tactic 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" where Latin is outwardly "formal." On the other
hand, there are supposed to be languages[95] which have no true grasp of
the fundamental relations but content themselves with the more or less
minute expression of material ideas, sometimes with an exuberant
display of "outer form," leaving the pure relations to be merely
inferred from the context. I am strongly inclined to believe that this
supposed "inner formlessness" of certain languages is an illusion. It
may well be that in these languages the relations are not expressed in
as immaterial a way as in Chinese or even as in Latin,[96] or that the
principle of order is subject to greater fluctuations than in Chinese,
or that a tendency to complex derivations relieves the language of the
necessity of expressing certain relations as explicitly as a more
analytic language would have them expressed.[97] All this does not mean
that the languages in question have not a true feeling for the
fundamental relations. We shall therefore not be able to use the notion
of "inner formlessness," except in the greatly modified sense that
syntactic relations may be fused with notions of another order. To this
criterion of classification we shall have to return a little later.

[Footnote 95: E.g., Malay, Polynesian.]

[Footnote 96: Where, as we have seen, the syntactic relations are by no
means free from an alloy of the concrete.]

[Footnote 97: Very much as an English _cod-liver oil_ dodges to some
extent the task of explicitly defining the relations of the three nouns.
Contrast French _huile de foie de morue_ "oil of liver of cod."]

More justifiable would be a classification according to the formal
processes[98] most typically