There is another powerful tendency which makes for a formal elaboration that does not strictly correspond to clear-cut conceptual differences. This is the tendency to construct schemes of classification into which all the concepts must be fitted.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.98

Language is in many respects as unreasonable and stubborn about its classifications [...] It must have its perfectly exclusive pigeon-holes and will tolerate no flying vagrants. Any concept that asks for expression must submit to the classificatory rules of the game [...]
- Sapir (1921), a pag.99

Dogma, rigidly prescribed by tradition, stiffens into formalism. Linguistic categories make up a system of surviving dogma- dogma of the unconscious. They are often but half real as concepts; their life tends ever to languish away into form for form' s sake.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.100

It is because our conceptual scheme is a sliding scale rather than a phylosophical analysis of experience that we cannot say in advance just where to put a given concept. We must dispense, in other words, with a well-ordered classification of categories.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.107

Our conventional classification of words into parts of speech is only a vague, wavering approximation to a consistently worked out inventory of experience.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.117

The classification has much greater value if it is taken to refer to the expression of relational elements alone[...] the terms 'isolating', ' affixing' and 'symbolic' have a real value.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.127

But we are too ill-informed as yet of the structural spirit of great numbers of languages to have the right to frame a classification [...] the fact that two languages are similarly classified does not necessarily mean that they present a great similarity on the surface.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.140

[...] languages that fall into tha same class have a way of paralleling each other in many details or in structural features not envisaged by the scheme of classification.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.141