Language by Edward Sapir

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Just as we can verbify the idea of a quality in such cases 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 (_height_, _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 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 we 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
convertible into each other. The upshot of such an examination 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
demarcations which it recognizes.

Yet we must not be too destructive. It is well to remember 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 importance that the
vast majority of languages have emphasized 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 discourse 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
activity. 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.[91]

[Footnote 91: 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 OF 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 notions
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 who 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 language 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 nature 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 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 thousands 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 overestimate 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 languages, 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 observable in
remote quarters of the globe. From this it follows that broadly similar
morphologies must have been reached by unrelated languages,
independently and frequently. 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 patterns, 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 answered. 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 classifications have been suggested, and
they all contain elements 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 selected languages. To take, as the sum total of our material, Latin,
Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, and perhaps Eskimo 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 home that we are more immediately interested in. Thirdly, the
strong craving for a simple formula[92] has been the undoing of
linguists. There is something irresistible about a method of
classification that starts with two poles, exemplified, say, by Chinese
and Latin, clusters what it conveniently can about these poles, and
throws everything else into a "transitional type." Hence has arisen the
still popular classification of languages into an "isolating" group, an
"agglutinative" group, and an "inflective" group. Sometimes the
languages 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
polysynthetic, or even polysynthetic and isolating, as we shall see a
little later on.

[Footnote 92: If possible, a triune formula.]

There is a fourth reason why the classification of languages 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. Intermingled with this scientific prejudice
and largely anticipating it was another, a more human one. The vast
majority of linguistic theorists themselves spoke languages of a certain
type, of which the most fully developed varieties were the Latin and
Greek that they 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 interesting
aberration.[93] Now any classification that starts with preconceived
values or that works up to sentimental 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 zooelogist 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
unconscious. If, therefore, we wish to understand language in its true
inwardness we must disabuse our minds of preferred "values"[94] and
accustom ourselves to look upon English and Hottentot with the same
cool, yet interested, detachment.

[Footnote 93: One celebrated American writer on culture and language
delivered 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 "inflective" languages
are wont to glory in the very irrationalities of Latin and Greek, except
when it suits them to emphasize their profoundly "logical" character.
Yet the sober logic of Turkish or Chinese leaves them cold. The glorious
irrationalities and formal complexities of many "savage" languages they
have no stomach for. Sentimentalists are difficult people.]

[Footnote 94: I have in mind valuations of form as such. Whether or not
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.]

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 preceding 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 fundamental syntactic relations even though there is not a single
affix to be found in its vocabulary. We conclude 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 mechanical 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
outwardly "formless" where Latin is outwardly "formal." On the other
hand, there are supposed to be languages[95] which have no true grasp of
the fundamental relations but content themselves with the more or less
minute expression of material ideas, sometimes with an exuberant
display of "outer form," leaving the pure relations 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,[96] or that the
principle of order is subject to greater fluctuations than in Chinese,
or that a tendency to complex derivations relieves the language of the
necessity of expressing certain relations as explicitly as a more
analytic language would have them expressed.[97] 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 notion
of "inner formlessness," except in the greatly modified sense that
syntactic relations may be fused with notions of another order. To this
criterion of classification we shall have to return a little later.

[Footnote 95: E.g., Malay, Polynesian.]

[Footnote 96: Where, as we have seen, the syntactic relations are by no
means free from an alloy of the concrete.]

[Footnote 97: 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 de foie de morue_ "oil of liver of cod."]

More justifiable would be a classification according to the formal
processes[98] 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 internal changes (reduplication; vocalic and
consonantal change; changes in quantity, stress, and pitch). The latter
type might be not inaptly termed "symbolic" languages.[99] The affixing
languages would naturally subdivide themselves into such as are
prevailingly prefixing, 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 classification (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 languages 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 derivational 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 expression of relational concepts[100] alone.
In this modified form we shall return to it as a subsidiary criterion.
We shall find that the terms "isolating," "affixing," and "symbolic"
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 distinction, one that is based on the relative firmness
with which the affixed elements are united with the core of the
word.[101]

[Footnote 98: See Chapter IV.]

[Footnote 99: There is probably a real psychological connection between
symbolism and such significant alternations as _drink_, _drank_, _drunk_
or Chinese _mai_ (with rising tone) "to buy" and _mai_ (with falling
tone) "to sell." The unconscious tendency toward symbolism is justly
emphasized by recent psychological literature. Personally I feel that
the passage from _sing_ 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 differ greatly as to the intensity with which we feel
symbolism in linguistic changes of this type.]

[Footnote 100: Pure or "concrete relational." See Chapter V.]

[Footnote 101: 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 than linguists have generally recognized. It
seems to me that there is a rather important psychological distinction
between a language that settles the formal status of a radical element
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 successive limitations, each curtailing in some degree
the generality of all that precedes. The spirit of the former method has
something 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 crystallization of floating elements,
the words of the typical suffixing languages (Turkish, Eskimo, Nootka)
are "determinative" formations, each added element determining the form
of the whole anew. It is so difficult in practice to apply these
elusive, yet important, distinctions that an elementary study has no
recourse but to ignore them.]

There is another very useful set of distinctions that can be made, but
these too must not be applied exclusively, 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
language 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 concrete
significance in the single word down to a moderate compass. A
polysynthetic language, as its name implies, is more than ordinarily
synthetic. The elaboration of the word is extreme. Concepts which we
should never dream of treating in a subordinate fashion are 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.[102] The three terms
are purely quantitative--and relative, that is, a language may be
"analytic" from one standpoint, "synthetic" from another. 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.[103]

[Footnote 102: English, however, is only analytic in tendency.
Relatively to French, it is still fairly synthetic, at least in certain
aspects.]

[Footnote 103: The former process is demonstrable for English, French,
Danish, 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 their present 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.]

We now come to the difference between an "inflective" and an
"agglutinative" language. As I have already remarked, the distinction is
a useful, even a necessary, 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 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 Greek, while far more analytic[104] 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 polysynthetic.

[Footnote 104: This applies more particularly to the Romance group:
Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Roumanian. Modern Greek is not so
clearly analytic.]

Latin and Greek are mainly affixing in their method, with the emphasis
heavily on suffixing. The agglutinative 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 affixing 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
difference 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 significant elements, but they convey their meaning
(agentive, abstract quality) with unfailing directness. Their use is
simple and regular and we should have no difficulty in appending them to
any verb or to any adjective, however recent in origin. From a verb _to
camouflage_ we may form the noun _camouflager_ "one who camouflages,"
from an adjective _jazzy_ proceeds with perfect ease the noun
_jazziness_. It is different with _height_ and _depth_. Functionally
they are related to _high_ 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 _-t_ 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 technique we may
call an "agglutinative" one, if we like.

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