Page:Comparative Grammar of the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German and Slavonic languages (Bopp 1885).pdf/120

98 OF THE ROOTS idea by themselves alone, without the aid of vowels; and although they may be momentarily compressed into one syllable, still, in this, the combination of the middle radical with the first or last cannot be recognised as original and belonging to the root, because it is only transitory, and chiefly depends on the mechanism of the construction of the word. Thus, in Hebrew, kâtûl, “slain,” in the fem., on account of the addition âh contracts itself to ktûl (ktûl-âh); while kôtêl, “slaying,” before the same addition, compresses itself in an opposite manner, and forms kôtlâh. Neither ktûl, therefore, nor kôtl, can be regarded as the root; and just as little can it be looked for in ktôl, as the status constructus of the infinitive; for this is only a shortening of the absolute form kâtôl, produced by a natural tendency to pass hastily to the word governed by the infinitive, which, as it were, has grown to it. In the imperative ktôl the abbreviation is not external, subject to mechanical conditions, but rather dynamic, and occasioned by the hurry with which a command is usually enunciated. In the Semitic languages, in decided opposition to those of the Sanskṛit family, the vowels belong, not to the root, but to the grammatical motion, the secondary ideas, and the mechanism of the construction of the word. By them, for example, is distinguished, in Arabic, katala, “he slew,” from kutila, “he was slain”; and in Hebrew, kôtêl, “slaying,” from kâtûl, “slain.” A Semitic root is unpronounceable, because, in giving it vowels, an advance is made to a special grammatical form, and it then no longer possesses the simple peculiarity of a root raised above all grammar. But in the Sanskṛit family of languages, if its oldest state is consulted in the languages which have continued most pure, the root appears as a circumscribed nucleus, which is almost unalterable, and which surrounds itself with foreign syllables, whose origin we must investigate, and whose destination is, to express the secondary ideas of grammar which the root itself cannot express.