action, nor would it easily occur to us, if we had not studied the classics, that it was anything but absurd to inject into two such highly attenuated relational concepts as are expressed by “the” and “that” the combined notions of number and sex.  Yet all this, and more, happens in Latin. Illa alba femina quae venit and illi albi homines qui veniunt, conceptually translated, amount to this:  that-one-feminine-doer[57] one-feminine-white-doer feminine-doing-one-woman which-one-feminine-doer other[58]-one-now-come; and:  that-several-masculine-doer several-masculine-white-doer masculine-doing-several-man which-several-masculine-doer other-several-now-come.  Each word involves no less than four concepts, a radical concept (either properly concrete—­white, man, woman, come—­or demonstrative—­that, which) and three relational concepts, selected from the categories of case, number, gender, person, and tense.  Logically, only case[59] (the relation of woman or men to a following verb, of which to its antecedent, of that and white to woman or men, and of which to come) imperatively demands expression, and that only in connection with the concepts directly affected (there is, for instance, no need to be informed that the whiteness is a doing or doer’s whiteness[60]).  The other relational concepts are either merely parasitic (gender throughout; number in the demonstrative, the adjective, the relative, and the verb) or irrelevant to the essential syntactic form of the sentence (number in the noun; person; tense).  An intelligent and sensitive Chinaman, accustomed as he is to cut to the very bone of linguistic form, might well say of the Latin sentence, “How pedantically imaginative!” It must be difficult for him, when first confronted by the illogical complexities of our European languages, to feel at home in an attitude that so largely confounds the subject-matter of speech with its formal pattern or, to be more accurate, that turns certain fundamentally concrete concepts to such attenuated relational uses.

[Footnote 57:  “Doer,” not “done to.”  This is a necessarily clumsy tag to represent the “nominative” (subjective) in contrast to the “accusative” (objective).]

[Footnote 58:  I.e., not you or I.]

[Footnote 59:  By “case” is here meant not only the subjective-objective relation but also that of attribution.]

[Footnote 60:  Except in so far as Latin uses this method as a rather awkward, roundabout method of establishing the attribution of the color to the particular object or person.  In effect one cannot in Latin directly say that a person is white, merely that what is white is identical with the person who is, acts, or is acted upon in such and such a manner.  In origin the feel of the Latin illa alba femina