relation.  The radical element A ("to cut up"), before entering into combination with the cooerdinate element B ("to sit"), is itself compounded with two nominal elements or element-groups—­an instrumentally used stem (F) ("knife"), which may be freely used as the radical element of noun forms but cannot be employed as an absolute noun in its given form, and an objectively used group—­(E) + C + d ("black cow or bull").  This group in turn consists of an adjectival radical element (E) ("black"), which cannot be independently employed (the absolute notion of “black” can be rendered only as the participle of a verb:  “black-be-ing"), and the compound noun C + d ("buffalo-pet").  The radical element C properly means “buffalo,” but the element d, properly an independently occurring noun meaning “horse” (originally “dog” or “domesticated animal” in general), is regularly used as a quasi-subordinate element indicating that the animal denoted by the stem to which it is affixed is owned by a human being.  It will be observed that the whole complex (F) + (E) + C + d + A + B is functionally no more than a verbal base, corresponding to the sing- of an English form like singing; that this complex remains verbal in force on the addition of the temporal element (g)—­this (g), by the way, must not be understood as appended to B alone, but to the whole basic complex as a unit—­; and that the elements (h) + (i) + (0) transform the verbal expression into a formally well-defined noun.

[Footnote 5:  In this and other examples taken from exotic languages I am forced by practical considerations to simplify the actual phonetic forms.  This should not matter perceptibly, as we are concerned with form as such, not with phonetic content.]

It is high time that we decided just what is meant by a word.  Our first impulse, no doubt, would have been to define the word as the symbolic, linguistic counterpart of a single concept.  We now know that such a definition is impossible.  In truth it is impossible to define the word from a functional standpoint at all, for the word may be anything from the expression of a single concept—­concrete or abstract or purely relational (as in of or by or and)—­to the expression of a complete thought (as in Latin dico “I say” or, with greater elaborateness of form, in a Nootka verb form denoting “I have been accustomed to eat twenty round objects [e.g., apples] while engaged in [doing so and so]").  In the latter case the word becomes identical with the sentence.  The word is merely a form, a definitely molded entity that takes in as much or as little of the conceptual material of the whole thought as the genius of the language cares to allow.  Thus it is that while the single radical elements and grammatical elements, the carriers of isolated concepts, are comparable as we pass from language to language, the finished words are not.  Radical (or grammatical) element and sentence—­these are the primary functional