relatively largest mechanical units employed "sentences" and the relatively smallest "words." Over this range extends the validity of grammatical laws. But as soon as we pass from theory to practice, we see that language as currently used is no longer such a mechanism; it obeys not laws, but pulse. Thus a race-character is involved, a priori, in the way in which the matter to be communicated is set in sentences. Sentences are not the same for Tacitus and Napoleon as for Cicero and Nietzsche. The Englishman orders his material syntactically in a different way from the German. Not the ideas and thoughts, but the thinking, the kind of life, the blood, determine in the primitive, Classical, Chinese, and Western speech-communities the type of the sentence-unit, and with it the mechanical relation of the word to the sentence. The boundary between grammar and syntax should be placed at the point where the mechanical of speech ceases and the organic of speaking begins — usages, custom, the physiognomy of the way that a man employs to express himself. The other boundary lies where the mechanical structure of the word passes into the organic factors of sound-formation and expression. Even the children of immigrants can often be recognized by the way in which the English "th" is pronounced — a race-trait of the land. Only that which lies between these limits is the "language," properly so called, which has system, is a technical instrument, and can be invented, improved, changed, and worn out; enunciation and expression, on the contrary, adhere to the race. We recognize a person known to us, without seeing him, by his pronunciation, and not only that, but we can recognize a member of an alien race even if he speaks perfectly correct German. The great sound-modifications, like the Old High German in Carolingian times and the Middle High German in the Late Gothic, have territorial frontiers and affect only the speaking of the language, not the inner form of sentence and word.
Words, I have just said, are the relatively smallest mechanical units in the sentence. There is probably nothing that is so characteristic of the thinking of a human species as the way in which these units are acquired by it. For the Bantu Negro a thing that he sees belongs first of all to a very large number of categories of comprehension. Correspondingly the word for it consists of a kernel or root and a number of monosyllabic prefixes. When he speaks of a woman in a field, his word is something like this: "living, one, big, old, female, outside, human"; this makes seven syllables, but it denotes a single, clear-headed, and to us quite alien act of comprehension.[1] There are languages in which the word is almost coextensive with the sentence.
The gradual replacement of bodily or sonic by grammatical gestures is thus the decisive factor in the formation of sentences, but it has never been completed. There are no purely verbal languages. The activity of speaking, in words, as it emerges more and more precise, consists in this, that through word-
- ↑ See the article "Bantu Languages," by Sir H. H. Johnston, Ency. Brit., XI ed. — Tr.
