Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/52

Rh like the vocative, the accent being drawn back to the first syllable, though other modes of denoting it soon came into vogue. Possibility was symbolized by the attachment of the suffix -ija to the stem, probability by the attachment of -a and -a, and in this way the optative and conjunctive moods first arose. The creation of a future by the help of the suffix -sya seems to belong to the same period in the history of the verb. This suffix is probably identical with that used to form a large class of adjectives and genitives (like the Greek linroio for ITTTTOO-IO) ; in this case future time will have bsen regarded as an attribute of the subject, no distinction being drawn, for instance, between &quot; rising sun and &quot;the sun will rise.&quot; It is possible, however, that the auxiliary verb as, &quot; to be,&quot; enters into the composition of the future ; if so, the future will be the product of the second stage in the development of the Aryan verb when new forms were created by means of composition. The sigmatic or first aorist is in favour of this view, as it cer tainly belongs to the age of Aryan unity, and may be a compound of the verbal stem with the auxiliary as. After the separation of the Aryan languages, composition was largely employed in the formation of new tenses. Thus in Latin we have perfects like scrip-si and ama-vi, formed by the help of the auxiliaries as (sum) and fuo, while such forms as amaveram (amavi-erain) or amarem (ama-sem) bear their origin on their face. So, too, the future in Latin and Old Celtic (amabo, Irish carub) is based upon the substan tive verb/o, &quot; to be,&quot; and the English preterite in -ed goes back to a suffixed did, the reduplicated perfect of do. New tenses and moods, however, were created by the aid of suffixes as well as by the aid of composition, or rather were formed from nouns whose stems terminated in the suffixes in question. Thus in Greek we have aorists and perfects in -Ka, and the characteristics of the two passive aorists, ye and the, are more probably the suffixes of nominal stems than the roots of the two verbs ya, &quot; to go,&quot; and dhd, &quot; to place,&quot; as Bopp supposed. How late some of these new formations were may be seen in Greek, where the Homeric poems are still ignorant of the weak future passive, the optative future, an:l the aspirated perfect, and where the strong future passive occurs but once and the desiderative but twice. On the other hand, many of the older tenses were disused and lost. In classical Sanskrit, for instance, of the modal aorist forms the precative and benedictive almost alone remain, while the pluperfect, of which Del- briick has found traces in the Veda, has wholly disappeared The passive voice did not exist in the parent-Aryan speech. No need for it had arisen, since such a sentence as &quot; I am pleased &quot; could be as well represented by &quot; This pleases me,&quot; or &quot; I please myself.&quot; It was long before the speaker was able to imagine an action without an object, and when he did so, it was a neuter or substantival rather than a passive verb that he formed. The passive, in fact, grew out of the middle or reflexive, and, except in the two aorists, continued to be represented by the middle in Greek. So, too, in Latin the second person plural is really the middle participle with estis understood, and the whole class of deponent or reflexive verbs proves that the characteristic r which Latin shares with Celtic could have had at the out set no passive force. Much light has been thrown on the character and con struction of the primitive Aryan sentence by comparative syntax. In contradistinction to Semitic, where the defining word follows that which is defined, the Aryan languages place that which is defined after that which defines it ; and Bergaigne has made it clear that the original order of the sentence was (1) object, (2) verb, and (3) subject. Greater complication of thought and its expression, the connexion of sentences by the aid of conjunctions, and rhetorical inversion caused that dislocation of the criminal order of the sentence which reaches its culminating point in the involved periods of Latin literature. Our own language still remains true, however, to the syntax of the parent-Aryan when it sets both adjective and genitive before the nouns which they define. In course of time a distinction came to be made between an attribute used as a mere qualificative and an attribute used predicatively, and this distinction was expressed by placing the predicate in opposition to the subject and accordingly after it. The opposition was of itself sufficient to indicate the logical copula, or substantive verb ; indeed, the word which afterwards commonly stood for the latter at first signified &quot; existence,&quot; and it was only through the wear and tear of time that a phrase like Dem bonus est, &quot; God exists as good,&quot; came to mean simply &quot; God is good.&quot; It is needless to observe that neither of the two articles was known to the parent-Aryan ; indeed, the definite article, which is merely a decayed demonstrative pronoun, has not yet been developed in several of the languages of the Aryan family.

We must now glance briefly at the results of a scientific investigation of English grammar and the modifications they necessitate in our conception of it. The idea that the free use of speech is tied down by the rules of the grammarian must first be given up ; all that the grammarian can do is to formulate the current uses of his time, which are determined by habit and custom, and are accordingly in a perpetual state of flux. We must next get rid of the notion that English grammar should be modelled after that of ancient Rome ; until we do so we shall never understand even the elementary principles upon which it is based. We cannot speak of declensions, since English has no genders except in the pronouns of the third person, and no cases except the genitive and a few faint traces of an old dative. Its verbal conjugation is essentially different from that of an inflexional language like Latin, and cannot be com pressed into the same categories. In English the syntax has been enlarged at the expense of the accidence ; position has taken the place of forms. To speak of an adjective &quot; agreeing &quot; with its substantive is as misleading as to speak of a verb &quot;governing&quot; a case, In fact, the distinction between noun and adjective is inapplicable tc English grammar, and should be replaced by a distinction between objective and attributive words. In a phrase like &quot;this is a cannon,&quot; cannon is objective ; in a phrase like &quot; a cannon- ball,&quot; it is attributive ; and to call it a substantive in the one case and an adjective in the other, is only to introduce confusion. With the exception of the nominative, the various forms of the noun are all attributive ; there is no difference, for example, between &quot;doing a thing&quot; and &quot; doing badly.&quot; Apart from the personal pronouns, the accusative of the classical languages can be represented only by position ; but if we were to say that a noun which follows a verb is in the accusative case we should have to define &quot; king&quot; as an accusative in such sentences as &quot;he became king&quot; or &quot;he is king.&quot; In conversational English &quot;it is me&quot; is as correct as &quot;c est moi&quot; in French, or &quot;det er mig &quot; in Danish ; the literary &quot; it is I &quot; is due to the in fluence of classical grammar. The combination of noun or pronoun and preposition results in a compound attribute. As for the verb, Mr Sweet has well said that &quot; the really characteristic feature of the English finite verb is its in ability to stand alone without a pronominal prefix.&quot; Thus &quot; dream &quot; by itself is a noun ; &quot; I dream &quot; is a verb. The place of the pronominal prefix may be taken by a noun, though both poetry and vulgar English frequently insert the pronoun even when the noun precedes. The number of inflected verbal forms is but small, being confined to the third person singular and the special forms of the preterite and past participle, though the latter may with more justice be regarded as belonging to the province of the lexicographer