Students of linguistics often have a sense of excitement when they come upon data from languages they’ve never heard of before and discover how very different languages can look from one another. Although linguists in the generative tradition are always quick to stress that languages are more alike underlyingly than they seem superficially, what often strikes students first are the wonderfully exuberant ways in which languages can do things differently. Some of what gives this impression of difference is the unique way in which the morphology of languages can package different concepts in different forms.

The linguist Edward Sapir, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, had a rather romantic name for the unique combination of processes that characterize the grammar of each language – he called it the “genius” of the language

For it must be obvious to anyone who has thought about the question at all or who has felt something of the spirit of a foreign language that there is such a thing as a basic plan, a certain cut, to each language. This type or plan or structural “genius” of the language is something much more fundamental, much more pervasive than any single feature of it that we can mention, nor can we gain an adequate idea of its nature by a mere recital of the sundry facts that make up the grammar of the language.

These days, linguists might find quaint Sapir’s idea that each language is imbued with something like a special spirit or soul that embodies its ‘basic plan’. But Sapir’s idea of “genius” comes close to that feeling that students have that the new languages they encounter are in some sense new creatures.

In this section we take a brief look at five very different languages – Turkish, Mandarin Chinese, Samoan, Latin, and Nishnaabemwin -- to try to see something of this unique combination of morphological processes that constitutes at least one part of the genius of each language. All of these languages use morphology in one way or another, but each makes different choices from the universal toolbag of rule types that we have surveyed so far in this book. Some use predominantly one strategy, others many; some have lots of inflection, others almost none. But each has its own unique pattern.