ABSTRACT
WE have so far taken no account of the semantic value of words, that is to say, of their meanings independent of the part they play in the sentence. Although morphemes are often part and parcel of a single whole with semantemes to such an extent that word analysis becomes impossible (see p. 87), morphology is just as independent of the semantic value as of the phonetic value of words. Vocabulary is the term used to indicate all the words belonging to a language considered from the point of view of their semantic value. The three systems, pronunciation, grammatical forms and vocabulary, may evolve separately and under the influence of different causes. Certain languages renew their vocabulary without modifying their phonetics or morphology. In literary Urdu (a branch of Hindustani) there are entire sentences whose grammar alone is Indian but whose vocabulary, from beginning to end, is Persian. The Armenian gipsies use a speech whose pronunciation and grammar are Armenian, but whose vocabulary is foreign to Armenian. 2 Different vocabularies can be cast in the same grammatical mould.
