Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/51

Rh genders, masculine and feminine. As soon as object and subject, patient and agent, were clearly distinguished from each other, there arose a need for a third gender, which. should be neither masculine nor feminine, but denote things without life. This third gender was fittingly expressed either by the objective case used as a nominative (e.g., regnum), or by a stem without any case ending at all (e.g., virus). The adverbial meaning of so many of the cases explains the readiness with which they became crystallized into adverbs and prepositions. An adverb is the attribute of an attri bute, &quot; the rose smells sweetly,&quot; for example, being resolv able into &quot; the rose has the attribute of scent with the further attribute of sweetness.&quot; In our own language once, twice, needs, are all genitives ; seldom is a dative. The Latin and Greek humi and ^a/xat are locatives, facillime (facil- lumed) and curves ablatives, iravrr] and afj-a instrumental, Trapos, ef i/s, and rrjXov genitives. The frequency with which particular cases of particular nouns were used in a speci fically attributive sense caused them to become, as it were, petrified, the other cases of the nouns in question passing out of use, and the original force of those that were retained being gradually forgotten. Prepositions are adverbs em ployed to define nouns instead of verbs and adjectives. Their appearance in the Aryan languages is comparatively late, and the Homeric poems allow us to trace their growth in Greek. The adverb, originally intended to define the verb, came to be construed with the noun, and the govern ment of the case with which it was construed was accord ingly transferred from the verb to the noun. Thus when we read in the Odyssey (iv. 43), avrovs 8 tio-rjyov Otiov oopov, we see that ets is still an adverb, and that the accusative is governed by the verb ; it is quite otherwise, however, with a line like Arpei S^s Se yepovras doAAea? r/yev A^ataiv es KLcrir]v (II., i. 89.) where the adverb has passed into a preposition. The same process of transformation is still going on in English, where we can say indifferently, &quot; What are you looking at 1 &quot; using &quot; at &quot; as an adverb, and govern ing the pronoun by the verb, and &quot; At what are you look ing?&quot; where &quot;at&quot; has become a preposition. With the growth and increase of prepositions the need of the case- endings diminished, and in some languages the latter dis appeared altogether. Like prepositions, conjunctions also are primarily adverbs used in a demonstrative and relative sense. Hence most of the conjunctions are petrified cases of pronouns. The relation between two sentences was originally expressed by simply setting them side by side, afterwards by employing a demonstrative at the beginning of the second clause to refer to the whole preceding one. The relative pronoun can be shown to have been in the first instance a demonstrative; indeed, we can still use that in English in a relative sense. Since the demonstrative at the beginning of the second clause represented the first clause, and was consequently an attribute of the second, it had to stand in some case, and this case became a conjunction. How closely allied the adverb and the conjunction are may be seen from Greek and Latin, where ws or quum can be used as either the one or the other. Our own and, it may be observed, has pro bably the same root as the Greek locative adverb en, and originally signified &quot; going further.&quot; Another form of adverb is the infinitive, the adverbial force of which appears clearly in such a phrase as &quot;A wonderful thing to see.&quot; Various cases, such as the loca tive, the dative, or the instrumental, are employed in Vedic Sanskrit in the sense of the infinitive, besides the bare stem or neuter formed by the suffixes man and van. In Greek the neuter stem and the dative case were alone retained, for the purpose. The first is found in infinitives like So/*ev and &amp;lt;e peiv (for an earlier &amp;lt;epe-/ev), the second in the infinitives in -at. Thus the Greek Sowai answers letter for letter to the Vedic dative ddvdne, &quot; to give,&quot; and the form tytvbta-Qai is explained by the Vedic vayodhai, for vayds-dhai, liter ally &quot; to do living,&quot; dhai being the dative of a noun from the root dha, &quot;to place&quot; or &quot;do.&quot; When the form iprv- Secrtfcu had once come into existence, analogy was ready to create such false imitations as ypdi^/ao-OaL or ypa.(f&amp;gt;0r](rea-6ai. The Latin infinitive in -re for -se has the same origin, amare, for instance, being the dative of an old fctem amas. In fieri for fierei or fi.esei, from the same root as our English be, the original length of the final syllable is pre served. The suffix in -urn is an accusative, like the corre sponding infinitive of classical Sanskrit. This origin of the infinitive explains the Latin construction of the accusative and infinitive. When the Roman said, &quot; Miror te ad me nihil scribere,&quot; all that he meant at first was, &quot; I wonder at you for writing nothing to me,&quot; where the infinitive wa merely a dative case used adverbially. The history of the infinitive makes it clear how little dis tinction must have been felt at the outset between the noun and the verb. Indeed, the growth of the verb was a slow process. There was a time in the history of Aryan speech when it had not as yet risen to the consciousness of the speaker, and in the period when the noun did not possess a plural there was as yet also no verb. The attachment of the first and second personal pronouns, or of suffixes re sembling them, to certain stems, was the first stage in the development of the latter. Like the Semitic verb, the Aryan verb seems primarily to have denoted relation only, and to have been attached as an attribute to the subject. The idea of time, however, was soon put into it, and two tenses were created, the one expressing a present or con tinuous action, the other an aoristic or momentary one. The distinction of sense was symbolized by a distinction of pronunciation, the root-syllable of the aorist being an abbreviated form of that of the present. This abbreviation was due to a change in the position of the accent (which was shifted from the stem-syllable to the termination), and this change again was probably occasioned by the prefixing of the so-called augment to the aorist, which survived into historical times only in Sanskrit, Zend, and Greek, and the origin of which is still a mystery. The weight of the first syllable in the aorist further caused the person -endings to be shortened, and so two sets of person-endings, usually termed primary and secondary, sprang into existence. By reduplicating the root-syllable of the present tense a perfect was formed; but originally no distinction was made between present and perfect, and Greek verbs like StSw/xt and ^KW are memorials of a time when the difference between &quot; I am come &quot; and &quot; I have come&quot; was not yet felt. Reduplication was further adapted to the expression of intensity and desire (in the so-called intensive and desiderative forms). By the side of the aorist stood the imperfect, which differed from the aorist, so far as outward form was concerned, only in possessing the longer and more original stem of the pre sent. Indeed, as Benfey first saw, the aorist itself was primitively an imperfect, and the distinction between aorist and imperfect is not older than the period when the stem- syllables of certain imperfects were shortened through the influence of the accent, and this differentiation of forms appropriated to denote a difference between the sense of the aorist and the imperfect which was beginning to be felt. After the analogy of the imperfect, a pluperfect was created out of the perfect by prefixing the augment (of which the Greek fyt^Kov is an illustration) ; though the pluperfect, too, was originally an imperfect formed from the redupli cated present. Besides time, mood was also expressed by the primitive Aryan verb, recourse being had to symbol ization for the purpose. The imperative was represented by the bare stem,