual sentiment. At last analysis, then, 
 language can no more flow from race as such than can 
 the sonnet form. 
 
 Nor can I believe that culture and language are in 
 any true sense causally related. Culture may be defined 
 as what a society does and thinks. Language is a par- 
 ticular how of thought. It is difficult to see what par- 
 ticular causal relations may be expected to subsist be- 
 tween a selected inventory of experience (culture, a 
 pignificant selection made by society) and the particular 
 manner in which the society expresses all experience. 
 The drift of culture, another way of saying history, is a 
 complex series of changes in society's selected inventory 
 ■ — additions, losses, changes of emphasis and relation. 
 The drift of language is not properly concerned with 
 changes of content at all, merely with changes in formal 
 expression. It is possible, in thought, to change every 
 sound, word, and concrete concept of a language with- 
 out changing its inner actuality in the least, just as one 
 can pour into a fixed mold water or plaster or molten 
 gold. If it can be shown that culture has an innate form, 
 a series of contours, quite apart from subject-matter of 
 any description whatsoever, we have a something in 
 culture that may serve as a term of comparison with
 
 234 LANGUAGE 
 
 and possibly a means of relating it to language. But 
 until such purely formal patterns of culture are dis- 
 covered and laid bare, we shall do well to hold the drifts 
 of language and of culture to be non-comparable and 
 unrelated processes. From this it follows that all at- 
 tempts to connect particular types of linguistic mor- 
 phology with certain correlated stages of cultural devel- 
 opment are vain. Rightly understood, such correla- 
 tions are rubbish. The merest coup d'oeil verifies our 
 theoretical argument on this point. Both simple and 
 complex types of language of an indefinite number of 
 varieties may be found spoken at any desired level of 
 cultural advance. When it comes to linguistic form, 
 Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confuciua 
 with the head-hunting savage of Assam. 
 
 It goes without saying that the mere content of lan- 
 guage is intimately related to culture. A society that 
 has no knowledge of theosophy need have no name for it ; 
 aborigines that had never seen or heard of a horse were 
 compelled to invent or borrow a word for the animal 
 when they made his acquaintance. In the sense that the 
 vocabulary of a language more or less faithfully reflects 
 the culture whose purposes it serves it is perfectly true 
 that the history of language and the history of culture 
 move along parallel lines. But this superficial and ex- 
 traneous kind of parallelism is of no real interest to the 
 linguist except in so far as the growth or borrowing of 
 new words incidentally throws light on the formal trends 
 of the language. The linguistic student should never 
 make the mistake of identifying a language with its dic- 
 tionary. 
 
 If both this and the preceding chapter have been 
 largely negative in their contentions, I believe that they 
 have been healthily so. There is perhaps no better way
 
 LANGUAGE, RACE AND CULTURE 235 
 
 to learn the essential nature of speech than to realize 
 what it is not and what it does not do. Its superficial 
 connections with other historic processes are so close 
 that it needs to be shaken free of them if we are to see 
 it in its own right. Everything that we have so far 
 seen to be true of language points to the fact that it is 
 the most significant and colossal work that the human 
 spirit has evolved — nothing short of a finished form of 
 expression for all communicable experience. This form 
 may be endlessly varied by the individual without 
 thereby losing its distinctive contours; and it is con- 
 stantly reshaping itself as is all art. Language is the 
 most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous 
 and anonymous work of unconscious generations.
 
 XI 
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 
 
 Languages are more to us than systems of thought- 
 transference. They are invisible garments that drape 
 themselves about our spirit and give a predetermined 
 form to all its symbolic expression. When the expres- 
 sion is of unusual significance, we call it literature.^ Art 
 is so personal an expression that we do not like to feel 
 that it is bound to predetermined form of any sort. The 
 possibilities of individual expression are infinite, lan- 
 guage in particular is the most fluid of mediums. Yet 
 some limitation there must be to this freedom, some re- 
 sistance of the medium. In great art there is the illu- 
 sion of absolute freedom. The formal restraints imposed 
 by the material — paint, black and white, marble, piano 
 tones, or whatever it may be — are not perceived ; it is as 
 though there were a limitless margin of elbow-room be- 
 tween the artist's fullest utilization of form and the 
 most that the material is innately capable of. The artist 
 has intuitively surrendered to the inescapable tyranny 
 of the material, made its brute nature fuse easily with 
 his conception.^ The material "disappears" precisely 
 
 1 1 can hardly stop to define just what kind of expression is 
 "significant" enough to be called art or literature. Besides, I do 
 not exactly know. We shall have to take literature for granted. 
 
 2 This "intuitive surrender" has nothing to do with subservience 
 to artistic convention. More than one revolt in modern art has 
 been dominated by the desire to get out of the material just 
 what it is really capable of. The impressionist wants light and 
 color because paint can give him just these; "literature" in paint- 
 ing, the sentimental suggestion of a "story," is otfensive to him 
 
 236
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 237 
 
 because there is nothing in the artist's conception to in- 
 dicate that any other material exists. For the time be- 
 ing, he, and we with him, move in the artistic medium 
 as a fish moves in the water, oblivious of the existence 
 of an alien atmosphere. No sooner, however, does the 
 artist transgress the law of his medium than we realize 
 with a start that there is a medium to obey. 
 
 Language is the medium of literature as marble or 
 bronze or clay are the materials of the sculptor. Since 
 every language has its distinctive peculiarities, the in- 
 nate formal limitations — and possibilities — of one liter- 
 ature are never quite the same as those of another. The 
 literature fashioned out of the form and substance of a 
 language has the color and the texture of its matrix. 
 The literary artist may never be conscious of just how 
 he is hindered or helped or otherwise guided by the 
 matrix, but when it is a question of translating his work 
 into another language, the nature of the original matrix 
 manifests itself at once. All his effects have been cal- 
 culated, or intuitively felt, with reference to the formal 
 "genius" of his own language; they cannot be carried 
 over without loss or modification. Croce ^ is therefore 
 perfectly right in saying that a work of literary art 
 can never be translated. Nevertheless literature does get 
 itself translated, sometimes with astonishing adequacy. 
 This brings up the question whether in the art of lit- 
 erature there are not intertwined two distinct kinds or 
 levels of art — a generalized, non-linguistic art, which 
 can be transferred without loss into an alien linguistic 
 medium, and a specifically linguistic art that is not trans- 
 
 because he does not want the virtue of his particular form to be 
 dimmed by shadows from another medium. Similarly, the poet, 
 as never before, insists that words mean just what they really 
 mean. 
 
 3 See Benedetto Croce, "Esthetic."
 
 238 LANGUAGE 
 
 ferable.* I believe the distinction is entirely valid, 
 though we never get the two levels pure in practice. 
 Literature moves in language as a medium, but that 
 medium comprises two layers, the latent content of lan- 
 guage — our intuitive record of experience — and the par- 
 ticular conformation of a given language — the specific 
 how of our record of experience. Literature that draws 
 its sustenance mainly — never entirely — from the lower 
 level, say a play of Shakespeare's, is translatable with- 
 out too great a loss of character. If it moves in the 
 upper rather than in the lower level — a fair example is 
 a lyric of Swinburne's — it is as good as untranslatable. 
 Both types of literary expression may be great or 
 mediocre. 
 
