THE INADEQUACY OF SPEECH 435 



an s to the singular. This method is so simple that it could not be 

 made more so. The exceptions are such plurals as oxen, mice, men, 

 and a few others. On the other hand, the Hausa, a dialect of the 

 Maude spoken in central Africa, employs at least seven different ways 

 of forming the plural regularly either by the addition of another 

 syllable or by reduplicating the final syllable with a euphonic change. 

 The Latin has five forms for the plural. In the language of the 

 Bullum and Temme the plural is made by means of various prefixes, 

 Ml " a house " becoming tikil, pokan, " a man " becoming apokan, and 

 so on. On the other hand, in the Japanese the plural, in a majority of 

 substantives, does not differ from the singular. Sometimes, however, it 

 is formed by repetition of the singular, or by the addition of another 

 word; but the latter process usually means something more than a 

 mere plural. In the French a large number of plurals do not differ 

 from the singular except to the eye. In the Italian the modification of 

 the terminal syllable often adds a qualification to the root : it may indi- 

 cate mere bigness, or bigness and ugliness, or bigness and fatness, or 

 bigness and vigor. Conversely, it possesses likewise several modifying 

 syllables to indicate the opposite qualities, as little and neat, little and 

 lovely, or little and unimportant, or little and contemptible. The 

 Finnish is provided with fifteen cases with which to express the various 

 relations in which a noun may be used. Doubling this number for 

 the plural, a Finnish substantive may appear in thirty different forms. 

 Comparing this method with such languages as the French and the 

 Spanish, in which case-relations are expressed by means of proposi- 

 tions, it looks like the extreme of complexity, or like an effort on the 

 part of the Finnish people to resort to an intricate method for doing 

 that which might be done just as well by a much simpler process. 

 Again, if we compare an English verb with the same part of speech 

 in Sanscrit or Greek we find a similar remarkable diversity. A Greek 

 verb with its participles may take more than five hundred different 

 forms to express person, number, tense and case. It must be evident 

 that with such an astonishing variety of resources at command it can 

 express shades of meaning in a single word quite impossible with a 

 Germanic verb. The Semitic languages are, for the most part, very 

 simple in the structure of the verb, having, like the English, only two 

 tense-forms. On the other hand, they complicate matters by giving to 

 the second person, both singular and plural, a form to agree with the 

 sex of the person addressed. Although they lack a passive voice they 

 indicate the passive state by the use of prefixes and vowels placed before 

 or within the radical consonants. The inadequacy of even the most 

 highly developed language to express abstract ideas with accuracy is 

 strikingly shown by a study of the writings of a thinker like Plato. 

 He had virtually no predecessors in the realm of thought in which his 

 mind often moved. He had, therefore, to coin new words, out of pre- 



