In other words, word order takes on a real functional value.  Latin and Chinook are at one extreme.  Such languages as Chinese, Siamese, and Annamite, in which each and every word, if it is to function properly, falls into its assigned place, are at the other extreme.  But the majority of languages fall between these two extremes.  In English, for instance, it may make little grammatical difference whether I say yesterday the man saw the dog or the man saw the dog yesterday, but it is not a matter of indifference whether I say yesterday the man saw the dog or yesterday the dog saw the man or whether I say he is here or is he here? In the one case, of the latter group of examples, the vital distinction of subject and object depends entirely on the placing of certain words of the sentence, in the latter a slight difference of sequence makes all the difference between statement and question.  It goes without saying that in these cases the English principle of word order is as potent a means of expression as is the Latin use of case suffixes or of an interrogative particle.  There is here no question of functional poverty, but of formal economy.

We have already seen something of the process of composition, the uniting into a single word of two or more radical elements.  Psychologically this process is closely allied to that of word order in so far as the relation between the elements is implied, not explicitly stated.  It differs from the mere juxtaposition of words in the sentence in that the compounded elements are felt as constituting but parts of a single word-organism.  Such languages as Chinese and English, in which the principle of rigid sequence is well developed, tend not infrequently also to the development of compound words.  It is but a step from such a Chinese word sequence as jin tak “man virtue,” i.e., “the virtue of men,” to such more conventionalized and psychologically unified juxtapositions as t’ien tsz “heaven son,” i.e., “emperor,” or shui fu “water man,” i.e., “water carrier.”  In the latter case we may as well frankly write shui-fu as a single word, the meaning of the compound as a whole being as divergent from the precise etymological values of its component elements as is that of our English word typewriter from the merely combined values of type and writer.  In English the unity of the word typewriter is further safeguarded by a predominant accent on the first syllable and by the possibility of adding such a suffixed element as the plural _-s_ to the whole word.  Chinese also unifies its compounds by means of stress.  However, then, in its ultimate origins the process of composition may go back to typical sequences of words in the sentence, it is now, for the most part, a specialized method of expressing relations.  French has as rigid a word order as English but does not possess anything like its power of compounding words into more complex units.  On the other hand, classical Greek, in spite of its relative freedom in the placing of words, has a very considerable bent for the formation of compound terms.