 There is really no mystery in the distinction. It can 
 be clarified a little by comparing literature with science. 
 A scientific truth is impersonal, in its essence it is un- 
 tinctured by the particular linguistic medium in which 
 it finds expression. It can as readily deliver its mes- 
 sage in Chinese ^ as in English. Nevertheless it must 
 have some expression, and that expression must needs 
 be a linguistic one. Indeed the apprehension of the sci- 
 entific truth is itself a linguistic process, for thought is 
 
 4 The question of the transferability of art productions seems 
 to me to be of genuine theoretic interest. For all that we speak 
 of the sacrosanct uniqueness of a given art work, we know very 
 well, though we do not always admit it, that not all productions 
 are equally intractable to transference. A Chopin etude is in- 
 violate; it moves altogether in the world of piano tone. A Bach 
 fugue is transferable into another set of musical timbres with- 
 out serious loss of esthetic significance. Chopin plays with the 
 language of the piano as though no other lanfjiiage existed (the 
 medium "disappears") ; Bach speaks the langnage of the piano 
 as a handy means of giving outward expression to a conception 
 wrought in the generalized language of tone. 
 
 5 i^rovided, of course, Chinese is careful to provide itself with 
 the necessary scientific vocabulary. Like any other language, 
 it can do so without serious diflSculty if the need arises.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 239 
 
 nothing but language denuded of its outward garb. The 
 proper medium of scientific expression is therefore a gen- 
 eralized language that may be defined as a symbolic 
 algebra of which all known languages are translations. 
 One can adequately translate scientific literature because 
 the original scientific expression is itself a translation. 
 Literary expression is personal and concrete, but this 
 does not mean that its significance is altogether bound up 
 with the accidental qualities of the medium. A truly 
 deep symbolism, for instance, does not depend on the 
 verbal associations of a particular language but rests 
 securely on an intuitive basis that underlies all lin- 
 guistic expression. The artist's "intuition," to use 
 Croce's term, is immediately fashioned out of a gener- 
 alized human experience — thought and feeling — of 
 which his own individual experience is a highly per- 
 sonalized selection. The thought relations in this deeper 
 level have no specific linguistic vesture ; the rhythms are 
 free, not bound, in the first instance, to the traditional 
 rhythms of the artist's language. Certain artists whose 
 spirit moves largely in the non-linguistic (better, in the 
 generalized linguistic) layer even find a certain diffi- 
 culty in getting themselves expressed in the rigidly set 
 terms of their accepted idiom. One feels that they are 
 unconsciously striving for a generalized art language, a 
 literary algebra, that is related to the sum of all known 
 languages as a perfect mathematical symbolism is re- 
 lated to all the roundabout reports of mathematical rela- 
 tions that normal speech is capable of conveying. Their 
 art expression is frequently strained, it sounds at times 
 like a translation from an unknown original — which, in- 
 deed, is precisely what it is. These artists — Whitmans 
 and Brownings — impress us rather by the greatness of 
 their spirit than the felicity of their art. Their relative
 
 240 LANGUAGE 
 
 failure is of the greatest diagnostic value as an index of 
 the pervasive presence in literature of a larger, more in- 
 tuitive linguistic medium than any particular language. 
 
 Nevertheless, human expression being what it is, the 
 greatest — or shall we say the most satisfying — literary 
 artists, the Shakespeares and Heines, are those who have 
 known subconsciously to fit or trim the deeper intuition 
 to the provincial accents of their daily speech. In them 
 there is no effect of strain. Their personal "intuition" 
 appears as a completed synthesis of the absolute art of 
 intuition and the innate, specialized art of the lin- 
 guistic medium. With Heine, for instance, one is under 
 the illusion that the universe speaks German. The ma- 
 terial ''disappears." 
 
 Every language is itself a collective art of expression. 
 There is concealed in it a particular set of esthetic fac- 
 tors — phonetic, rhythmic, symbolic, morphological — 
 which it does not completely share with any other lan- 
 guage. These factors may either merge their potencies 
 with those of that unknown, absolute language to which 
 I have referred — this is the method of Shakespeare and 
 Heine — or they may weave a private, technical art fabric 
 of their own, the innate art of the language intensified 
 or sublimated. The latter type, the more technically 
 "literary" art of Swinburne and of hosts of delicate 
 "minor" poets, is too fragile for endurance. It is built 
 out of spiritualized material, not out of spirit. The 
 successes of the Swinburnes are as valuable for diagnostic 
 purposes as the semi-failures of the Brownings. They 
 show to what extent literary art may lean on the col- 
 lective art of the language itself. The more extreme 
 technical practitioners may so over-individualize this col- 
 lective art as to make it almost unendurable. One is
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 241 
 
 not always thankful to have one 's flesh and blood frozen 
 to ivory. 
 
 An artist must utilize the native esthetic resources of 
 his speech. He may be thankful if the given palette of 
 colors is rich, if the springboard is light. But he de- 
 serves no special credit for felicities that are the lan- 
 guage's own. We must take for granted this language 
 with all its qualities of flexibility or rigidity and see 
 the artist's work in relation to it. A cathedral on the 
 lowlands is higher than a stick on Mont Blanc. In other 
 words, we must not commit the folly of admiring a 
 French sonnet because the vowels are more sonorous 
 than our own or of condemning Nietzsche's prose be- 
 cause it harbors in its texture combinations of consonants 
 that would affright on English soil. To so judge litera- 
 ture would be tantamount to loving "Tristan und Isolde" 
 because one is fond of the timbre of horns. There are 
 certain things that one language can do supremely well 
 which it would be almost vain for another to attempt. 
 Generally there are compensations. The vocalism of 
 English is an inherently drabber thing than the vowel 
 scale of French, yet English compensates for this draw- 
 back by its greater rhythmical alertness. It is even 
 doubtful if the innate sonority of a phonetic system 
 counts for as much, as esthetic determinant, as the rela- 
 tions between the sounds, the total gamut of their simi- 
 larities and contrasts. As long as the artist has the 
 wherewithal to lay out his sequences and rhythms, it 
 matters little what are the sensuous qualities of the ele- 
 ments of his material. 
 
 The phonetic groundwork of a language, however, is 
 only one of the features that give its literature a cer- 
 tain direction. Far more important are its morphologi-
 
 242 LANGUAGE 
 
 eal peculiarities. It makes a great deal of difference 
 for the development of style if the language can or can- 
 not create compound words, if its structure is synthetic 
 or analytic, if the words of its sentences have considera- 
 ble freedom of position or are compelled to fall into a 
 rigidly determined sequence. The major characteristics 
 of style, in so far as style is a technical matter of the 
 building and placing of words, are given by the language 
 itself, quite as inescapably, indeed, as the general acoustic 
 effect of verse is given by the sounds and natural ac- 
 cents of the language. These necessary fundamentals 
 of style are hardly felt by the artist to constrain his 
 individuality of expression. They rather point the way 
 to those stylistic developments that most suit the natural 
 bent of the language. It is not in the least likely that a 
 truly great style can seriously oppose itself to the basic 
 form patterns of the language. It not only incorporates 
 them, it builds on them. The merit of such a style as 
 W. H. Hudson's or George Moore's" is that it does with 
 ease and economy what the language is always trying to 
 do. Carlylese, though individual and vigorous, is yet 
 not style ; it is a Teutonic mannerism. Nor is the prose 
 of Milton and his contemporaries strictly English ; it is 
 semi-Latin done into magnificent English words. 
 
