The study of how a language reacts to the presence of foreign words- rejecting them, translating them, or freely accepting them- may throw much valuable light in its innate formal tendencies.
- Sapir (1921), Pag. 197

If it can be shown that culture has an innate form [...] quite apart from subject-matter of any description whatsoever, we have a something in culture that may serve as a term of comparison with and possibly a means of relating it to language.
- Sapir (1921), Pag. 218

Since every language has its distinctive peculiarities, the innate formal limitations- and possibilities- of one literature are never quite the same as those of another.
- Sapir (1921), Pag. 222

[...] literary artists [...] are those who have known subconsciously to fit or trim the deeper intuition to the provincial accents of their daily speech. [...] Their personal 'intuition' appears as a completed synthesis of the absolute art of intuition and the innate, specialized art of the linguistic medium.
- Sapir (1921), Pag. 225

It is even doubtful if the innate sonority of a phonetic system counts for as much, as esthetic determinant, as the relations between the sounds, the total gamut of their similarities and contrasts.
- Sapir (1921), Pag. 226