emned
as unscientific. A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type
of morphology as though it were necessarily the high-water mark of
linguistic development is like the zooelogist that sees in the organic
world a huge conspiracy to evolve the race-horse or the Jersey cow.
Language in its fundamental forms is the symbolic expression of human
intuitions. These may shape themselves in a hundred ways, regardless of
the material advancement or backwardness of the people that handle the
forms, of which, it need hardly be said, they are in the main
unconscious. If, therefore, we wish to understand language in its true
inwardness we must disabuse our minds of preferred "values"[94] and
accustom ourselves to look upon English and Hottentot with the same
cool, yet interested, detachment.

[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.]

We come back to our first difficulty. What point of view shall we adopt
for our classification? After all that we have said about grammatical
form in the preceding chapter, it is clear that we cannot now make the
distinction between form languages and formless languages that used to
appeal to some of the older writers. Every language can and must express
the fundamental syn