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THE

NEW CRATYLUS.

BOOK IV.

THE VERB.

CHAPTER I.

THE PERSON-ENDINGS.

345 Original comprehensiveness of the verb. 346 Causes which led to the mutilation of the affixes. 347 The person-endings are objective cases of the personal pronouns. 348 Differences of voice are only different cases of the pronominal affix. 349 A. Primary forms. 1st person singular. Reasons for believing that verbs in -u are older than verbs in -o. 350 Successive mutilations of -u. Ouantity of the original penultima. 351 In the active, the person-ending represents the instrumental or ablative case. 352 In the middle, it represents the locative. 353 2nd person singular. Usual form in -6-. The by-form is --, not -6-9. 354 Evanescence of the characteristic of this person. 355 3rd person singular. Active in -, -to: middle in -taι, -tηv. 356 1st person plural. Active -μες for -με-σι. 357 Middle -μεθα, -μεθον, for -μεθαι, μέθην. 358 2nd person plural. Active -te for tɛs: middle -σs for -σai and -óðŋv. 359 3rd person plural. Difficulties occasioned by the dual. 360 Plural in vt and -vra. Explanation of -ão. 361 Origin of vt. 362 B. Secondary forms. Active suffixes. Explanation of -cav. 363 Middle suffixes. They are not reduplications. 364 Table of existing forms. 365 Latin person-endings. Difficulties of the passive forms. The second persons. Are participial predications without a copula allowable in Greek? 366 Influence of the weight of the person-endings.

345 THOSE students, whose notions of the nature of a verb are derived from the appearance of that part of speech in our own and indeed in most modern languages, will not be able to understand very well the meaning of the term as applied in the grammars of the ancient languages. A verb in English can only express the copula or the copula and predicate of a sentence: it can never contain the subject; in other words,

no English verb can really be used impersonally, as the grammarians say, except in such obsolete phrases as me-thinketh, meseems, &c. But in the ancient languages, verbs are often found in the third person without any subject or nominative case expressed: and unless some particular emphasis is required, the nominative of the first and second persons is regularly omitted; so that the whole logical proposition may be included in a single word.

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346 The explanation of this follows from what we have said of the substitution of prepositions for case-endings, &c.; the original verb contained the pronominal elements or symbols of the relations of place, which constituted at once the case-endings of the noun and the persons of the verb. A bare root or stem without a pronominal suffix could no more form a noun, a modification of it could form a verb without a corresponding person-ending. By the lapse of time, the introduction of writ ing, and the other causes which are always at work upon a language as long as it retains its vitality, the old forms degen erated into those naked shapes in which we find but scanty remnants of the original clothing. A desire for greater distinctness in the applications of the verb led to the introduction of a system of nominative cases, or the express statement of the subject, and then, as the person-endings became less necessary, they were gradually dropt; just as the same causes produced an analogous effect upon the cases of the noun. We have shown that the Sanscrit language, which had no prepositions in the ordinary sense of the word, exhibits a most complete system of caseendings; the person-endings of the verb are also more strongly marked in Sanscrit than in Greek, because the Indians were less accustomed than the Greek to state the subject of the proposition, and in general the language had not attained to a full logical development. With the exception of the verbs in -, and some of the secondary forms of the common verbs, the person-endings are, as we shall soon show, absorbed in the more modern state of the Greek language.

