Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/341

VIII.] instance is the word baba-lar-um-dan, given above, which contains the possessive um, signifying 'our,' besides the plural ending lar and the ablative case-affix dan. The Turkish verbs exemplify the same peculiarity in a much more striking manner: thus, by appending to the root one or more than one of half-a-dozen modifying elements, expressing passivity, reflexiveness, reciprocity, causation, negation, and impossibility, we may form an almost indefinite number of themes of conjugation, each possessing the complete scheme of temporal and modal forms: examples are, from the root sev, 'love,' sev-ish-dir-mek, 'to cause to love one another,' sev-ish-dir-il-eme-mek, 'not to be capable of being made to love one another,' and so on.

Of the more ordinary inflectional apparatus, analogous with that of the tongues of our own family, some of the Scythian languages possess an abundant store: the Finnish has a regular scheme of fifteen cases for its nouns; the Hungarian, one of more than twenty. Their plurals are formed by a separate pluralizing suffix (in Turkish, ler or lar, as seen above), to which then the same case-endings are added as to the simple theme in the singular. No distinction of grammatical gender is marked. Verbal forms are produced, as with us, by personal endings, of pronominal origin. These are of two kinds, personal and possessive, and are appended respectively to conjugational themes having a participial and an infinitival significance, to names of the actor and of the action. Thus, from Turkish dog-mak, 'to strike,' through the present participle dogur, 'striking,' comes the present dogur-um, 'striking-I,' i.e., 'I strike;' the preterit is dogd-um, 'act-of-striking-mine,' i.e., 'I have struck;' the third person is the simple theme, without suffix, as dogur, 'he strikes,' dogdi, 'he has struck;' and the addition to these of the common plural suflix of declension makes the third persons plural, dogur-lar, 'they strike,' dogdi-ler, 'they have struck'—literally, 'strikers,' 'strikings.' Such verbal forms are, then, essentially nouns, taken in a predicative sense; the radical idea has been made a noun of, in order to be employed as a verb; and so much of the nominal form and character still cleaves to them, that it must