(Humboldt is not merely Bopp's contemporary; he knew his work, and in detail); whereas in the Classical period the expressive function of language was required only at its point of origin, and in order to explain how a sound could represent a thing, language in the nineteenth century, throughout its development and even in its most complex forms, was to have an irreducible expressive value; no arbitrariness, no grammatical convention is able to obliterate that value, for, if language expresses, it does so not in so far as it is an imitation and duplication of things, but in so far as it manifests and translates the fundamental will of those who speak it.