praise_. This conveys no
finished thought in English, 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 significant 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 case of _sing
praise_ different individuals 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 him)!_ 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 who kills joy_) or _he 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 amplifying processes is habitual. It depends entirely
on the genius of the particular language what function is inherently
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 rhetorical rather than a strictly grammatical principle.
Whether I say in Latin _hominem femina videt_ or _femina hominem videt_
or _hominem videt femina_ or _videt femina hominem_ makes little or no
difference beyond, possibly, a rhetorical or stylistic one. _The woman
sees the man_ 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 _she-him-sees_. Eliminate the Latin case suffixes (_-a_ and _-em_)
and the Chinook pro