347 It has long been perceived that the terminations of the verbs in -u are personal pronouns; but it has been sup

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posed by modern scholars (for instance, by Thiersch, in his Grammar, and Pott) that these personal pronouns must needs be nominative cases, the root of the verb constituting the predicate, and the connecting syllable the copula. Nothing, in our opinion, can be more unphilosophical than such a supposition. Even if man, in the rudest and earliest times, had excogitated all the rules of logic which were adumbrated by Plato and set forth as a novelty by Aristotle, it appears to us inconceivable that he should have arranged predicate, copula and subject in an order converse to that which every logician knows to be the natural one. Besides, when the system of nominative cases was introduced, the nominative of the first person was in Latin ego, in Greek yoóv, in Sanscrit aham; of the second in Latin tu, in Greek tú, subsequently oú, in Sanscrit tvam; and, as we have shown in the preceding book, the nominative sign in nouns expressing the third person was -s. Now the oldest forms of the singular person-endings in these languages, so far as they have come down to us, appear to have been -mi, -si, -ti, of which the first and third manifestly refer to the objective cases of the same pronouns: and when the third person appears as -si, this is manifestly only a dialectic softening of the objective t. In Hebrew it is well known that the pronominal affixes both of nouns and verbs perform the functions of objective cases (see Maskil le Sopher, p. 17); and the late Mr. Garnett proved many years ago that the person-endings of all the Indo-Germanic verbs are in statu regiminis (Quarterly Review, LVII. pp. 93 sqq.)*. The fact is, that the original verbs stands on precisely

*This admirable philologer is entitled to the credit of this important discovery. In the first edition of the present work, the author, not having the Quarterly Review of Prichard before him, had attributed the true theory to that distinguished writer, and not to the reviewer, whose name at that time had not been mentioned. This inadvertence was corrected by Mr. Garnett, in a letter dated "British Museum, May 3, 1842," in which he introduced himself to the author of the present book, and claimed as his own the remark referred to in the text. With Mr. Garnett's consent we printed in 1844 (Varron. p. 290) an extract from this letter, to which he has referred in one of his papers (Essays, p. 269). It may be interesting to the reader to see in Mr. Garnett's own words the vindication of his right to this linguistic deduction. "If Dr. Prichard,"

the same footing as the noun; it is a word, of which the element or differential part might be found in a noun, the constant part consisting, like that of the noun, in a pronominal element, expressing some relation of place. Thus dido-u would signify "giving here," i. e. where the speaker is; dida-61, "giving where the person addressed is;" dido-ti, "giving there,” i.e. at any other place; and similarly with regard to ridη-u. Now the roots of didou and tidŋu are do- and e- respectively*, and both of them represent a Sanscrit a, for they correspond to the verbs dadâmi and dadhâmi. But in each case the root seems to be connected with the person-ending by an intervening a, and it is then reduplicated to express more vividly the continuity of the action; a custom which we find in the unformed dialects of rude tribes even at the present day. The root do appears with a similar prolongation in dã-po-v, "a giving away” (-oα-), the case-ending of which implies mere location, and does not, like the person-endings of the verb, mark a particular relative place. As the verb gradually receives its development, we find that the differences of mood and tense affect the terminations as well as the root; but this is sufficiently intelligible, for of course the conjugation would not receive its completion till

he says, "ever did advance that the personal-endings of the verbs are objective or oblique cases of pronouns, I have done him an injustice, which I ought to repair, for in the Q. R. I expressly affirmed that he had overlooked the fact altogether. Indeed, on looking carefully through his book, I find he speaks of the suffixes in question as abbreviated pronouns, but never, as far as I am aware, as oblique cases. Nor can I discover that they were ever considered in that light by any philologist prior to the publication of the paper in the Quarterly. Gesenius, and other orientalists, speak of them decidedly as nominatives; and Lee, though he regards verbal roots as nouns, speaks indeed of the suffixes as abbreviated pronouns, but never that I know of as being in statu obliquo. The only writer I am acquainted with who has at all adverted to the fact, is the late William Humboldt, and he speaks of it as an occasional phenomenon, in a few languages, without appearing at all aware of the extensive and important application of which it is capable."

*The roots dâ, do-, dhâ, de-, are confused in Latin, for do means not only "to give," but "to put," as is seen from the compounds abdere, condere, dedere, &c. Pott, Etym. Forsch. 11. 114; Bopp, Vergl. Gr. p. 886; Benary, Röm. Lautl. p. 175.

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