Page:IJAL vol 1.djvu/93

 NO. I

��REVIEWS

��classification of pronominal affixes. The Basque forms (intransitive subject and transi- tive object versus transitive subject) are taken as his starting-point, and attention is called to parallels in Eskimo and, hypotheti- cally, an inferred stage in Indogermanic. The Indian forms are quoted from Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Chinook, Muskhogean.and Siouan. Riggs's Dakota evidence, in particular, is presented in great detail; the conclusion arrived at being that all active verbs are passives in nature, the logical subject being really an agentive. Comparison with other Siouan dialects (Hidatsa, Ponca, Winnebago, Tutelo) shows the pronominal peculiarities of Dakota to be general to Siouan ; the Catawba evidence throws no light on the subject (I cannot refrain, in passing, from remarking that there is no bit of American Indian linguistic research that more urgently needs doing than the preparation in the field of a Catawba grammar; Gatschet's sketch is worthless). It follows clearly enough from Uhlenbeck's evidence, which could no doubt be greatly augmented, that the ordinary contrast between subject and object does not hold in these languages ; but I do not see that the interpretation of the transitive or active verb as a passive is a necessary one. At least two other possibilities seem open. Uhlenbeck's casus inertia may be an intrinsi- cally caseless form which takes on all functions not specifically covered by the transitive or active case (subject of transitive or active verb) ; in other words, the I of I SLEEP, and the ME of HE KILLS ME may be identical in form, not because of any identity of verb- morphology, but merely by way of contrast to the distinctively transitive form of the I of I KILL HIM. This explanation would probably imply a previous stage of complete lack of pronominal differentiation. Secondly, instead of interpreting the object of the transitive verb as a sort of subjective (in other words, deriving it from the intransitive or inactive

��case), one may, on the contrary, look upon the latter as an objective, the inactive or intransitive verb being interpreted as a static verb without expressed subject, but with direct or indirect object. Thus, forms like i SLEEP or i THINK could be understood as meaning properly IT SLEEPS ME, IT SEEMS TO ME (cf. such German forms as mich hungert). Personally, I consider the latter explanation as very likely for those languages that, like Tlingit, Haida, Muskhogean, and Siouan, distinguish between active and inactive verbs. On the other hand, it seems considerably more far-fetched in the case of languages that distinguish between transitive and intransi- tive verbs (i RUN, for example, as IT RUNS TO ME). This brings me to what I consider the greatest weakness of Uhlenbeck's paper, the inclusion under one rubric of transitive versus intransitive, and active versus inactive. I believe he would have made a more con- vincing case if he had confined himself to the former category, and adopted our second suggestion for the latter. In brief, the transitive verb may be plausibly interpreted as a passive, though this hardly seems neces- sary to me where there is not direct morpho- logic evidence of the kind that Uhlenbeck has produced for certain Algonkin forms; the active verb is far more plausibly otherwise interpreted.

To Uhlenbeck's speculations as to the primitiveness of the passive verb I am not inclined to attach much importance. Such questions must be attacked morphologically and historically, not ethno-psychologically. As long as we are not better informed as to the exact distribution of types of pronominal classification and as to the historical drifts inferred from comparative linguistic research, it is premature to talk of certain features as primitive, of others as secondary. For the present, I should like to point out that we know of at least five, fundamentally probably only three, types of pronominal classification

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