 It is strange how long it has taken the European lit- 
 eratures to learn that style is not an absolute, a some- 
 thing that is to be imposed on the language from Greek 
 or Latin models, but merely the language itself, run- 
 ning in its natural grooves, and with enough of an indi- 
 vidual accent to allow the artist's personality to be felt 
 as a presence, not as an acrobat. "We understand more 
 clearly now that what is effective and beautiful in one 
 
 fi Aside from iiidividnal peculiarities of diction, the selection 
 and evaluation of particular words as such.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 243 
 
 language is a vice in another. Latin and Eskimo, with 
 their highly inflected forms, lend themselves to an elabo- 
 rately periodic structure that would be boring in Eng- 
 lish. English allows, even demands, a looseness that 
 would be insipid in Chinese. And Chinese, with its un- 
 modified words and rigid sequences, has a compactness 
 of phrase, a terse parallelism, and a silent suggestiveness 
 that would be too tart, too mathematical, for the English 
 genius. While we cannot assimilate the luxurious periods 
 of Latin nor the pointilliste style of the Chinese classics, 
 we can enter sympathetically into the spirit of these 
 alien techniques. 
 
 I believe that any English poet of to-day would be 
 thankful for the concision that a Chinese poetaster at- 
 tains without effort. Here is an example : ^ 
 
 Wu-river * stream mouth evening sun sink, 
 North look Liao-Tung,^ not see home. 
 Steam whistle sevei-al noise, sky-earth boundless, 
 Float float one reed out Middle-Kingdom. 
 
 These twenty-eight syllables may be clumsily interpreted : 
 "At the mouth of the Yangtsze River, as the sun is 
 about to sink, I look north toward Liao-Tung but do not 
 see my home. The steam-whistle shrills several times on 
 the boundless expanse where meet sky and earth. The 
 steamer, floating gently like a hollow reed, sails out of 
 the Middle Kingdom." ^*^ But we must not envy Chinese 
 its terseness unduly. Our more sprawling mode of ex- 
 pression is capable of its own beauties, and the more 
 
 7 Not by any means a great poem, merely a bit of occasional 
 verse written by a young Chinese friend of mine when lie left 
 Shanghai for Canada. 
 
 8 The old name of the country about the moutk of the Yangtsze. 
 
 9 A province of Manchuria. 
 1" I.e., China.
 
 244 LANGUAGE 
 
 compact luxuriance of Latin style has its loveliness too. 
 There are almost as many natural ideals of literary style 
 as there are languages. Most of these are merely po- 
 tential, awaiting the hand of artists who will never come. 
 And yet in the recorded texts of primitive tradition 
 and song there are many passages of unique vigor and 
 beauty. The structure of the language often forces an 
 assemblage of concepts that impresses us as a stylistic 
 discovery. Single Algonkin words are like tiny imagist 
 poems. We must be careful not to exaggerate a fresh- 
 ness of content that is at least half due to our fresh- 
 ness of approach, but the possibility is indicated none 
 the less of utterly alien literary styles, each distinctive 
 with its disclosure of the search of the human spirit for 
 beautiful form. 
 
 Probably nothing better illustrates the formal depend- 
 ence of literature on language than the prosodic aspect 
 of poetry. Quantitative verse was entirely natural to 
 the Greeks, not merely because poetry grew up in con- 
 nection with the chant and the dance,^^ but because alter- 
 nations of long and short syllables were keenly live facts 
 in the daily economy of the language. The tonal ac- 
 cents, which were only secondarily stress phenomena, 
 helped to give the syllable its quantitative individuality. 
 When the Greek meters were carried over into Latin 
 verse, there was comparativly little strain, for Latin 
 too was characterized by an acute awareness of quan- 
 titative distinctions. However, the Latin accent was 
 more markedly stressed than that of Greek. Probably, 
 therefore, the purely quantitative meters modeled after 
 
 11 Poetry everywhere is inseparable in its origins from the 
 singing voice and the measure of the dance. Yet accentual and 
 syllabic types of verse, rather than quantitative verse, seem to be 
 tlie prevailing norms.
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 2i5 
 
 the Greek were felt as a shade more artificial than in 
 the language of their origin. The attempt to cast Eng- 
 lish verse into Latin and Greek molds has never been 
 successful. The dynamic basis of English is not quan- 
 tity,^^ but stress, the alternation of accented and un- 
 accented syllables. This fact gives English verse an 
 entirely different slant and has determined the develop- 
 ment of its poetic forms, is still responsible for the 
 evolution of new forms. Neither stress nor syllabic 
 weight is a very keen psychologic factor in the dynamics 
 of French. The syllable has great inherent sonority and 
 does not fluctuate significantly as to quantity and stress. 
 Quantitative or accentual metrics would be as artificial 
 in French as stress metrics in classical Greek or quan- 
 titative or purely syllabic metrics in English. French 
 prosody was compelled to develop on the basis of unit 
 syllable-groups. Assonance, later rhyme, could not but 
 prove a welcome, an all but necessary, means of articu- 
 lating or sectioning the somewhat spineless flow of son- 
 orous syllables. English was hospitable to the French 
 suggestion of rhyme, but did not seriously need it in 
 its rhythmic economy. Hence rhyme has always been 
 strictly subordinated to stress as a somewhat decorative 
 feature and has been frequently dispensed with. It is 
 no psychologic accident that rhyme came later into 
 English than in French and is leaving it sooner.^^ 
 Chinese verse has developed along very much the same 
 lines as French verse. The syllable is an even more 
 
 12 Quantitative distinctions exist as an objective fact. They 
 have not the same inner, psychological value that they had in 
 Greek. 
 
 13 Verhaeren was no slave to the Alexandrine, yet he remarked 
 to Symons, a propos of the translation of Les Aubes, that while 
 he approved of the use of rhymeless verse in the English version, 
 he found it "meaningless" in French.
 
 246 LANGUAGE 
 
 integral and sonorous unit than in French, while quan- 
 tity and stress are too uncertain to form the basis of a 
 metric system. Syllable-groups— so and so many syl- 
 lables per rhythmic unit— and rhyme are therefore two 
 of the controlling factors in Chinese prosody. The third 
 factor, the alternation of syllables with level tone and 
 syllables with inflected (rising or falling) tone, is pecu- 
 liar to Chinese. 
 
 To summarize, Latin and Greek verse depends on the 
 principle of contrasting weights; English verse, on the 
 principle of contrasting stresses; French verse, on the 
 principles of number and echo ; Chinese verse, on the 
 principles of number, echo, and contrasting pitches. 
 Each of these rhythmic systems proceeds from the un- 
 conscious dynamic habit of the language, falling from 
 the lips of the folk. Study carefully the phonetic sys- 
 tem of a language, above all its dynamic features, and 
 you can tell what kind of a verse it has developed — or, if 
 history has played pranks with its phychology, what 
 kind of verse it should have developed and some day 
 will. 
 
