Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/325

VIII.] three root-letters may be due to the inorganic and arbitrary extension of an analogy which had by some means become a dominant one; and that, in attaining their present form, the roots have prevailingly passed through the condition of derivative nouns. The Semitic verbal forms show many signs of a more immediate and proximate development out of forms of nouns than is to be traced in the structure of the Indo-European verb.

In no small part of its structure, the Semitic verb differs very strikingly from the Indo-European. It distinguishes, indeed, the same three numbers, singular, dual, and plural, and the same persons, first, second, and third, and its personal endings are to a considerable extent formed in the same manner, by adding pronominal elements to the verbal root. But in the second and third persons it makes a farther distinction of the gender of the subject: thus, qatalat, 'she killed,' is different from qatala, 'he killed.' What is of much more consequence is that its representation of the important element of time is quite diverse from ours. The antithesis of past, present, and future, which seems to us so fundamental and necessary, the Semitic mind has ignored, setting up but two tenses, whose separate uses are to no small extent interchangeable and difficult of distinct definition, but whereof the one denotes chiefly completed action, the other incomplete; each of them admitting of employment, in different circumstances, as past, present, or future. The perfect or preterit is the more original, and its persons are formed by appended pronominal endings; the imperfect (sometimes called future) has the terminations of number belonging to a noun, and indicates person and gender by prefixes: thus, the three masculine persons in the singular are aqtulu, taqtulu, and yaqtulu; the third, masculine and feminine, dual, are yaqtulāni and taqtulāni; plural, yaqtulūna and yaqtulna. To the imperfect belongs a subjunctive and imperative, and one or two other less common quasi-modal forms. But of the wealth of modal expression into which our owh verb has always tended to develop, in a