Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/83

II.] tense of another verb, namely did, from to do. We tamed is in Mœso-Gothic tamidêdum, which means not less evidently tame-did-we than the Anglo-Saxon sôthlîce, 'soothly, truly,' means 'in a sooth-like (truth-like) way.' I loved is, then, originally I love did, that is, I did love—as, unconsciously repeating in another way the same old act of composition, we now almost as often say. The history of the suffix has been quite like that of the ly of truly, save that it happened longer ago, and is therefore more difficult to read.

All our illustrations hitherto have been taken from the Germanic part of our language, and they have all been forms which are peculiar to the Germanic dialects, and which we have therefore, as already remarked, every reason to believe of later date than the separation of that group of dialects from the other tongues with which it stands related. Yet, with the exception of the adverbial application of the suffix ly, they are all anterior to the time at which we first make acquaintance with any Germanic tongue in contemporary records. Our confidence in the reality of our etymological analysis, and in the justness of the inferences drawn from it, is not on that account any the less: we feel as sure that the words in question were made by putting together the two parts into which each is still resolvable as if the whole process of composition had gone on under our own observation. If this were not so, if our conclusions respecting the growth of language were to be limited by the possession of strict documentary evidence, our researches in linguistic history would be stopped almost at the outset. Few languages have any considerable portion of their development illustrated by contemporary records; literature is wont, at the best, to cast light upon certain distinct epochs in the history of a dialect, leaving in obscurity the intervening periods, nor do we ever, by such help, reach a point at all nearly approaching that of the actual origin of speech. Hence the necessity resting upon the etymologist of interrogating the material of language itself, of making words yield up, on examination, their own history. He applies the analogy of processes of change and development which are actually going on in language to explain the earlier results of the