Politics & Power Quote by Edward Sapir

Sapir is puncturing a fantasy that still flatters educated moderns: that a “proper” national language is, or should be, a clean logical machine. By starting with “No important national language” and narrowing to the “Occidental world,” he signals he’s talking about prestige tongues people treat as models of rationality - the languages of schools, parliaments, and empires. Then he pulls the rug out: even these supposedly disciplined systems don’t achieve “complete regularity,” and they can’t reliably encode even one “logical category” with consistent symbols.

The intent is methodological as much as philosophical. As a scientist of language, Sapir is warning against importing the ideals of formal logic into linguistic description. Grammars aren’t engineering diagrams; they’re historical records of compromise. Irregular verbs, gender systems that half-mean something, tense markers that leak into mood - these aren’t “errors” awaiting correction. They’re evidence that language is an accretion of habits shaped by time, contact, conquest, and convenience.

The subtext is also political. “National language” hints at standardization projects that treat deviation as decay: academies, textbooks, gatekeeping. Sapir’s claim destabilizes the moral hierarchy behind prescriptivism. If no major Western language consistently “handles” a logical category, then the usual sneer at “illogical” speech varieties looks less like science and more like social sorting.

Contextually, Sapir is writing in an era when linguistics is professionalizing and when faith in rational systems - from scientific management to planned languages - is in the air. His sentence reads like an early 20th-century corrective: human meaning-making resists tidy symbolization, and that resistance is the point, not a flaw.