GRAMMAR OF ISOLATING SPEECH. 23 
difference, Je tala means “‘a story.’’ With other demonstratives we 
find the sense group ‘ou te tala meaning “‘I say.’”’ Regarded as word 
absolute, tala passes unchanged from one sense to the next. It sim- 
plifies the grammar to group all the significations of tala, of the 
thousands of other words which are similarly flexible in use, and to 
erect a part of speech which shall at once and for all its contents 
define the use, just as in our more discrete grammar a noun is the 
name of any person, place, or thing which can be known or men- 
tioned, and a verb is a word which signifies to be, to do, or to suffer. 
If I may be pardoned a personal note I do wonder whence these 
machine-made definitions come back so perfectly to mind at the 
moment when for the first time in a generation I need them or 
their like. 
We may, of course, say that tala is a root invariable in form, but 
which varies in sense according as it is used for a noun or a verb. 
This is a very indolent way of disposing of the problem; we shall 
find no difficulty in adducing many instances from English in which 
noun and verb are the same in form, which interesting fact has 
absolutely no whit to do with the matter. There is far more in this 
attributive part of isolating speech than is susceptible of explanation 
by the statement that any vocable may serve as noun, verb, adjec- 
tive, or adverb according to the whim of the speaker. We shall lose 
the whole significance of isolating speech if we avoid its problems 
by such evasion, and it is vitally significant when we see it pointing 
the way to the comprehension of how man created for his own needs 
the art of speech. 
In our system of formal grammar the only thing which at all 
approximates this idea is the verbal noun. The savage of our study, 
like many another primitive thinker, has no conception of being in 
the absolute; his speech has no true verb “‘to be.”’ Similarly he can 
not conceive a quality in the absolute; his recognition of that quality 
is always substantive; quality and the notorious existence of that 
quality must share his statement. His is not the intelligence to say 
‘“‘red’’ as we may do and hold an abstract idea of redness; whatever 
word he may use to express ‘“‘red’’ must equally express the concep- 
tion of existence; the utmost he can say is ‘‘is-red,’’ and when the 
word is spoken the untrained intelligence and, in great likelihood, 
the roving eye will seek out some object in nature concerning which 
specifically to posit the existing quality, whether it be the blossom 
of hibiscus tucked over his neighbor’s ear or the long tail-feathers of 
the tropic bird aloft visible to his keen sight, but to us, when dis- 
cerned, no more than a locomotive dot in the blue heavens. 
Recur to my first introduction of the sample phrase, tala 1 manu: 
it will be observed that for tala I offered a sense as dashed as if it 
were in the Morse code: ‘‘there-is-a-telling.’”’ Such periphrasis 
