is really “that-one, the-white-one, (namely) the-woman”—­three substantive ideas that are related to each other by a juxtaposition intended to convey an identity.  English and Chinese express the attribution directly by means of order.  In Latin the illa and alba may occupy almost any position in the sentence.  It is important to observe that the subjective form of illa and alba, does not truly define a relation of these qualifying concepts to femina.  Such a relation might be formally expressed via an attributive case, say the genitive (woman of whiteness).  In Tibetan both the methods of order and of true case relation may be employed:  woman white (i.e., “white woman”) or white-of woman (i.e., “woman of whiteness, woman who is white, white woman").]

I have exaggerated somewhat the concreteness of our subsidiary or rather non-syntactical relational concepts In order that the essential facts might come out in bold relief.  It goes without saying that a Frenchman has no clear sex notion in his mind when he speaks of un arbre ("a-masculine tree”) or of une pomme ("a-feminine apple").  Nor have we, despite the grammarians, a very vivid sense of the present as contrasted with all past and all future time when we say He comes.[61] This is evident from our use of the present to indicate both future time ("He comes to-morrow”) and general activity unspecified as to time ("Whenever he comes, I am glad to see him,” where “comes” refers to past occurrences and possible future ones rather than to present activity).  In both the French and English instances the primary ideas of sex and time have become diluted by form-analogy and by extensions into the relational sphere, the concepts ostensibly indicated being now so vaguely delimited that it is rather the tyranny of usage than the need of their concrete expression that sways us in the selection of this or that form.  If the thinning-out process continues long enough, we may eventually be left with a system of forms on our hands from which all the color of life has vanished and which merely persist by inertia, duplicating each other’s secondary, syntactic functions with endless prodigality.  Hence, in part, the complex conjugational systems of so many languages, in which differences of form are attended by no assignable differences of function.  There must have been a time, for instance, though it antedates our earliest documentary evidence, when the type of tense formation represented by drove or sank differed in meaning, in however slightly nuanced a degree, from the type (killed, worked) which has now become established in English as the prevailing preterit formation, very much as we recognize a valuable distinction at present between both these types and the “perfect” (has driven, has killed) but may have ceased to do so at some point in the future.[62] Now form lives longer than