Were a language ever completely "grammatical" it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.

A common allegiance to form of expression that is identified with no single national unit is likely to prove one of the most potent symbols of the freedom of the human spirit that the world has yet known.

A logical analysis of reflexive usages in French shows, however, that this simplicity is an illusion and that, so far from helping the foreigner, it is more calculated to bother him.

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

What fetters the mind and benumbs the spirit is ever the dogged acceptance of absolutes.

National languages are all huge systems of vested interests which sullenly resist critical inquiry.

A second type of direct evidence is formed by statements, whether as formal legends or personal information, regarding the age or relative sequence of events in tribal history made by the natives themselves.