the parallel form "it becomes red, it
turns red" and say "it reddens." No one denies that "reddens" is as good
a verb as "sleeps" or even "walks." Yet "it is red" is related to "it
reddens" very much as is "he stands" to "he stands up" or "he rises." It
is merely a matter of English or of general Indo-European idiom that we
cannot say "it reds" in the sense of "it is red." There are hundreds of
languages that can. Indeed there are many that can express what we
should call an adjective only by making a participle out of a verb.
"Red" in such languages is merely a derivative "being red," as our
"sleeping" or "walking" are derivatives of primary verbs.

Just as we can verbify the idea of a quality in such cases as "reddens,"
so we can represent a quality or an action to ourselves as a thing. We
speak of "the height of a building" or "the fall of an apple" quite as
though these ideas were parallel to "the roof of a building" or "the
skin of an apple," forgetting that the nouns (_height_, _fall_) have not
ceased to indicate a quality and an act when we have made them speak
with the accent of mere objects. And just as there are languages that
make verbs of the great mass of adjectives, so there are others that
make nouns of them. In Chinook, as we have seen, "the big table" is
"the-table its-bigness"; in Tibetan the same idea may be expressed by
"the table of bigness," very much as we may say "a man of wealth"
instead of "a rich man."

But are there not certain ideas that it is impossible to render except
by way of such and such parts of speech? What can be done with the "to"
of "he came to the house"? Well, we can say "he reached the house" and
dodge the preposition altogether, giving the verb a nuance that absorbs
the idea of local relation carried by the "to." But let us insist on
giving independence to this idea of local relation. Must we not then
hold to the preposition? No, we can make a noun of it. We can say
something like "he reached the proximity of the house" or "he reached
the house-locality." Instead of saying "he looked into the glass" we may
say "he scrutinized the glass-interior." Such expressions are stilted in
English because they do not easily fit into our formal grooves, but in
language after language we find that local relations are expressed in
just this way. The local relation is nominalized. And so we might go on
examining the various parts of speech and showing how they not merely
grade into each ot