Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/82

60 regarded rather as a suffix, forming derivative adjectives; one of the oblique cases of these adjectives was next often employed in an adverbial sense; and the use of the suffix in its extended form and with its modified application grew in importance and frequency, until finally it threw quite into the shade and supplanted the adjective use—and the independent adjective had become a mere adverbial ending. The mutilation of its form went hand in hand with this obliviousness of its origin and with its transferral to a new office; each helped on the other.

Another Germanic suffix, ship, as in friendship, worship, lordship, is distinctly traceable to its origin in the independent word shape; and its transition of meaning, from 'form' to 'aspect, condition, status, rank,' though perhaps less obvious than those which we have already noted, is evidently a natural and easy one.

A case of somewhat greater difficulty is presented us in such forms as I loved. Here the final d is, as we say, the sign of the preterit tense, added to the root love in order to adapt it to the expression of past time; and, from the evidence presented in our own language, no suspicion of its derivation from an independent word would ever cross our minds. Nor does the Anglo-Saxon, nor any other of the Germanic dialects of the same period, cast any light upon its origin. Since, however, such a sign of past time is one of the distinctive features of the Germanic group of languages, and is found nowhere else in the greater family to which these belong, we cannot help assuming that it has grown up in them since their separation from the rest of the family; just as the adverbial suffix ly, which is peculiar to our own tongue, has grown up in it since its separation from the other Germanic tongues. It is therefore a form of comparatively modern introduction, and we might hope to trace out its genesis. This is, in fact, disclosed to us by the Mœso-Gothic, the most ancient Germanic dialect, which stands toward the rest in somewhat the same relation as the Anglo-Saxon to the English; in its primitive and uncorrupted forms we see clearly that the preterits in question are made by appending to the root of the verb the past