 Whatever be the sounds, accents, and forms of a lan- 
 guage, however these lay hands on the shape of its lit- 
 erature, there is a subtle law of compensations that gives 
 the artist space. If he is squeezed a bit here, he can 
 swing a free arm there. And generally he has rope 
 enough to hang himself with, if he must. It is not 
 strange that this should be so. Language is itself the 
 collective art of expression, a summary of thousands 
 upon thousands of individual intuitions. The individual 
 goes lost in the collective creation, but his personal ex- 
 pression has left some trace in a certain give and flexi- 
 bility that are inherent in all collective works of the 
 human spirit. The language is ready, or can be quickly
 
 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 247 
 
 made r^ady, to define the artist's individuality. If no 
 literary artist appears, it is not essentially because the 
 language is too weak an instrument, it is because the cul- 
 ture of the people is not favorable to the growth of such 
 personality as seeks a truly individual verbal expression
 
 INDEX 
 
 Note. Italicized entries are names of languages or groups of languages. 
 
 Abbreviation of stem, 26 
 Accent, stress, 26, 36, 48, 55, 
 
 61, 64; as grammatical 
 
 process, 82, 83; importance 
 
 of, 118, 119, 120; metrical 
 
 value of, 244, 245, 246 
 "Accent," 44 
 "Adam's apple," 48 
 Adjective, 123, 124, 125 
 Affixation, 26, 64, 70-6 
 Affixing languages, 133, 134, 
 
 137 
 African languages, pitch in, 55 
 Agglutination, 140-3 
 Agglutinative languages, 130, 
 
 136-8, 139, 146, 147, 148, 
 
 150, 151, 155 
 Agglutinative-fusional, 148, 150 
 Agglutinative-isolating, 148, 150 
 Algonkin languages (N. Amer. ) , 
 
 70, 74, 134, 151, 229, 244 
 Alpine race, 223, 225 
 Analogical leveling, 193, 197, 
 
 200-3 
 Analytic tendency, 135, 136, 
 
 148, 150, 151, 154, 216, 217 
 Angles, 224, 225 
 Anglo-Saxon, 28, 175, 183, 185, 
 
 186-8, 191, 197, 198, 201 
 Anglo-Saxon culture, 229; race, 
 
 222, 223, 224 
 Annamite (S. E. Asia), 66, 
 
 150, 205 
 Apache (N. Amer.), 71 
 Arabic, 76, 77, 135, 151, 207 
 Armenian, 163, 212 
 Art, 236-40; language as, 233, 
 
 235, 240, 241, 246. 247; 
 
 transferability of, 237, 238 
 
 Articulation, ease of, 196; 
 
 types of, drift toward, 194 
 Articulations, laryngeal, 49, 
 
 50; manner of consonantal, 
 
 52, 53; nasal, 50, 51; oral, 
 51, 52; place of consonantal, 
 
 53, 54; vocalic, 52 
 Art/an. See Indo-European. 
 Aspect, 114 
 
 Association of concepts and 
 speech elements, 38, 39 
 
 Associations fundamental to 
 speech, 10, 11 
 
 Athalaskan languages (N. 
 Amer.), 6, 71, 77, 83, 105, 
 209, 214, 219, 228, 229 
 
 Athabaskans, cultures of, 228 
 
 Attic dialect, 162 
 
 Attribution, 101 
 
 Auditory cycle in language, 17 
 
 Australian culture, 221, 222 
 
 Avestan, 175 
 
 B 
 
 Bach, 238 
 
 Baltic race, 223, 225, 226 
 
 Bantu languages (Africa), 71, 
 113, 122, 123, 134, 135, 151, 
 221, 230 
 
 Bantus, 230, 231 
 
 Basque (Pyrenees), 164, 210 
 
 Bengali (India), 155, 163 
 
 Berber. See Hamitic. 
 
 Bohemians, 225 
 
 BontoG Igorot (Philippines), 
 75, 81 
 
 Borrowing, morphological, 215- 
 17, 219, 220 
 
 Borrowing, word: 205-7; pho- 
 netic adaptation in. 210, 211; 
 resistances to, 207-10 
 
 249
 
 250 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Breton, 225 
 Broncliiul tubes, 48 
 Browning, 239, 240 
 Buddhism, influence of, 207, 
 
 209 
 Burmese, 207 
 
 Bushman (S. Africa), 55, 230 
 Bushmen, 221, 230, 231 
 
 C 
 
 Camlodgian (S. E. Asia), 71, 
 
 75, 108, 134, 150, 155, 207, 
 209, 219 
 
 Carlyle, 242 
 
 Carrier (British Columbia), 71 
 Case, 115. See Attrilnition ; 
 Object; Personal relations; 
 Subject. 
 Case-system, history of, 174-7 
 Caucasus, languages of, 213 
 Celtic. See Celts. 
 Celtic languages, 78, 79 
 Celts, 224, 225, 226; Brytlionic, 
 
 224 
 "Cerebral" articulations, 54 
 Chaucer, English of, 170, 188, 
 
 191, 211 
 Chimariko (N. California), 73 
 Chinese: absence of affixes, 70; 
 analytic character, 135, 136; 
 attribution, 101; compounds, 
 67 ; grammatical concepts 
 illustrated, 96, 97; influ- 
 ence, 205, 207; "inner form," 
 132; pitch accent, 55, 83, 84; 
 radical words, 29 ; relational 
 use of material words, 108; 
 sounds, 49; stress, 119; 
 structure, 150, 154, 155; 
 style, 243 ; survivals, mor- 
 phological, 152; symbolism, 
 134; verse, 2^3, 244, 245; 
 word duplication, 80; word 
 order, 66. 97, 118 
 Chinooh (K Amer.), &Q, 73, 
 
 76, 80, 121, 122, 123. 124, 
 135. 136. 151, 155, 220 
 
 Chi'peu-unu (N". Amer.), 71; C. 
 
 Indians. 228 
 Chopin, 238 
 
 Christianity, influence of, 206 
 
 Chukchi, 230 
 
 Classification: of concepts, 
 rigid, 104, 105; of linguistic 
 types, 129-56. See Structure, 
 linguistic. 
 
 "Clicks," 55, 81 
 
 Composition, 29, 30, 64, 145; 
 absence of, in certain lan- 
 guages, 68; types of, 69, 70; 
 word order as related to, 
 67, 68 
 
 Concepts, 12, 25-30, 31 
 
 Concepts, grammatical: analy- 
 sis of, in sentence, 86-94; 
 classification of, 104, 105, 
 109-13; concrete, 86, 87, 92, 
 106; concrete relational, 98- 
 102, 107; concreteness in, 
 varying degree of, 108, 109; 
 derivational, 87, 88, 92. 106; 
 derivational, abstract, 109-11 ; 
 essential, 98, 99, 107, 108; 
 grouping of, non-logical, 94 ; 
 lack of expression of certain, 
 97, 98; pure relational, 99, 
 
 107, 179; radical, 88, 92, 
 98; redistribution of. 94-8; 
 relational, 89-03, 98, 99; 
 thinning-out of significance 
 of, 102-4; types of, 106, 107, 
 
 108, 109; typical categories 
 of, 113-15. See Structure, 
 lingnistic. 
 
