[Footnote 71:  These are classical, not modern colloquial, forms.]

[Footnote 72:  Just as in English “He has written books” makes no commitment on the score of quantity ("a few, several, many").]

What is true of the idea of plurality is naturally just as true of a great many other concepts.  They do not necessarily belong where we who speak English are in the habit of putting them.  They may be shifted towards I or towards IV, the two poles of linguistic expression.  Nor dare we look down on the Nootka Indian and the Tibetan for their material attitude towards a concept which to us is abstract and relational, lest we invite the reproaches of the Frenchman who feels a subtlety of relation in femme blanche and homme blanc that he misses in the coarser-grained white woman and white man.  But the Bantu Negro, were he a philosopher, might go further and find it strange that we put in group II a category, the diminutive, which he strongly feels to belong to group III and which he uses, along with a number of other classificatory concepts,[73] to relate his subjects and objects, attributes and predicates, as a Russian or a German handles his genders and, if possible, with an even greater finesse.

[Footnote 73:  Such as person class, animal class, instrument class, augmentative class.]

It is because our conceptual scheme is a sliding scale rather than a philosophical analysis of experience that we cannot say in advance just where to put a given concept.  We must dispense, in other words, with a well-ordered classification of categories.  What boots it to put tense and mode here or number there when the next language one handles puts tense a peg “lower down” (towards I), mode and number a peg “higher up” (towards IV)?  Nor is there much to be gained in a summary work of this kind from a general inventory of the types of concepts generally found in groups II, III, and IV.  There are too many possibilities.  It would be interesting to show what are the most typical noun-forming and verb-forming elements of group II; how variously nouns may be classified (by gender; personal and non-personal; animate and inanimate; by form; common and proper); how the concept of number is elaborated (singular and plural; singular, dual, and plural; singular, dual, trial, and plural; single, distributive, and collective); what tense distinctions may be made in verb or noun (the “past,” for instance, may be an indefinite past, immediate, remote, mythical, completed, prior); how delicately certain languages have developed the idea of “aspect"[74] (momentaneous, durative, continuative, inceptive, cessative, durative-inceptive, iterative, momentaneous-iterative, durative-iterative, resultative, and still others); what modalities may be recognized (indicative, imperative, potential, dubitative, optative, negative, and a host of others[75]); what distinctions of person are possible (is “we,” for instance, conceived of as a plurality of “I”