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