 Concord, 100, 120-23 
 
 Concrete concepts. See Con- 
 
 C€T)ts 
 
 Conflict, 167, 168, 171, 172 
 
 Consonantal change, 26, 61, 
 64, 78, 79 
 
 Consonants, 52-4; combinations 
 of, 56 
 
 Co(>rdinate sentences, 37 
 
 Corean, 205 
 
 Croce, Benedetto, 237, 239 
 
 Culttire, 221 ; language and, 
 227-30, 231, 232. 233-5; lan- 
 guage as aspect of, 2, 10; 
 language, race and, 222. 223, 
 230, 231; reflection of his- 
 tory of, in language, 206, 207
 
 INDEX 
 
 251 
 
 Culture areas, 221, 222, 228 
 
 D 
 
 Danish, 49, 110, 136, 175, 217 
 Demonstrative ideas, !)7, 98, 114 
 Dental articulations, 54, 192 
 Derivational concepts. See 
 
 Concepts. 
 Determinative structure, 135 
 Dialects, causes of, 160-3; com- 
 promise between, 159; dis- 
 tinctness of, 159; drifts in, 
 diverging, 183, 184; drifts 
 in, parallel, 184-93; splitting 
 up of, 163, 164; unity of, 
 157-9. 
 DifTusion, morphological, 217- 
 
 20 
 Diphthongs, 56 
 
 Drift, linguistic: 160-3, 183, 
 184; components of, 172-4; 
 determinants of, in English, 
 168-82; direction of, 165, 
 166, 183; direction of, illus- 
 trated in English, 166-8; 
 examples of general, in Eng- 
 lish, 174-82; parallelisms in, 
 184-93; speed of, 183, 184. 
 See Phonetic Law; Phonetic 
 processes. 
 Duplication of words, 79-81 
 Dutch, 175, 188, 212, 224 
 
 E 
 
 Elements of speech, 24-42 
 Emotion, expression of: invol- 
 untary, 3; linguistic, 39- 
 41 
 English: agentive suffix, 87; 
 analogical leveling, 202, 203; 
 analytic tendency, 135, 136, 
 216, 217; animate and in- 
 animate, 176. 177, 179, 180; 
 aspect, 114; attribution, 101; 
 case, history of, 169, 170, 
 175-7, 179;' compounds, 67, 
 68, 69, 70; concepts, gram- 
 matical, in sentence, 86-94 ; 
 concepts, passage of concrete 
 
 into derivational, 108, 109 
 consonantal change, 64, 78 
 culture of speakers of, 229 
 230; desire, expression of 
 39; diminutive suffix, 87 
 drift, 166-82; duplication 
 word, 79, 80; esthetic quali 
 ties, 241, 243; feeling-tone 
 41, 42; form, word, 59, 60 
 61 ; French influence on, 206 
 207, 208, 210, 211, 215, 216 
 function and form, 93, 94 
 fusing and juxtaposing, 137 
 138, 139-41; gender, 100 
 Greek influence on, 215, 216 
 influence of, 207 ; influence 
 on, morphological, lack of 
 deep, 215-17; interrogative 
 words, 170; invariable words, 
 tendency to, 180-2, 208; in- 
 fixing, 75; Latin influence 
 on, 206, 207, 208, 215, 216; 
 loan-words, 182; modality, 
 90, 91, 92, 93; number, 90, 
 91; order, word. 65. 66. 170, 
 171, 177-9, 191, 192; parts of 
 speech, 123-5; patterning, 
 formal, 62, 63; personal re- 
 lations, 91, 92, 93; plionetic 
 drifts, history of. 184-93, 
 194, 197-9; phonetic drifts, 
 history of, 184-93, 194, 197-9; 
 phonetic leveling, 193, 194; 
 phonetic pattern, 200, 206; 
 plurality, 38, 99, 100, 105, 
 106, 202; race of speakers 
 of, 223-7 ; reference, definite- 
 ness of, 89, 90, 92, 93; re- 
 lational words, 32 ; relations, 
 genetic, 163, 175, 183, 218; 
 rhythm, 171, 172; sentence, 
 analysis of, 37 ; sentence, de- 
 pendence of word on, 116; 
 sound-imitative words, 6, 80; 
 sounds, 44, 45, 49. 51. 53. 54, 
 56, 57; stress and pitch, 36, 
 55, 83; structure, 151. 180; 
 survivals, morphological, 149, 
 152; symbolism, 134; syn- 
 tactic adhesions, 117. 118; 
 syntactic values, transfer of,
 
 252 
 
 INDEX 
 
 120; tense, 91, 93, 102, 103, 
 104; verb, syntactic rela- 
 tions of, 115; verse, 245, 24G; 
 vocalic change, 70; word and 
 element, analysis of, 25, 26, 
 27, 28, 29, 30, 35 
 
 English, Middle, 175, 176, 188, 
 191, 201, 202, 203 
 
 Enj?lish people, 223, 224 
 
 Eshimo, 60, 68, 70, 74, 118, 
 134, 135, 230, 243 
 
 Eskimos, 230 
 
 Eice (Guinea coast, Africa), 
 80, 84, 150, 154, 155 
 
 Expiratory sounds, 55 
 
 "Explosives," 62 
 
 F 
 
 Faucal position, 53 
 
 Feeling-tones of words, 41, 42 
 
 Fijians, 230 
 
 Finnish, 135, 155, 219 
 
 Finns, 226 
 
 Flemish, 212 
 
 "Foot, feet" (English), history 
 of, 184-93, 197-9, 201, 
 202 
 
 Form, cultural, 233, 234; feel- 
 ing of langiiage for, 58, 62, 
 63, 152, 153, 210, 220; "in- 
 ner," 132, 133 
 
 Form, linguistic: conservatism 
 of, 102-4; differences of, me- 
 chanical origin of, 105, 100; 
 elaboration of, reasons for, 
 102-6; function and, inde- 
 pendence of, 59-63, 93, 94; 
 grammatical concepts em- 
 bodied in, 86-12G; gram- 
 matical processes embodying, 
 59-85 ; permanence of differ- 
 ent aspects of, relative, 153- 
 6; twofold consideration of, 
 59-61. See Structure, lin- 
 guistic. 
 
 Form-classes, 105, 113. See 
 Gender. 
 
 Formal units of speech, 33 
 
 "Formlessness, inner," 132, 133 
 
 Fox (N. Amer.), 74 
 
 French : analytical tendency, 
 135, 136, 137; esthetic quali- 
 ties, 241; gender, 102, 104, 
 113; influence, 205, 206, 207, 
 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 215, 
 216; order, word, 67; plu- 
 rality, 99; sounds, 51, 212; 
 sounds as words, single, 24; 
 stress, 55, 118; structure, 
 151, 154; tense forms, 103; 
 verse, 245, 246 
 
 French, Norman, 224 
 
 French people, 224, 225 
 
 Freud, 168 
 
 Fricatives, 52 
 
 Frisian, 175, 224 
 
 Fid (Soudan), 79, 81 
 
 Function, independence of form 
 and, 59-63, 93, 94 
 
 Functional units of speech, 33 
 
 Fusion, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 
 149 
 
 Fusional languages, 147, 150, 
 151. See Fusion. 
 
