Page:EB1911 - Volume 21.djvu/457

 is masculine and the fox feminine, but the lamb or the chicken which the fox robs from the fold or the henroost is rarely feminine, generally masculine. Nor does this explanation account for the mouse in those languages being of the masculine gender, while the ferret or cat which caught them is feminine (, feles). An explanation which completes the theory of personification, if it does not altogether drive it from the field, has been put forward by Brugmann. In its briefest form this explanation is that gender was attached to certain suffixes because they chanced to occur frequently in words which markedly implied sex. In the Indo-European languages the commonest suffix indicating feminine gender is ā. According to this theory it had originally nothing to do with gender, but as some early words for woman or wife ended with this sound it came to be identified with feminine gender. Similarly the ending os in o-stems occurred often in names connected with males and so became identified with the masculine gender. But many stems indicate either gender indifferently, and even the very old sex words father and mother have the same ending. But when masculine and feminine endings have been attached to certain suffixes in this way, how comes it that in one series of stems the neuter should be marked not by an absence of all suffix but by a separate suffix in -m? These are the o-stems, other forms of which have been markedly identified with the masculine gender. As this characteristic, like the others mentioned, goes back apparently to a time before the separation of the Indo-European languages, explanation can hardly pass beyond speculation. It is, however, to be noted that the neuter form of the nominative is phonetically identical with the accusative form of the masculine, and it has been ingeniously argued that such forms were used originally in the accusative, such neuters not forming the subject to a verb. To the same writer the most plausible explanation of the presence of gender in the adjective is due, viz. that gender began with the deictic pronoun *so “ that man,” *sa “ that woman,” and that hence it passed to the adjective with which the pronoun was so frequently accompanied. If this explanation be right, analogy has brought into the Indo-European languages the useless multiplication of gender marks in such sentences as the Latin hae pulcrae feminae caesae suet, where the feminine gender is indicated no less than four times without any obvious gain over the English These fair women were slain, where grammatical gender is no longer obviously indicated at all.

Closely related to this question is that of the history of the neuter plural, which was first fully worked out by Professor Johannes Schmidt of Berlin. The curious construction, most common in ancient Greek, whereby a neuter plural is combined with a singular verb, is now demonstrated to be an archaic survival from the time when the neuter plural was a collective singular. Thus a word like the Latin iugum was a single yoke, the plural iuga, however, which was earlier iuga, was a collection of yokes, with the same final ā as is found generally in feminine substantives. The declension ought therefore to have been originally: nominative iugā, genitive iugās, &c., like mensa, &c., of the first declension. But as iuguum was used in the neuter singular for both nominative and accusative, iuga when it was felt as the corresponding plural was used for the accusative as well as the nominative, while the other cases of the plural were taken over from the masculine o-stems, with which the singular neuter in -o-m was so closely connected. That collective words should be used for the plural is not surprising; the English youth, first an abstract, next a collective, and finally an individual, is a case in point.

For the early history of the syntax of the verb Greek and Sanskrit are important above all other languages, because in them the original forms and the original usages are better preserved than they are elsewhere. And it is in the verb that the great difficulties of comparative syntax present themselves. The noun system is so well preserved in several languages that, when the number of the original cases had once been determined, the sifting of the pro-ethnic usages attaching to each case¦was tolerably easy, for besides Sanskrit and (to a less extent) Latin, Lithuanian and Slavonic have kept the pro-ethnic case system almost complete. The ideas also which had to be expressed by the cases were on the whole of a very concrete character, so that here the problem was much simplified. On the other hand, the ideas expressed by the forms of the verb are of a much more subtle nature, while the verb system in all languages except Greek and Sanskrit has broken down earlier and more completely than the noun. It is clear that the verb of the original IndoEuropean language possessed two voices, and forms corresponding to what we call the Indicative, Subjunctive, and Optative moods, and to the Present, Imperfect, Future, Aorist, and Perfect tenses. The imperative mood seems primitively to have been confined to the second person singular, just as the vocative, which, like the imperative is a stem form without suffix, was confined to the singular. The infinitive, as is well known, is in all languages of this system not originally a verbal but a substantival form. The pluperfect, where it has developed, seems to be a mixed form arising from the application of aorist endings to a perfect stem. Thus far the history of the verb system is tolerably clear. But when we attempt to define the original meaning of the moods and of the tenses we pass into a region where, in spite of assiduous investigation in many quarters during recent years, the scanty amount of light thrown on the problem has only served to make the darkness visible. As regards the tenses, at least, it has been shown that without doubt there is no difference in formation between present, future and aorist stems, while the earliest meaning cf the perfect was that of a special kind of present expressing either repeated or intensive action or a state. It has also been proved that the original meaning of the aorist is not past in time, and that in fact the only element whereby these languages could express remoteness in time was the augment. The augment seems to have been originally a pronominal deictic particle. Thus, as there was no original pluperfect, as neither perfect nor aorist originally referred to past time, and as the future, except in Lithuanian (with slight traces in Slavonic) and the Indo-Iranian group, cannot be clearly distinguished from the aorist, the system as a method of expressing time absolutely breaks down. The tenses in fact did not originally express the times when the action took place, but the type of action which took place. Thus the present system in the main expressed continued or durative action, the aorist only the fact that the action had taken place. The action indicated by the aorist might have been of considerable duration, or it might have been begun and ended in a moment; its characteristics in this respect are not in any way indicated by the aorist form, which intimates only that the action is viewed as a completed whole and not as a continuous process. The present system, however, is built up in a great variety of ways (thirty-two according to Brugmann’s enumeration). It is a priori unlikely that such a multiplicity of formations had not originally some reason for its existence, and Delbruck thinks that he has discovered a difference in syntactical value between various forms. The reduplicated present forms of the type seen in Sanskrit jigāti, Greek, &c., he regards as expressing originally an action which consisted of repeated acts of the same nature (iterative), though this iterative meaning frequently passed into an intensive meaning. Presents of the type seen in Sanskrit tṛ′ ṣyati, “is thirsty,” and Greek, “am glad” (for *), where the (y) of the suffix has modified the first syllable and disappeared, he regards as cursive—i.e. they express continuous action without reference to its beginning or end. Verbs which have regard to the beginning or end of the action he calls terminative, and finds them represented (a) in verbs with -n- suffixes, Sanskrit ṛṇóti,, “sets in motion,” , “break to pieces”; (b) in verbs with the suffix -sko-, Sanskrit gáchati, “goes” (to a definite destination), Greek &c. The roots he classifies as momentary (punktuell) or non-momentary, according as they do or do not express an action which is begun and ended at once.