Page:Comparative Grammar of the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German and Slavonic languages (Bopp 1885).pdf/121

OF THE ROOTS. 99 The vowel, with one or more consonants, and sometimes without any consonant whatever, belongs to the fundamental meaning: it can be lengthened to the highest degree, or raised by Guna or Vṛiddhi; and this lengthening or raising, and, more lately, the retention of an original a, opposed to its weakening to i or change to u (§§., ), belongs not to the denoting of grammatical relations, which require to be more clearly pointed out, but, as I imagine I can prove, only to the mechanism, the symmetry of construction.

As the Semitic roots, on account of their construction, possess the most surprising capacity for indicating the secondary ideas of grammar by the mere internal moulding of the root, of which they also make extensive use, while the Sanskrit roots, at the first grammatical movement, are compelled to assume external additions; so must it appear strange, that F. von Schlegel, while he divides languages in general into two chief races, of which the one denotes the secondary intentions of meaning by an internal alteration of the sound of the root by inflexion, the other always by the addition of a word, which may by itself signify plurality, past time, what is to be in future, or other relative ideas of that kind, allots the Sanskṛit and its sisters to the former race, and the Semitic languages to the second. “There may, indeed,” he writes, p. 48, “arise an appearance of inflexion, when the annexed particles are melted down with the chief word so as to be no longer distinguishable; but where in a language, as in the Arabic, and in all which are connected with it, the first and most important relations, as those of the person to verbs, are denoted by the addition of particles which have a meaning for themselves individually, and the tendency to which suffixes shews itself deeply seated in the language, it may there be safely assumed that the same may have