Wealth & Money Quote by Edward Sapir

Sapir is picking a fight with the engineer’s fantasy of language: that you can file down the irregularities, publish a neat rulebook, and get global communication as a clean utility. He’s speaking as a scientist, but the line is really a warning about what gets lost when “international language” is framed as an efficiency project. Simple, regular, logical: those are the selling points of constructed tongues and streamlined reforms, the linguistic equivalent of a universal socket wrench. Sapir grants the appeal, then pivots: a shared language has to be “rich and creative” or it won’t actually live.

The intent is pragmatic, not sentimental. A language meant to travel across borders must do more than transmit transactions; it has to carry jokes, flirtation, insult, poetry, science, bureaucracy, prayer. Richness here isn’t ornament. It’s functional redundancy: multiple ways to say nearly the same thing, room for metaphor, registers that signal intimacy or authority. “Creative” is the real trapdoor. Sapir is implying that speakers will inevitably bend rules, coin words, and invent slang. If your “logical” system can’t absorb that pressure, it becomes a museum piece - admirable, unused.

Context matters: Sapir worked in a period obsessed with modern standardization (industry, measurement, bureaucracy) and also with international auxiliary languages like Esperanto. As a linguist attuned to cultural texture, he knew that natural languages aren’t messy by accident; their irregularities often encode history and social meaning. The subtext is a rebuttal to linguistic technocracy: you can’t legislate a world tongue the way you standardize a rail gauge, because the point of language isn’t just to be understood. It’s to be inhabited.