[…] a part of our forms, derivative and inflectional, appear to be made by internal modification rather than external addition.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.125

[…] in our languages, forms are made by an external accretion of elements which were at first independent words.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.128

[…] there is no absolute dividing-line between what is material and what is formal in a language; material and form are relative words only, names for degrees, for poles of a continuous series, of which the members shade into one another.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.222

If we see how collocation and combination and integration and mutilation and corruption all work in succession on the same material in every part of language, producing forms and destroying them again; it is plainly within the competency of the changing circumstances and habits of the language-making community to give the history of development a climactic form.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.211

The forms, even of the richest known languages, embody and bring to distinct consciousness only a small part of the infinity of relations which subsist among the objects of thought, and which the mind impliedly recognizes, even when it does no direct attention to them by expression. Not one of those which are expressed, any more than those which have not found embodiment, is absolutely essential to successful speech.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.106

This transfer of a formal distinction only partially made to the words in which it is not made at all is an important feature in the history of forms.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.217