Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/84

62 same or like processes. And, if he work with due caution and logical strictness, his results are no more exposed to question than are those of the geologist, who infers, from the remains of animal and vegetable organisms in deeply-buried rocks, the deposition of those rocks in a period when animal and vegetable life, analogous with that of our own day, was abundant.

If, now, we turn our attention to other portions of our English speech, to those which come to us from the Latin, or which are of an ancient and primitive growth, we note the same condition of things as prevailing there also. The subject admits of the most abundant and varied illustration, but we must limit ourselves to but an instance or two.

In the series of multiplicative numerals, double, triple, quadruple, quintuple, and so on, we have a suffix ple, which is the principal indicator of the grammatical quality of the words. On following them up into the Latin, whence we derive them, we find this brief ending to be a mutilated remnant of the syllable plic, which is a well-known root, meaning 'to bend, to fold.' Double is thus by origin duplic, by abbreviation from duo-plic, and is, in sense, the precise Latin equivalent of our Germanic word two-fold. We still retain the fuller form in duplicate, the learned synonym of double.

Again, one of the oldest words in our familiar speech is am, the first person of the verb to be, nor do we see in it any signs of being otherwise than simple and indivisible. As, however, we trace its history of changes backward, from one to another of the languages with which our own claims kindred, we are enabled to discover that its two sounds are the scanty relics of two separate elements: the first, a, is all that remains of an original syllable as, which expressed the idea of existence; the other, m, represents an ending, mi, which, originally a pronoun, and having the same meaning as the same word, me, still has with us, was employed to limit the predicate of existence to the person speaking; it was, in fact, the suffix universally employed, during the earliest period in the history of our family of languages, to form the first persons singular of verbs. Am, then, really contains a