 Fusioiial-agglutinative, 148, 
 
 150, 151 
 
 Fusional-isolating, 148, 150 
 
 "Fuss, Fiisse" (German), his- 
 tory of, 184, 185, 191-3, 197- 
 99 
 
 G 
 
 Gaelic, 225 
 
 Gender, 100-2, 113 
 
 German: French influence on, 
 208, 209, 212; grammatical 
 concepts in sentence, 95; 
 Latin influence on, 206, 208; 
 phonetic drifts, history of, 
 184, 18,5, 188, 191-3, 197-9; 
 plurality, 100; relations, 175, 
 183; soimd-imitative words, 
 6; sounds, 56, 212; tense 
 forms, 103; "umlaut," 202, 
 203, 204; unanalvzable words, 
 resistance to, 208, 209 
 
 German, High, 224 
 
 German, Middle High, 184, 185, 
 192, 204
 
 INDEX 
 
 253 
 
 German, Old High, 175, 184, 
 
 185, 192, 194 
 
 Germanic languages, 175, 183, 
 
 184, 185, 186, 206, 212, 226 
 
 Germanic, West, 175, 184, 185, 
 
 186, 187, 191, 192, 224 
 Germans, 224, 225, 226 
 Gesture languages, 20, 21 
 Ginneken, Jac van, 40 
 Glottal cords, 48; action of, 
 
 48-50 
 
 Glottal stop, 49 
 
 Gothic, 82, 175, 184 
 
 Grammar, 39 
 
 Grammatical element, 26-32 
 
 Grammatical concepts. See Co7i- 
 cepts, grammatical. 
 
 Grammatical processes, classi- 
 fied by, languages, 133-5; 
 particular, development by 
 each langiiage of, 62, 63 ; 
 types of, 63, 64; variety of, 
 use in one language of, 61, 62 
 
 Greek, dialectic history of, 162 
 
 Greek, classical: affixing, 137; 
 compounds, 67, 68 ; concord, 
 121; infixing, 75; influence, 
 207, 215, 216; pitch accent, 
 83; plurality, 100; redupli- 
 cated perfects, 82, 216; 
 stress, 82, 83; structure, 
 139, 151, 152; synthetic char- 
 acter, 137; verse, 244, 246 
 
 Greek, modern, 137, 163, 194, 
 212 
 
 H 
 
 Haida (British Columbia), 56, 
 
 57, 150, 219, 229 
 Hamitio languages (N". Africa), 
 
 77, 219, 221 
 Hausa (Soudan), 81 
 Hebrew, 61, 62, 73, 76, 151, 
 
 207 
 Heine, 240 
 
 Hesitation, 172, 173, 183 
 History, linguistic, 153-6, 7- 
 
 204 
 Eokan languages (N. Amer.), 
 
 220, 229 
 
 Hottentot (S. Africa), 55, 81, 
 
 70, 80, 81 
 Hudson, W. H., 242 
 Humming, 50 
 
 Hupa (N. California), 71, 72 
 Hupa Indians, 228 
 
 Icelandic, Old, 175 
 
 India, languages of, 54 
 
 Indians, American, languages 
 of, 34, 35, 49, 51, 56, 57, 68, 
 84, 85, 105, 130, 212, 213. 
 See also Algonkin; Atlia^ 
 iaskan; Chimariko ; Chinook/ 
 Eskimo; Fox; Haida; Hokan; 
 Hitpa; Iroquois; Karok; 
 Kivakiutl; Nahuatl; Nass; 
 Navaho; Nootka; Ojibwa; 
 Paitite; Sahaptin; Salinan; 
 Shasta; Siouan; Sioxix ; Tak- 
 elma; Tlingit ; Tsimshian; 
 Washo; Yana; Yakuts; 
 Yurok. 
 
 Indo-Chinese languages, 155, 
 164 
 
 Indo-European, 24, 75, 82, 163, 
 164, 174, 175, 186, 200, 226 
 
 Indo-Iranian languages, 175, 
 212 
 
 Infixes, 26, 64, 75, 76 
 
 Inflection. See Inflective lan- 
 guages. 
 
 Inflective languages, 130, 136- 
 41, 143, 144, 14G, 155 
 
 Influence, cultural, reflected in 
 language, 205-10; morpho- 
 logical, of alien language, 
 215-17, 220; phonetic, of 
 alien language, 210-15 
 
 Inspiratory sounds, 65 
 
 Interjections, 4, 5 
 
 Irish, 224 
 
 Irish, 78, 79, 163, 218 
 
 Iroquois (N. Amer.), 69, 70 
 
 Isolating languages, 130, 133, 
 147, 150 
 
 Italian, 54, 55, 137, 163 
 
 "Its," history of, 167, 176, 177
 
 254 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Japanese, 205, 207 
 Jutes, 224 
 
 Juxtaposing. See Agglutinate 
 tion. 
 
 Karok (N. California), 220, 
 229; K. Indians, 227 
 
 Khmer. See Camhodgian. 
 
 Knowledge, source of : as gram- 
 matical category, 115 
 
 Ko'me, 162 
 
 Kwakivtl (Britisli Columbia), 
 81, 07, 98 
 
 Labial trills, 53 _ 
 
 Language : associations in, 38, 
 39; associations underlying 
 elements of, 10, 11; auditory 
 cycle in, 17; concepts ex- 
 pressed in, 12; a cultural 
 function, 2, 10; definition of, 
 7; diversity of, 21-3; ele- 
 ments of, 24-38; emotion ex- 
 pressed in, 39-41; feeling- 
 tones in, 41, 42; grammatical 
 concepts of, 86-126; gram- 
 matical processes of, 59-85; 
 historical aspects of, 157- 
 204; imitations of sounds, 
 not evolved from, 5, 6; influ- 
 ences on, exotic, 205-20; in- 
 terjections, not evolved from, 
 5; ■ literature and, 236-47; 
 modifications and transfers of 
 typical form of, 17-21; an 
 "overlaid" function, 8; psy- 
 cho-physical basis of, 8, 9; 
 race, culture and, 221-35; 
 simplification of experience 
 in, 11, 12; sounds of, 43-58; 
 structure of, 127-56; thought 
 and, 12-17, 232, 233; uni- 
 versality of, 21-3; vnriability 
 of, 157-65; volition expressed 
 in, 39-41 
 
 Larynx, 48-50 
 
 Lateral sounds, 52, 53 
 
 Latin: attribution, 101; con- 
 cord, 121; infixing, 26, 75; 
 influence of, 206, 207, 215, 
 216; objective -m, 119, 120; 
 order of words, 65, 66, 123; 
 plurality. 100; prefixes and 
 suffixes, 71 ; reduplicated per- 
 fects, 82, 216; relational con- 
 cepts expressed, 101, 102; 
 sentence-word, 33, 36; sound 
 as word in, single, 24 ; struc- 
 ture, 151, 154; style, 243, 
 244; suffixing character, 134, 
 137; syntactic nature of 
 sentence, 116, 118; synthetic 
 character, 135, 137; verse, 
 244, 245, 246; word and ele- 
 ment in, analysis of, 27, 29, 
 30 
 
 Lettish, 49 
 
 Leveling, phonetic, 193, 194, 
 195. See Analogical leveling. 
 
