Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/290

268 the completion of the action signified by the root, and furnished another past tense, a perfect: for example, from the root dā, 'give,' Sanskrit dadāu, Greek dedōka, Latin dedi; from dhā, 'put, make,' Greek tetheika, Old High-German tēta, Anglo-Saxon dide, our did. This reduplicated perfect, as is well known, is a regular part of the scheme of Greek conjugation; in the Latin, not a few of the oldest verbs show the same, in full, or in more or less distinct traces; the Mœso-Gothic has preserved it in a considerable number of verbs (for example, in haihald, 'held,' from haldan, 'hold;' saislep, 'slept,' from slepan, 'sleep'); in the other Germanic dialects it is nearly confined to the single word did, already quoted. Moods were added by degrees: a conjunctive, having for its sign a union-vowel, a, interposed between root and endings, and bearing perhaps a symbolical meaning; and an optative, of which the sign is i or ia in the same position, best explained as a verbal root, meaning 'wish, desire.' From this optative descends the "subjunctive" of all the Germanic dialects. The earliest future appears to have been made by compounding with the root the already developed optative of the verb 'to be,' as-yâ-mi; for 'I shall call,' then, the language literally said 'I may be calling' (vak-s-yâ-mi). Of primitive growth, too, was a reflexive or "middle" voice, characterized by an extension of the personal endings, which is most plausibly explained as a repetition of them, once as subject and once as object: thus, vak-mai, for vak-ma-mi, 'call-I-me,' i.e. 'I call myself:' it was also soon employed in a passive sense, 'I am called'—as reflexives, of various age and form, have repeatedly been so employed, or have been converted into distinct passives, in the history of Indo-European language. Other secondary forms of the verb, as intensives, desideratives, causatives, were created by various modifications of the root, or compositions with other roots; yet such verbal derivatives have played only a subordinate part in the