44 INTEKNATIONAL LANGUAGE AND SCIENCE 



enunciated by Ostwald : " There exists a unique and 

 reciprocal correspondence between the ideas and the 

 morphemes which express them." This principle represents 

 evidently the ideal of all language, for a language, being 

 essentially a system of symbols, is only theoretically perfect 

 (and useful and convenient in practice) when there exists a 

 unique correspondence between the symbol and the idea 

 symbolised. 



Now it follows from this principle that it is quite incorrect 

 to say, as is often done, " Being given a stem, it suffices to 

 add to it -ar to form a verb, -o to form a substantive, -a to 

 form an adjective"; we require to define the sense possessed 

 by this verb, substantive, and adjective. In other words, to 

 every derivative of form there must correspond a derivative 

 of sense which is in no wise arbitrary, but determined by 

 general rules. If dorm-ar =: to sleep, dorm-o cannot mean 

 indifferently the sleeper, the dormitory, or the desire to 

 sleep ; if blind-a = blind, blind-o cannot signify at pleasure 

 either blindness or the act of blinding. The rule which must 

 guide us here is the principle enunciated above, namely, 

 that a stem always preserves the same sense and expresses 

 the same idea ; if one wishes to express another idea related 

 to the former in a definite way, it is necessary to add to the 

 stem a morpheme expressing this relationship. The 

 morphemes which denote the relations of our ideas are 

 the affixes of derivation, which permit us to express a whole 

 family of ideas by the aid and as the function of one 

 fundamental idea, and to form correspondingly a family of 

 words all derived from the same stem, as occurs, as a matter 

 of fact, in natural languages. Certain of these affixes are 

 wrongly classed amongst the grammatical inflections, such 

 as, for example, the participial suffixes which serve to derive 

 an adjective or a substantive from a verb, denoting him who 

 performs the action, or is affected by (subject to) the state or 

 relationship expressed by the stem : dorm-ant-a = sleeping, 



