CHAPTER II.

PARTS OF SPEECH-THE NOUN.

Original identity of substantive and adjective-Parallel formation of noun and verb-Declension-Case-endings are postpositions of demonstrative suffixes-The attrition of terminations a proof of their great antiquity - Nominative, accusative, subject, and object in old French-Genitive, dative, vocative, and ablative— Insufficiency of cases-Gradual substitution of the preposition for the postposition-Degrees of comparison-The disappearance of the suffix before the adverb.

BEFORE we touch on the mechanism of the declension, we have to solve one or two preliminary problems, which offer a far greater interest than the nomenclature of the forms special to the various families of languages. What is a noun ? What is a verb? Is the one class anterior to the other? What are case and verbal endings? what their nature and their office?

The noun is the individual or generic designation of an object, in the most general sense of that word, of a sensible or intellectual object, concrete or abstract. So at least it now appears to us when we say lion, tiger, sheep, horse, house, or even pain, pleasure, feeling, idea. But although we apply to these words the term noun-substantive, although all hold the same place in the sentence, and are brought into relation with one another in the same manner, and with other parts of the proposition by the same methods, yet even a cursory examination will reveal to us shades of difference among them. Most of them are derived

Yes

from derivatives; and it is through forgotten metaphors and transpositions, through changes innumerable in form and meaning, that they have come to express for us the, so to speak, real and objective image of the being, thing, or quality with which we identify them. They represent no substance. But, by a useful illusion, eliminating more or less voluntarily all accessory or approximative meanings, we imagine that we conceive clearly the object designated. Are there now, were there ever in the past, true substantives? and no. That is to say, that in the earliest times, when man was yet unable to analyse his sensations, the meeting with an animal, the passage of a meteor, a blow received, pain or joy experienced, may have provoked cries, phonetic gestures, which answered adequately to the impression received; and these sounds, these primitive names, may, by the merest chance, have come down to us. I am speaking here of the Indo-European languages only. For it cannot be doubted that a great number of Chinese monosyllables were signs, attached either to objects or to various aspects of objects, aspects considered as new objects. M. Michel Bréal is disposed to believe that naked roots like srp, like av, as, va, ap, or aqv, grau, which are found in serpens, in ovis, in asu, in vata, in aqua, in bos, were essentially what I shall call raw substantives, and signified before anything else serpent, sheep, breath, wind, water, ox, and by analogy only came to be applied to other beings, or the actions of other beings, and took other meanings, such as to glide, undulating, to breathe, life, to run, agile, to wander, to walk, earth. This opinion is plausible, yet the haste with which speech seizes upon those raw substantives to express qualities or actions seems to prove that

they themselves are the result of an unconscious analysis, and that they describe the most salient peculiarity of the object heard, seen, or touched. Our sensibility, in fact, having five ways of perceiving external things, is itself an instrument of abstraction. The senses co-operate and supplement each other, but it is always the one which is most directly affected which determines the impression on the brain and its expression by the voice; and the vocal symbol necessarily differs according as it corresponds to an indication of sight, hearing, touch, smell, or taste. Hence the number of synonyms ultimately rejected, or reserved for approximate shades of meaning, or qualities perceived in the same object by the eye, the ear, or the hand. So that the noun, even when the most involuntary expression of the primitive impression, can only be the expression of a quality.

There is, then, no original difference between the substantive and the adjective. Both are names which express a quality, a manner of existence, either generalised and applicable to all the objects which possess it, or specialised and identified with the whole of the object, of which it really designates but one property. "All substantives," says M. Bréal, "were, to begin with, adjectives taken substantively."

How did the adjective come to be distinguished in the long-run not only in meaning but in form? In the first place, the adjective, habitually used to signify an object, lost its qualifying value, and came to be solely the name of the object. For instance, deva, which means the shining, and which has still in Sanscrit the three degrees of comparison, ended by meaning the god. Sourya, the brilliant, became the name of the sun.

Akva, the runner, became the

name of the horse. Manu, the intelligent, signified man. The epithet was forgotten in the thing designated by it. Other words, on the contrary, laghu (Gr. λaxis, Lat. le(g)vis, light), tanu, brghu (tenuis, bre(g)vis), nava, new, not being specially attached to any object, retained, with their qualifying power, the faculty of taking the three genders, which the substantives lost, and the comparative and superlative forms. Phonetic change, by obscuring the meaning of the roots, contributed also to separate the two classes of words. The Hindu, whose language is less modified, can perceive the relationship which exists between akva and açu, rapid. But what Greek would have guessed the affinity between wкus and Tоs? Then a choice was made between the suffixes, and that as early as the Indo-European period. If in Latin the suffix ti forms alike nouns and adjectives, pestis, vestis, fustis, mentis, fortis, mitis, tristis, there are others, such as man and men (açman, the sky, nomen, documen, foramen, examen, agmen), such as tra, tro (πλктрov, rastrum, cultrum, monstrum), which were used for nouns alone. We sometimes find this sorting process taking place in a single language. In the Vedic dialect, for instance, the suffix as still forms adjectives, tar-as, penetrating, ap-as, action; but in Sanscrit it rarely forms anything but nouns, man-as, gan-as, as in Greek and Latin, pévos, gen-us, op-us.

The verb, which we shall consider separately, is closely related with the noun and the adjective. At first it expresses, like them, a state, a manner of being, an action; it even borrows their form for its supines, participles, gerundives, and infinitives. Reduced to its simplest elements, it is composed, like them, of an attributive root or theme, and of a

demonstrative root.

Bhara-s, the bearer, the burden, is the same as bhara-ti, he bears; for the two suffixes s and ti represent the same pronoun, of which the sound varies between sa and ta, and which replaces, announces, or recalls the subject expressed or understood. For the rest, the fundamental identity of noun and verb is proved to us by the monosyllabic languages; the same word may be noun, adjective, or verb, according to its place in the sentence. But in the agglutinative idioms we see the beginning of the differences, which become more marked in inflected languages. Affixes placed before or after a root, which may turn into a verb, are pronominal, and not simply indicative; already some rudimentary artifices add to the action the idea of present or of past time. The complicated edifice of the Indo-European conjugation is raised on the same foundation, and by the aid of similar materials. Only the joints, which a ruder construction allowed us to see, have here disappeared, hidden by the fusion in which the theme, itself inflected, contracted, lengthened, reduplicated, and the auxiliaries and terminations are welded together.

In his ingenious essay on the chronology of language, Curtius rejects the hypothesis of a parallel development of the noun and of the verb. He believes that while the former remains as a naked root, or at least as an indeclinable theme, the latter acquired the six personal terminations, "invariable characteristic of all the Indo-European languages." The declension is even, in his view, of later date than the insertion between the root and the termination of the suffixes a, ja, nu, na, pa, ta, sja, which give an intensive, causative, frequentative, desiderative meaning to the verb, and later also than the period of auxiliary verbs and