nominal 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, Siamese, 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
instance, 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 _yesterday the dog saw the man_ or whether I say _he is
here_ or _is he here?_ In the one case, of the latter group of examples,
the vital distinction of subject and object depends 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
question. It goes without saying that in these cases the English
principle of word order is as potent a means of expression as is the
Latin use of case suffixes or of an interrogative particle. There is
here no question of functional poverty, but of formal economy.

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
juxtapositions as _t'ien tsz_ "heaven son," i.e., "emperor," or _shui
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
values of its component elements as is that of our English word
_typewriter_ from the merely combined values of _type_ and _writer_. In