 Lips, 48 ; action of, 62, 53 
 
 Literature, compensations in, 
 formal, 246, 247; language 
 and, 42, 236-47; levels in, 
 linguistic, 237-41; medium 
 of, language as, 236, 237 ; 
 science and, 238-40 
 
 Literature, determinants of: 
 linguistic, 240, 241 ; metrical, 
 244-6; morphological, 241-4; 
 phonetic, 241 
 
 Lithuanian, 55, 175, 183 
 
 Localism, 161 
 
 Localization of speech, 8, 9 
 
 Lonchrvx (N". Amer.), 71; L. 
 Indians, 228 
 
 Lun.TS, 48 
 
 Lutlier, German, of, 192 
 
 M 
 
 Mnlaif, 132; M. race, 227 
 
 Malayan, 227 
 
 Malayo- Pnlynesian languages, 
 
 219. 221,' 227 
 Manrhu, 80 
 Mannr, 225
 
 INDEX 
 
 255 
 
 '"Maus, Ma use" (German), his- 
 tory of, 184, 185, l!)l-3 
 
 Mediterranean race, 223 
 
 Melanesian languages, 227, 230 
 
 Meter. See Terse. 
 
 JMilton, 242 
 
 Mixed-relational languages, 146, 
 147, 154; complex, 146, 147, 
 151, 155; simple, 146, 147, 
 151 
 
 Modality, 90, 91, 92, 93, 114 
 
 Mon-Khmer (S. E. Asia), 210 
 
 Moore, George, 242 
 
 Morphological features, diffu- 
 sion of, 217-20 
 
 Morphology. See Structure, 
 linguistic. 
 
 "Mouse, mice" (English), his- 
 tory of, 184-93 
 
 Munda languages (E. India), 
 219 
 
 Murmuring, 50 
 
 Mutation, vocalic, 184, 185, 
 197-9, 20.3, 204 
 
 N 
 
 Nahuatl (Mexico), 69, 70 
 
 Nasal sounds, 51 
 
 "Nasal twang," 51 
 
 Nasalized stops, 52 
 
 Nass (British Columbia), 62, 
 81 
 
 Nationality, 222, 227, 228 
 
 Navaho (Arizona, New Mex- 
 ico), 71, 77, 83, 136; N. In- 
 dians, 228 
 
 Nietzsche, 241 
 
 Nootka (Vancouver Id.), 29, 
 3.3, 35, 68, 70, 74, 79, 82, 
 95, 109-11, 135, 141-3, 151 
 
 Nose, 48; action of, 50, 51 
 
 Noun, 123, 124, 126 
 
 Nouns, classification of, 113 
 
 Number, 90, 91, 93, 114. See 
 Plurality. 
 
 O 
 
 Object, 92, 08. See Personal 
 relations. 
 
 Ojibwa (N. Amer.), 55 
 
 Onomatopoetic theory of origin 
 of speech, 5, 6 
 
 Oral sounds, 51-4 
 
 Order, word: 64-6, 91, 92; com- 
 position as related to, 67, 
 68; fixed, English tendency 
 to, 177-9; sentence molded 
 by, 117, 118; significance of, 
 fundamental, 119, 120, 123 
 
 Organs of speech, 7, 8, 47, 48 ; 
 action of, 48-54 
 
 Paiute (N. Amer.), 31, 32, 36, 
 .52, 53, 69, 70 
 
 Palate, 48; action of soft, 51; 
 articulations of, 53 
 
 Pali (India), 207 
 
 Papuan languages, 227 
 
 Papuans, 227, 230 
 
 Parts of speech, 123-5, 126 
 
 Pattern, formal, 61, 63, 234, 
 242; phonetic, 57, 58, 187, 
 93-6, 99, 200, 206, 211, 214, 
 215, 220 
 
 Persian, 163, 207 
 
 Person, 114 
 
 Personal relations, 91, 92, 93, 
 115 
 
 Phonetic adaptation, 210, 211 
 
 Plionetic diffusion, 211-15 
 
 Phonetic law, basis of, 195, 
 196, 199, 200; direction of, 
 194, 195, 199; examples of, 
 186-93; influence of, on mor- 
 phology, 203, 204; influence of 
 morphology on, 196-9; regu- 
 larity of, 193, 194; signifi- 
 cance of, 186; spread of, 
 slow, 190, 191. See Leveling, 
 phonetic; Pattern, phonetic. 
 
 Phonetic processes, form caused 
 by, diff'erences of, 105, 106; 
 parallel drifts in, 184-93, 
 197-9 
 
 Pitch, grammatical use of, 88- 
 5; metrical use of, 246; pro- 
 duction of, 49 ; significant 
 diflFerences in, 55, 64
 
 256 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Plains Indians, gesture lan- 
 guage of, 20 
 
 "Plattdeutsch," 224, 225 
 
 Plurality: classification of con- 
 cept of, variable, 110, 111, 
 112; a concrete relational 
 category, 90, 100; a deriva- 
 tional or radical concept, 99 ; 
 expression of, multiple, 38, 
 62. See Number. 
 
 Poles, 225 
 
 Poh/nesian, 132, 150, 155, 227, 
 230 
 
 Polynesians, 221, 222, 227, 230 
 
 Polysyntlictic languages, 130, 
 135, 146, 148, 150, 151 
 
 Portuguese, 137 
 
 Predicate, 37, 126 
 
 Prefixes, 26, 64, 70, 71-5 
 
 Prefixing languages, 134, 135 
 
 Preposition, 125 
 
 Psycho -pliysieal, aspect of 
 speech, 8, 9 
 
 Pure-relational languages, 145, 
 147, 154, 155; complex, 145, 
 147, 150, 155; simple, 145, 
 147, 150 
 
 Q 
 
 Qualifying concepts. See Con- 
 cepts, derivational. 
 
 Quality of speech sounds, 48; 
 of individual's voice, 48 
 
 Quantity of speech sounds, 65, 
 04 
 
 R 
 
 Race, 221, 222; language and, 
 lack of correspondence be- 
 tween, 227; language and, 
 theoretical relation between, 
 231-3; language as correlated 
 with, English, 223-7; lan- 
 guage, culture and, corre- 
 spondence between, 230, 231 ; 
 language, culture and, inde- 
 pendence of, 222, 223 
 
 Radical concepts. See Concepts. 
 
 Radical element, 26-32 
 
 Radical word, 28, 29 
 
 "Reading from the lips," 19 
 
 Reduplication, 64, 79-82 
 
 Reference, definite and indefi- 
 nite, 89, 90 
 
 Repetition of stem, 26. See Re- 
 duplication. 
 
 Repression of impulse, 167, 168 
 
 Rhyme, 245, 246 
 
 Rolled consonants, 53 
 
 Ixomance languages, 137 
 
 Root, 25 
 
 Roumanian, 137 
 
 Rounded vowels, 52 
 
 Russian, 44, 45, 54, 71, 80, 
 103, 212 
 
 S 
 
 Saliaptin languages (N. Amer.), 
 
 220 
 Salinan (S. W. California), 
 
 150, 155 
 Sanskrit (India), 54, 75, 82. 
 
