Language by Edward Sapir

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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 proposition, however abstract its intent, is humanly
possible without a tying on at one or more points to the concrete 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 relational
concepts must be expressed as moor the concrete concepts to each other
and construct a definite, fundamental form of proposition. In this
fundamental form there must be no doubt as to the nature of the
relations that obtain between the concrete concepts. We must know what
concrete concept is directly or indirectly related to what other, and
how. If we wish to talk of a thing and an action, we must know if they
are cooerdinately related to each other (e.g., "He is fond of _wine and
gambling_"); 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 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 probabilities 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 expressed, 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 concepts that we have already discussed? Is there, after all
is said and done, a fundamental difference between a qualifying concept
like the negative in _unhealthy_ and a relational one like the number
concept in _books_? If _unhealthy_ may be roughly paraphrased as _not
healthy_, may not _books_ be just as legitimately paraphrased, barring
the violence to English idiom, as _several book?_ There are, indeed,
languages in which the plural, if expressed at all, is conceived of in
the same sober, restricted, one might almost say casual, spirit in which
we feel the negative in _unhealthy_. For such languages the number
concept has no syntactic significance whatever, is not essentially
conceived of as defining a relation, but falls into the group of
derivational or even of basic concepts. In English, however, as in
French, 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 may 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 between the two basically
distinct types of concept, the concrete and the abstractly relational,
infecting the latter, as it were, with the color and grossness of the
former. By a certain violence of metaphor the material concept is forced
to do duty for (or intertwine itself with) the strictly relational.

The case 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 attenuated relational concepts as are
expressed by "the" and "that" the combined notions of number and sex.
Yet all this, and more, happens in Latin. _Illa alba femina quae venit_
and _illi albi homines qui veniunt_, conceptually translated, amount to
this: _that_-one-feminine-doer[57] one-feminine-_white_-doer
feminine-doing-one-_woman_ _which_-one-feminine-doer
other[58]-one-now-_come_; and: _that_-several-masculine-doer
several-masculine-_white_-doer masculine-doing-several-_man_
_which_-several-masculine-doer other-several-now-_come_. Each word
involves no less than four concepts, a radical concept (either properly
concrete--_white_, _man_, _woman_, _come_--or demonstrative--_that_,
_which_) and three relational concepts, selected from the categories of
case, number, gender, person, and tense. Logically, only case[59] (the
relation of _woman_ or _men_ 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 affected (there is, for instance, no need to
be informed that the whiteness is a doing or doer's whiteness[60]). The
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
sensitive Chinaman, accustomed as he is to cut to the very bone of
linguistic form, might well say of the Latin sentence, "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 concepts to such attenuated relational uses.

[Footnote 57: "Doer," not "done to." This is a necessarily clumsy tag to
represent the "nominative" (subjective) in contrast to the "accusative"
(objective).]

[Footnote 58: I.e., not you or I.]

[Footnote 59: By "case" is here meant not only the subjective-objective
relation but also that of attribution.]

[Footnote 60: Except in so far as Latin uses this method as a rather
awkward, 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 _illa 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 _illa_ and _alba_ may occupy almost any
position in the sentence. It is important to observe that the subjective
form of _illa_ and _alba_, does not truly define a relation of these
qualifying concepts to _femina_. Such a relation might be formally
expressed _via_ an attributive case, say the genitive (_woman of
whiteness_). In Tibetan both the methods of order and of true case
relation may be employed: _woman white_ (i.e., "white woman") or
_white-of woman_ (i.e., "woman of whiteness, woman who is white, white
woman").]

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 arbre_
("a-masculine tree") or of _une pomme_ ("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_.[61]
This is evident from our use of the present to indicate both future time
("He comes to-morrow") and general activity unspecified as to time
("Whenever he comes, I am glad to see him," where "comes" refers to past
occurrences and possible future ones rather than to present 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 persist by inertia,
duplicating each other's secondary, syntactic 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 (_killed_,
_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 in the future.[62]
Now form lives longer than its own conceptual 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 as natural to the life of
language as is the retention of modes of conduct that have long outlived
the meaning they once had.

