cow.  Language in its fundamental forms is the symbolic expression of human intuitions.  These may shape themselves in a hundred ways, regardless of the material advancement or backwardness of the people that handle the forms, of which, it need hardly be said, they are in the main unconscious.  If, therefore, we wish to understand language in its true inwardness we must disabuse our minds of preferred “values"[94] and accustom ourselves to look upon English and Hottentot with the same cool, yet interested, detachment.

[Footnote 93:  One celebrated American writer on culture and language delivered himself of the dictum that, estimable as the speakers of agglutinative languages might be, it was nevertheless a crime for an inflecting woman to marry an agglutinating man.  Tremendous spiritual values were evidently at stake.  Champions of the “inflective” languages are wont to glory in the very irrationalities of Latin and Greek, except when it suits them to emphasize their profoundly “logical” character.  Yet the sober logic of Turkish or Chinese leaves them cold.  The glorious irrationalities and formal complexities of many “savage” languages they have no stomach for.  Sentimentalists are difficult people.]

[Footnote 94:  I have in mind valuations of form as such.  Whether or not a language has a large and useful vocabulary is another matter.  The actual size of a vocabulary at a given time is not a thing of real interest to the linguist, as all languages have the resources at their disposal for the creation of new words, should need for them arise.  Furthermore, we are not in the least concerned with whether or not a language is of great practical value or is the medium of a great culture.  All these considerations, important from other standpoints, have nothing to do with form value.]

We come back to our first difficulty.  What point of view shall we adopt for our classification?  After all that we have said about grammatical form in the preceding chapter, it is clear that we cannot now make the distinction between form languages and formless languages that used to appeal to some of the older writers.  Every language can and must express the fundamental syntactic relations even though there is not a single affix to be found in its vocabulary.  We conclude that every language is a form language.  Aside from the expression of pure relation a language may, of course, be “formless”—­formless, that is, in the mechanical and rather superficial sense that it is not encumbered by the use of non-radical elements.  The attempt has sometimes been made to formulate a distinction on the basis of “inner form.”  Chinese, for instance, has no formal elements pure and simple, no “outer form,” but it evidences a keen sense of relations, of the difference between subject and object, attribute and predicate, and so on.  In other words, it has an “inner form” in the same sense in which Latin possesses it, though it is outwardly “formless”