Form Is All

  What is form? Simply, it is the shape something can take. When we use the word combined with language, the types of shapes we speak of are limited by that content... but the limitation still leaves us with a number of possibilities we could not attend to in our lifetimes. In his seminal biological text "The Origin of the Species," Charles Darwin wrote this about the expansion of formal potential in life:  ...whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. Language is the same. Which is an oversimplification, of course, but also not. When we talk about the shapes of language, we might be talking about its shape in the mouth, or its pattern as sound waves when spoken. We could be speaking of linguistic variation, different language families and their global interpolation, or we could be speaking of words themselves and their look on the p