Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/364

342 no little difference of opinion among linguistic scholars, and can be fully established only by continued research.

The Egyptian was a language of the utmost simplicity, or even poverty, of grammatical structure. Its roots—which, in their condition as made known to us, are prevailingly, though not uniformly, monosyllabic—are also its words; neither noun nor verb, nor any other part of speech, has a characteristic form, or can be traced back to a simpler radical element, from which it comes by the addition of a formative element. Some roots, as in Chinese, are either verb, substantive, or adjective—thus, ankh, 'live, life, alive,' sekhi, 'write, a writing, writer'—others are only verbs or only nouns. A word used as substantive is generally marked by a prefixed article, which is often closely combined with it, but yet is not a part of it; it has no declension, the objective uses being indicated by prepositions. The personal inflection of the verb is made by means of suffixed pronominal endings, also loosely attached, and capable of being omitted in the third person when a noun is expressed as subject of the verb. Mode and tense are, to a certain limited extent, signified by prefixed auxiliary words. But these pronominal endings, which, when added to the verb, indicate the subject (sometimes also the object), have likewise a possessive value, when appended to nouns: thus, ran-i is either 'I name' or 'my name;' it is literally, doubtless, 'naming-mine,' applied in a substantive or a verbal sense according to the requirements of the particular case: that is to say, there is no essential distinction formally made between a noun and a verb. In the singular number of both articles and pronominal suffixes, as also in the pronouns, there is made a separation of gender, as masculine or feminine. This is a highly important feature in the structure of Hamitic speech, and the one which gives it its best claim to the title of form-language. So far as it goes, it puts the tongues of the family into one grand class along with the Indo-European and the Semitic: these three families alone have made a subjective classification of all objects of knowledge and of thought as masculine and feminine, and given it expression in their speech. But, by its general character, the Egyptian is far enough