tower as well as
a brave man and a tall man. In Marett's words:

The evolution of language then, on this view, may be regarded as a
movement away from the holophrastic [compound] in the direction
of the analytic. When every piece in your playbox of verbal bricks
can be dealt with separately, because it is not joined on in all sorts of
ways to the other pieces, then only can you compose new constructions
to your liking. Order and emphasis, as is shown by English,
and still more conspicuously by Chinese, suffice for sentence-building.
Ideally, words should be individual and atomic. Every modification
they suffer by internal change of sound, or by having prefixes
or suffixes tacked on to them, involves a curtailment of their
free use and a sacrifice of distinctness. It is quite easy, of course,
to think confusedly, even whilst employing the clearest type of
language.... On the other hand, it is not feasible to attain a high
degree of clear thinking, when the only method of speech available
is one that tends toward wordlessness--that is to say, one that is
relatively deficient in verbal forms that preserve their identity in all
contexts.[1]

[Footnote 1: Marett: _loc. cit._, pp. 141-42.]

Languages differ not only in being more or less analytic,
but in their general modes of classification. That is, not only
do they have more or less adequate vocabularies, but in their
syntax, their sentence structure, their word forms, they variously
organize experience. It is important to note that in
these divergent classifications no one of them is more final
than another. We are tempted, despite this fact, to think
that the grammar, spelling, and phonetics of our own language
constitute the last word in the rational conveyance of thought.

THE INSTABILITY OF LANGUAGE. Language being a social habit,
it is to be expected that it should not stay fixed and changeless.
The simpler physiological actions are not performed in
the same way by any two individuals, and no social practice
is ever performed in the same way by two members of a group,
or by two different generations. In this connection writes
Professor Bloomfield:

The speech of former times, wherever history has given us records
of it, differs from that of the present. When we read Shakspere,
for example, we are disturbed by subtle deviations from our own
habits in the use of words and in construction; if our actors
pronounced their lines as Shakspere and his contemporaries