 If)!, 154, 175, 200, 207, 209, 
 
 210 
 Sarcee Indians, 228 
 Saxon, Low, 224; Old, 175; 
 
 Upper, 225 
 Saxons, 224, 225 
 Scandinavian, 224. See Danish ; 
 
 Icelandic; Swedish. 
 Scandinavians, 224 
 Scotch, 224, 226 
 Scotch, Lowland, 188 
 Semitic languages, 61, 68, 76, 
 
 134, 151, 219, 228 
 Sentence, 33, 36-8; binding 
 
 words into, methods of, 115- 
 
 17; stress in, influence of, 
 
 118, 119; word-order in, 
 
 117, 118 
 Sequence. See Order of words. 
 Shakespeare, art of, 238, 240; 
 
 English of, 188, 189. 191 
 Sha.<ita (N. California), 220 
 Shilh (Morocco), 77, 81 
 Shilluk (Nile headwaters), 84, 
 
 ].'-)0, 154, 155 
 Siamese, 55, 66, 70, 207 
 Singing, 50
 
 INDEX 
 
 257 
 
 Siouan languages (N. Amer. ), 
 76 
 
 Sioux (Dakota), 29, 76, 95, 
 150 
 
 Slavic languages, 212 
 
 Slavs, 225 
 
 Somali (E. Africa), 77, 80, 81 
 
 Soudanese languages, 84, 154, 
 155, 163 
 
 Sound-imitative words, 4, 5, 6, 
 80 
 
 Sounds of speech, 24; adjust- 
 ments involved in, muscular, 
 46; adjustments involved in 
 certain, inhibition of, 46, 47; 
 basic importance of, 43; clas- 
 sification of, 54, 55; combi- 
 nations of, 56; conditioned 
 appearance of, 56, 57; dy- 
 namics of, 55, 56; illusory 
 feelings in regard to, 43-5; 
 "inner" or "ideal" system 
 of, 57, 58; place in phonetic 
 pattern of, 194-6; produc- 
 tion of, 47-54 ; values of, psy- 
 chological, 56-8; variability 
 of, 45, 46 
 
 Spanish, 137 
 
 Speech. See Language. 
 
 Spirants, 52 
 
 Splitting of sounds, 193, 195 
 
 Stem, 26 
 
 Stock, linguistic, 163-5, 218, 
 221 
 
 Stopped consonants {or stops), 
 52 
 
 Stress. See Accent. 
 
 Structure, linguistic, 127-56; 
 conservatism of, 200; differ- 
 ences of, 127, 128; intui- 
 tional forms of, 153, 154 
 
 Structure, linguistic, types of: 
 classification of, by char- 
 acter of concepts, 143-7, by 
 degree of fnsion, 13fi-4.3, by 
 degree of synthesis, 135, 136, 
 by formal processes, 133-5, 
 from threefold standpoint, 
 147-9, 154. into "formal" and 
 "formless," 132, 133; classi- 
 fying, difficulties in, 129-32, 
 
 149; examples of, 149-51; 
 mixed, 148; reality of, 128, 
 129, 149, 152, 153; validity 
 of conceptual, historical test 
 of, 152-6 
 
 Style, 38, 216, 242-4 
 
 Subject, 92, 98. See Personal 
 relations. 
 
 Subject of discourse, 37, 126 
 
 Suffixes, 26, 64 
 
 Suffixing, 61, 70, 71-5 
 
 Suffixing languages, 134, 135 
 
 Survivals, morphological, 149, 
 152, 202, 218, 219 
 
 Sicedish, 55, 110, 175 
 
 Swinburne, 238, 240 
 
 Swiss, French, 225 
 
 Syllabifying, 56 
 
 Symbolic languages, 133, 134, 
 147, 150, 151 
 
 Symbolic processes, 134, 138, 
 139, 140 
 
 Symbolic-fusional, 151 
 
 Symbolic-isolating, 148 
 
 Symons, 245 
 
 Syntactic adhesions, 117, 118 
 
 Syntactic relations, primary 
 methods of expressing, 119, 
 120; transfer of values in, 
 120. See Concepts, rela- 
 tional; Concord; Order, 
 tcord; Personal relations; 
 Sentence. 
 
 Synthetic tendency, 69, 135, 
 136, 137, 148, 150, 151, 154 
 
 Takelma (S. W. Oregon), 81, 
 
 82, 84, 85, 151, 152, 
 
 220 
 Teeth, 48; articulations of, 
 
 53, 54 
 Telegraph code, 20 
 Temperament, 231, 232 
 Tense, 91, 93, 114 
 Teutonic race. See Baltic race. 
 Thinking, types of, 17, 18 
 Thought, relation of language 
 
 to, 12-17, 232, 233
 
 258 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Throat, 48; articulations of, 
 
 49, 50, 53 
 Tibetan, 80, 102, 112, 124, 125, 
 
 136, 143, 144, 150, 154, 155, 
 
 20!), 210 
 Time. See Tense. 
 Tlingit (S. Alaska), 84, 134, 
 
 135, 219, 229; T. Indians, 
 
 230 
 Tongue, 48; action of, 52, 53, 
 
 54 
 Transfer, types of linguistic, 
 
 18-21 
 Trills, 53 
 Tsimshian (British Columbia), 
 
 70, 80, 81. See Nass. 
 Turkish, 70, 135, 150, 207, 212 
 Types, linguistic, change of, 
 
 153-6. See Structure, lin- 
 guistic. 
 
 U 
 
 Ugro-Finnic, 212 
 
 "Umlaut." See Mutation, vo- 
 calic. 
 
 United States, culture in, 209; 
 race in, 223 
 
 Ural-Altaic languages, 212 
 
 Uvula, 48, 53 
 
 V 
 
 Vocalic change, 26, 61, 64, 76-8. 
 
 See Mutation, vocalic. 
 Voice, production of, 50 
 Voiced sounds, 50 
 Voiceless: laterals, 53; nasals, 
 
 51; sounds, 49, 50; trills, 53; 
 
 vowels, 52 
 "Voicelessness," production of, 
 
 49 
 Volition expressed in speech, 
 
 38, 39 
 Vowels, 52 
 
 W 
 
 Walking, a biological function, 
 1. 2 
 
 Washo (Nevada), 81 
 
 Welsh, 51, 53, 225 
 
 Westermann, D., 154 
 
 Whisper, 50 
 
 Whitman, 239 
 
 "Whom," use and drift of, 
 166-74 
 
 Word, 25-8; definition of, 32-6; 
 syntactic origin of complex, 
 117, 118; "twilight" type of, 
 28, 299; types of, formal, 
 29-32 
 
 Written language, 19, 20 
 
 Values, "hesitation." 173; mor- 
 phologic, 131, 132; phonetic, 
 56-8; variability in, of com- 
 ponents of drift, 172, 173 
 
 Variations, linguistic: dialec- 
 tic, 157-65; historical, 160- 
 204; individual, 157-9, 165, 
 199 
 
 Verb, 123, 124, 126; syntactic 
 relations expressed in, 115 
 
 Verhaerei?, 245 
 
 Verse, accentual, 244, 245; lin- 
 guistic determinants of, 242- 
 G; quantitative, 244, 245; 
 syllabic, 244, 245 
 
 Tana (N. California), 69, 70, 
 74, 76, 96, 105, 111, 112, 126, 
 150, 155 
 
 Yiddish, 204 
 
 Yokuts (S. California), 77, 78 
 
 Yurok (N. W. California), 
 229; Y. Indians, 228 
 
 Zaconic dialect of Creek. 162
 
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