Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/139

III.] two former into single words, like the two latter. It is clear that, as formerly claimed, the significant content of words is more plastic than their external form: while our language has nearly lost the habit, and so the "power," as we call it, of making new vocables out of independent elements, it is still able to combine and integrate the meanings of such elements, to no small extent.

But again, all form-making includes as an essential part something of the same attenuation of meaning of the formative element, the same withdrawal of its distinctive substantial significance and substitution of one which is relational and formal, which we have been illustrating in the history of independent words. The ly of godly, homely, lively, and so on, no longer means 'like;' still less does that of fully, mostly, etc. In the ship of lordship, the independent word shape is no more to be recognized by its significance than by its form. Even the ful of healthful and cheerful has been weakened in intent from 'full of' to 'possessed of, characterized by.' But there are other phrases which exhibit a closer resemblance and more intimate connection with form-making than any hitherto cited. The d of loved, as we have already seen, is by origin the imperfect did; I loved means etymologically 'I did or performed a loving;' the d has been converted from an independent word into a formative element, indicative of past action, by being compounded with love, and then, in the relation which it sustained toward that word, losing its distinctive force and meaning, and assuming the value of a temporal modification merely. With the form I loved, now, the phrase I did love is virtually equivalent: it contains the same elements, and they have the same logical value: the did is there for no other purpose than the d, its hereditary representative, and is in idea, not less than the latter, a formative element; it impresses a modification of temporal form upon the word with which it is connected, and has no other office. That it still maintains its grammatical standing as a separate word constitutes only a formal, not an essential, distinction between the two equivalent expressions. So also with the verb have, by the aid of which we form other of