sed in different form but that they may be
differently grouped among themselves; that some among them may be
dispensed with; and that other concepts, not considered worth expressing
in English idiom, may be treated as absolutely indispensable to the
intelligible rendering of the proposition. First as to a different
method of handling such concepts as we have found expressed in the
English sentence. If we turn to German, we find that in the equivalent
sentence (_Der Bauer toetet das Entelein_) the definiteness of reference
expressed by the English _the_ is unavoidably coupled with three other
concepts--number (both _der_ and _das_ are explicitly singular), case
(_der_ is subjective; _das_ is subjective or objective, by elimination
therefore objective), and gender, a new concept of the relational order
that is not in this case explicitly involved in English (_der_ is
masculine, _das_ is neuter). Indeed, the chief burden of the expression
of case, gender, and number is in the German sentence borne by the
particles of reference rather than by the words that express the
concrete concepts (_Bauer_, _Entelein_) to which these relational
concepts ought logically to attach themselves. In the sphere of concrete
concepts too it is worth noting that the German splits up the idea of
"killing" into the basic concept of "dead" (_tot_) and the derivational
one of "causing to do (or be) so and so" (by the method of vocalic
change, _toet-_); the German _toet-et_ (analytically _tot-_+vowel
change+_-et_) "causes to be dead" is, approximately, the formal
equivalent of our _dead-en-s_, though the idiomatic application of this
latter word is different.[55]

[Footnote 55: "To cause to be dead" or "to cause to die" in the sense of
"to kill" is an exceedingly wide-spread usage. It is found, for
instance, also in Nootka and Sioux.]

Wandering still further afield, we may glance at the Yana method of
expression. Literally translated, the equivalent Yana sentence would
read something like "kill-s he farmer[56] he to duck-ling," in which
"he" and "to" are rather awkward English renderings of a general third
personal pronoun (_he_, _she_, _it_, or _they_) and an objective
particle which indicates that the following noun is connected with the
verb otherwise than as subject. The suffixed element in "kill-s"
corresponds to the English suffix with the important exceptions that it
makes no reference to the number of the subject and that the statement
is