[Footnote 3: It is not a question of the general isolating character of such languages as Chinese (see Chapter VI). Radical-words may and do occur in languages of all varieties, many of them of a high degree of complexity.]
[Footnote 4: Spoken by a group of Indian tribes in Vancouver Island.]
We now know of four distinct formal types of word: A (Nootka _hamot_); A + (0) (_sing_, _bone_); A + (b) (_singing_); (A) + (b) (Latin _hortus_). There is but one other type that is fundamentally possible: A + B, the union of two (or more) independently occurring radical elements into a single term. Such a word is the compound _fire-engine_ or a Sioux form equivalent to _eat-stand_ (i.e., "to eat while standing"). It frequently happens, however, that one of the radical elements becomes functionally so subordinated to the other that it takes on the character of a grammatical element. We may symbolize this by A + b, a type that may gradually, by loss of external connection between the subordinated element b and its independent counterpart B merge with the commoner type A + (b). A word like _beautiful_ is an example of A + b, the _-ful_ barely preserving the impress of its lineage. A word like _homely_, on the other hand, is clearly of the type A + (b), for no one but a linguistic student is aware of the connection between the _-ly_ and the independent word _like_.
In actual use, of course, these five (or six) fundamental types may be indefinitely complicated in a number of ways. The (0) may have a multiple value; in other words, the inherent formal modification of the basic notion of the word may affect more than one category. In such a Latin word as _cor_ "heart," for instance, not only is a concrete concept conveyed, but there cling to the form, which is actually shorter than its own radical element (_cord-_), the three distinct, yet intertwined, formal concepts of singularity, gender classification (neuter), and case (subjective-objective). The complete grammatical formula for _cor_ is, then, A + (0) + (0) + (0), though the merely external, phonetic formula would be (A)--, (A) indicating the abstracted "stem" _cord-_, the minus sign a loss of material. The significant thing about such a word as _cor_ is that the three conceptual limitations are not merely expressed by implication as the word sinks into place in a sentence; they are tied up, for good and all, within the very vitals of the word and cannot be eliminated by any possibility of usage.