[Footnote 61: Aside, naturally, from the life and imminence that may be
created for such a sentence by a particular context.]

[Footnote 62: This has largely happened in popular French and German,
where the difference is stylistic rather than functional. The preterits
are more literary or formal in tone than the perfects.]

There is another powerful tendency which makes for a formal elaboration
that does not strictly correspond to clear-cut conceptual differences.
This is the tendency 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
recognizes 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
unreasonable 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 statistical 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 yesterday, we have to pretend that the
present moment may be elongated fore and aft so as to take in all
eternity.[63] In French we know once for all that an object is masculine
or feminine, whether it be living or not; just as 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 enumerated
(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 another
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 allowed 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.

[Footnote 63: 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.]

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 formal 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
_z_-sound coupled with a change in the radical element of the word of
_f_ to _v_. Here we have not a falling together of forms 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 manifolding of the same formal element without a
corresponding 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 degenerate into
purely formal counters.

We may now conveniently revise our first classification 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[64]

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[65]

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 modification 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 intertwined 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.

[Footnote 64: Except, of course, the fundamental selection and contrast
necessarily implied in defining one concept 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.]

[Footnote 65: Thus, the _-er_ of _farmer_ may he defined as indicating
that particular substantive concept (object or thing) that serves as the
habitual subject of the particular verb to which it is affixed. This
relation of "subject" (_a farmer farms_) is inherent in and specific to
the word; it does not exist for the sentence as a whole. In the same way
the _-ling_ of _duckling_ defines a specific relation of attribution
that concerns only the radical element, not the sentence.]

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 \_ II. Derivational Concepts
_
Relation _/ III. Concrete Relational Concepts
\_ IV. Pure Relational Concepts

These schemes must not be worshipped as fetiches. In the actual work of
analysis difficult problems frequently 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 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 continuous gamut of concepts and forms that leads
imperceptibly from the crudest of materialities ("house" or "John
Smith") to the most subtle of relations. It is particularly significant
that the unanalyzable independent 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 Cambodgian when the
verb "give" is used in an abstract sense as a mere symbol of the
"indirect objective" relation (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 transitions 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 examples in which the independent word, after passing through
the preliminary stage of functioning as the secondary or qualifying
element in a compound, ends up by being a derivational affix pure and
simple, yet without losing the memory of its former independence. Such
an element and concept is the _full_ of _teaspoonfull_, which hovers
psychologically between the status of an independent, radical concept
(compare _full_) or of a subsidiary element in a compound (cf.
_brim-full_) and that of a simple suffix (cf. _dutiful_) in which the
primary concreteness 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 reality within the main groups of linguistic concepts
themselves. In many languages it becomes almost imperative, therefore,
to make various sub-classifications, to segregate, for instance, the
more concrete from the more abstract concepts of group II. Yet we must
always beware of reading into such abstracter groups that purely formal,
relational feeling that we can hardly help associating with certain of
the abstracter concepts which, with us, fall in group III, unless,
indeed, there is clear evidence to warrant such a reading in. An example
or two should make clear these all-important distinctions.[66] In Nootka
we have an unusually large number of derivational 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 denoting
plurality and a diminutive affix, are far more abstract in content. The
former type are more closely welded with the radical element than the
latter, which can only be suffixed to formations that have the value of
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 elements 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."[67] But is the Nootka correlate of
"the small fires in the house" the true equivalent of an English "_the
house-firelets_"?[68] 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, "several" 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 sentence. In English "the
house-firelets burn" (not "burns"), in Nootka neither verb, nor
adjective, nor 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 concrete 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 concreter group of affixes;
and may not the Nootka diminutive have a slenderer, a more elusive
content than our _-let_ or _-ling_ or the German _-chen_ or _-lein?_[69]

[Footnote 66: 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.]

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