Part 1 ran from the definition of language to the “sound pattern.” Part 2 is form — how a word is built, what kinds of meaning it hides, and why the attempt to rank languages fails. Chapters 4–6.
1. “Method” and “meaning” are separate
Chapter 4. English plural can be -s (books) or vowel change (geese). Vowel change also carries past (sing → sang). Past can be a suffix (work-ed) or vowel change. In Hebrew, a verb’s meaning rides on three consonants (sh-m-r = “guard”) while the vowels between them shift the form.
Sapir’s conclusion is always the same: “Pattern is one thing, the utilization of pattern quite another.” Which function is expressed by which method is largely arbitrary, language by language; there is no logical necessity in it.
2. Six ways to build a word
The methods themselves are not many: word order, composition, affixation (prefix, suffix, infix), internal modification (of vowel, consonant, accent, length), reduplication (of the whole stem or part), and accent. Every language combines some of these to make its words.
3. “The farmer kills the duckling” — four layers of meaning
Sapir dissects “the farmer kills the duckling” exhaustively. Drop the and the sentence collapses; drop -s and it becomes a command (an address); swap farmer and duckling and subject and object reverse — so relation is carried by word order and small words.
From this he sorts concepts into four:
- I. Basic (concrete) concepts — objects, actions, qualities (farm, kill, duck). Radical elements.
- II. Derivational concepts — attached to a radical to twist its meaning (-er “one who,” -ling “little”).
- III. Concrete relational concepts — number, gender: abstract, but still keeping a trace of the concrete.
- IV. Pure relational concepts — word order,
the,of: syntactic relation itself.
Every language has I and IV. II and III are optional and vary enormously. English marks number and tense (twice — on the noun and the verb) because it treats them as relational, not because it must.
4. Parts of speech are not an analysis of reality
Late in chapter 5: if “it reddens” is a verb, a language may make “red” a verb too. Some languages have no adjective and express “red” only as the participle of a verb (“being red”); others nominalise it (“the table of bigness”). English speakers already treat a quality as a thing in “the height of a building.”
The “part of speech” reflects not so much our intuitive analysis of reality as our ability to compose that reality into a variety of formal patterns. (ch. 5)
The one near-universal distinction is noun vs. verb — because “speech consists of a series of propositions”: you need a noun to talk about something and a verb to say something of it. “No logical scheme of the parts of speech … is of the slightest interest to the linguist.”
5. Languages have no ladder of rank
In chapter 6 Sapir discards the old “isolating → agglutinative → inflective” (plus polysynthetic) ranking. It comes from an evolutionary prejudice and from the Eurocentric habit of treating Latin and Greek as the summit.
A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type of morphology as though it were necessarily the high-water mark of linguistic development is like the zoologist that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy to evolve the race-horse or the Jersey cow. (ch. 6)
Language “in its fundamental forms is the symbolic expression of human intuitions,” and these “may shape themselves in a hundred ways, regardless of the material advancement or backwardness of the people that handle the forms.” Hence: “Every language is a form language.” To classify at all, you need several independent axes: which concepts a language expresses, its technique (isolating / agglutinative / fusional / internal-change), and its degree of synthesis (analytic / synthetic / polysynthetic).
In sum
| Sapir’s claim (ch. 4–6) | In a line |
|---|---|
| Method and function are not one-to-one | “Pattern is one thing, its utilization another” |
| A word is built by about six methods | word order, composition, affixation, internal change, reduplication, accent |
| A sentence’s meaning has four layers | only I (basic) and IV (pure relational) are essential |
| Parts of speech shape reality; they don’t picture it | only noun vs. verb is near-universal |
| Languages have no ladder of rank | not “a conspiracy to evolve the Jersey cow”; use several independent axes |
And, from chapter 2: “All grammars leak.” No language is perfectly regular.
Next: the book’s most influential idea — drift (chapters 7–8). For the overview, see “Reading Edward Sapir’s Language”.
