Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/137

III.] knew that," or " I knew that thing: viz. he was ill;" "we saw the man who did it " represents "who did it? we saw the man," or "we saw the man [of whom the inquiry is made] who did it?" Than is historically the same word as then: "he is mightier than I" was once "he is mightier, then (that is, next after him) I." Or is a contracted form of other. The primary meaning of and is 'against;' the simpler form of the latter, again, has made at least partially the same transition to a connective. Our articles are of quite modern development; an or a is the numeral one; the is the demonstrative that. We saw some time since how head has come to stand for 'individual;' the butcher talks of "twenty head of sheep," as if that part of the animal were not the least valuable from his point of view. Hand is similarly applied: "the head-carpenter and his twenty hands," if it do not describe one Briarean individual, ought at least to designate only eleven persons; but in our usage it denotes twenty-one. Even the peculiarly corporal word body has been spiritualized, in somebody, anybody, "if a body meet a body," and so on: to say "nobody was present" is equivalent to saying "not a soul was there," and would be true, however many corpses, or beasts, or bodies metallic, fluid, or aëriform, might have been within cognizance. The verb grow signifies properly 'to increase, to change from smaller to larger,' but we often use it in the simple sense of gradual change, of 'becoming,' and say to grow thin or small, to grow tired. By a farther extension of the same process, the verb which in our whole family of languages originally meant 'to grow' (Sansk. bhû, Greek phüō) has in many of them passed through the idea of 'becoming' to that of 'being' simply: the Latin fui, our be, been, are its descendants. Indeed, our substantive verb to be, the most bodiless and colourless of all our words, the mere copula between subject and predicate, is made up of the relics of several verbs which once had a distinct physical significance: be and been, as just noticed, contained the idea of 'growing;' am, art, is, and are, that of 'sitting;' was and were, that of 'dwelling, abiding.'