Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/286

264 noun or verb, then we must believe that the germs out of which our language grew were not more complicated than single syllables, and that they possessed no distinct character as nouns or verbs, but were equally convertible into both. Our researches are only pointed a step farther back, without a change of method or result. That in these roots we approach very near to, if we do not quite touch, the actual beginnings of speech, is proved by other considerations. In order to bring into any language new apparent roots, and give them mobility by clothing them with inflections, a system of inflections must have been already elaborated by use with other roots in other forms. We cannot apply our d as sign of the imperfect tense to form such words as I electrified, I telegraphed, until we have worked down our preterit did, in substance and meaning, to such a mere formative element. And when we have traced the suffix back until we find it identical with the independent word out of which it grew, we know that we are close upon the beginning of its use, and have before us virtually that condition of the language in which its combinations were first made. So also with the adverbial suffix ly, when we have followed it up to lîce, a case of the adjective lîc, 'like.' Now, in connection with the roots of which examples have been given above, we see in actual process of elaboration the general system of Indo-European inflection, the most ancient, fundamental, and indispensable part of our grammatical apparatus; and we infer that these roots and their like are the foundation of our speech, the primitive material out of which its high and complicated fabric has been reared. It is not possible to regard them as the worn-down relics of a previous career of inflective development. The English, it is true, has been long tending, through the excessive prevalence of the wearing-out processes, toward a state of flectionless monosyllabism; but such a monosyllabism, where the grammatical categories are fully distinguished, where relational words and connectives abound, where every vocable inherits the character which the former possession of inflection has given it, where groups of related terms are applied to related uses, is a very different thing from a primitive