of the word is far from fanciful, for historical evidence does, in all earnest, show that sing is in origin a number of quite distinct words, of type A + (b), that have pooled their separate values.  The (b) of each of these has gone as a tangible phonetic element; its force, however, lingers on in weakened measure.  The sing of I sing is the correspondent of the Anglo-Saxon singe; the infinitive sing, of singan; the imperative sing of sing.  Ever since the breakdown of English forms that set in about the time of the Norman Conquest, our language has been straining towards the creation of simple concept-words, unalloyed by formal connotations, but it has not yet succeeded in this, apart, possibly, from isolated adverbs and other elements of that sort.  Were the typical unanalyzable word of the language truly a pure concept-word (type A) instead of being of a strangely transitional type (type A + [0]), our sing and work and house and thousands of others would compare with the genuine radical-words of numerous other languages.[3] Such a radical-word, to take a random example, is the Nootka[4] word hamot “bone.”  Our English correspondent is only superficially comparable. Hamot means “bone” in a quite indefinite sense; to our English word clings the notion of singularity.  The Nootka Indian can convey the idea of plurality, in one of several ways, if he so desires, but he does not need to; hamot may do for either singular or plural, should no interest happen to attach to the distinction.  As soon as we say “bone” (aside from its secondary usage to indicate material), we not merely specify the nature of the object but we imply, whether we will or no, that there is but one of these objects to be considered.  And this increment of value makes all the difference.

[Footnote 3:  It is not a question of the general isolating character of such languages as Chinese (see Chapter VI).  Radical-words may and do occur in languages of all varieties, many of them of a high degree of complexity.]

[Footnote 4:  Spoken by a group of Indian tribes in Vancouver Island.]

We now know of four distinct formal types of word:  A (Nootka hamot); A + (0) (sing, bone); A + (b) (singing); (A) + (b) (Latin hortus).  There is but one other type that is fundamentally possible:  A + B, the union of two (or more) independently occurring radical elements into a single term.  Such a word is the compound fire-engine or a Sioux form equivalent to eat-stand (i.e., “to eat while standing").  It frequently happens, however, that one of the radical elements becomes functionally so subordinated to the other that it takes on the character of a grammatical element.  We may symbolize this by A + b, a type that may gradually, by loss of external connection between the subordinated element b and its independent counterpart B merge with the commoner type A + (b).  A word like beautiful is an example of A + b, the _-ful_ barely preserving the impress of its lineage.  A word like homely, on the other hand, is clearly of the type A + (b), for no one but a linguistic student is aware of the connection between the _-ly_ and the independent word like.