It is curious to observe how greatly languages differ in their ability to make use of the process of composition.  One would have thought on general principles that so simple a device as gives us our typewriter and blackbird and hosts of other words would be an all but universal grammatical process.  Such is not the case.  There are a great many languages, like Eskimo and Nootka and, aside from paltry exceptions, the Semitic languages, that cannot compound radical elements.  What is even stranger is the fact that many of these languages are not in the least averse to complex word-formations, but may on the contrary effect a synthesis that far surpasses the utmost that Greek and Sanskrit are capable of.  Such a Nootka word, for instance, as “when, as they say, he had been absent for four days” might be expected to embody at least three radical elements corresponding to the concepts of “absent,” “four,” and “day.”  As a matter of fact the Nootka word is utterly incapable of composition in our sense.  It is invariably built up out of a single radical element and a greater or less number of suffixed elements, some of which may have as concrete a significance as the radical element itself.  In, the particular case we have cited the radical element conveys the idea of “four,” the notions of “day” and “absent” being expressed by suffixes that are as inseparable from the radical nucleus of the word as is an English element like _-er_ from the sing or hunt of such words as singer and hunter.  The tendency to word synthesis is, then, by no means the same thing as the tendency to compounding radical elements, though the latter is not infrequently a ready means for the synthetic tendency to work with.

There is a bewildering variety of types of composition.  These types vary according to function, the nature of the compounded elements, and order.  In a great many languages composition is confined to what we may call the delimiting function, that is, of the two or more compounded elements one is given a more precisely qualified significance by the others, which contribute nothing to the formal build of the sentence.  In English, for instance, such compounded elements as red in redcoat or over in overlook merely modify the significance of the dominant coat or look without in any way sharing, as such, in the predication that is expressed by the sentence.  Some languages, however, such as Iroquois and Nahuatl,[28] employ the method of composition for much heavier work than this.  In Iroquois, for instance, the composition of a noun, in its radical form, with a following verb is a typical method of expressing case relations, particularly of the subject or object. I-meat-eat for instance, is the regular Iroquois method of expressing the sentence I am eating meat.  In other languages similar forms may express local or instrumental or still other relations.  Such