be "borrowed," and that
even morphological elements may be taken over. We may go further and
recognize that certain languages have, in all probability, taken on
structural features owing to the suggestive influence of neighboring
languages. An examination of such cases,[176] however, almost invariably
reveals the significant fact that they are but superficial additions on
the morphological kernel of the language. So long as such direct
historical testimony as we have gives us no really convincing examples
of profound morphological influence by diffusion, we shall do well not
to put too much reliance in diffusion theories. On the whole, therefore,
we shall ascribe the major concordances and divergences in linguistic
form--phonetic pattern and morphology--to the autonomous drift of
language, not to the complicating effect of single, diffused features
that cluster now this way, now that. Language is probably the most
self-contained, the most massively resistant of all social phenomena. It
is easier to kill it off than to disintegrate its individual form.

[Footnote 176: I have in mind, e.g., the presence of postpositions in
Upper Chinook, a feature that is clearly due to the influence of
neighboring Sahaptin languages; or the use by Takelma of instrumental
prefixes, which are likely to have been suggested by neighboring "Hokan"
languages (Shasta, Karok).]

X

LANGUAGE, RACE AND CULTURE

Language has a setting. The people that speak it belong to a race (or a
number of races), that is, to a group which is set off by physical
characteristics from other groups. Again, language does not exist apart
from culture, that is, from the socially inherited assemblage of
practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our lives.
Anthropologists have been in the habit of studying man under the three
rubrics of race, language, and culture. One of the first things they do
with a natural area like Africa or the South Seas is to map it out from
this threefold point of view. These maps answer the questions: What and
where are the major divisions of the human animal, biologically
considered (e.g., Congo Negro, Egyptian White; Australian Black,
Polynesian)? What are the most inclusive linguistic groupings, the
"linguistic stocks," and what is the distribution of each (e.g., the
Hamitic languages of northern Africa, the Bantu languages of the south;
the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and
Polyn