It is this very fact that countless sentences of this sort are

perfectly clear which leads to the employment of similar constructions

even where the resulting sentence is by no means clear; but if all,

or most, words were identical in the nominative and the dative,

like _gott_, or in the dative and genitive, like _der Indierin_,

constructions like those used would be impossible to imagine in a

language meant to be an intelligible vehicle of thought. And so the

ultimate cause of the ambiguities is the inconsistency in the formation

of the several cases. But this inconsistency is found in all the old

languages of the Aryan family: cases which in one gender or with one

class of stems are kept perfectly distinct, are in others identical.

I take some examples from Latin, because this is perhaps the best

known language of this type, but Gothic or Old Slavonic would show

inconsistencies of the same kind. _Domini_ is genitive singular and

nominative plural (corresponding to, e.g., _verbi_ and _verba_);

_verba_ is nominative and accusative pl. (corresponding to _domini_

and _dominos_); _domino_ is dative and ablative; _dominæ_ gen. and

dative singular and nominative plural; _te_ is accusative and ablative;

_qui_ is singular and plural; _quæ_ singular fem. and plural fem.

and neuter, etc. Hence, while _patres filios amant_ or _patres filii

amant_ are perfectly clear, _patres consules amant_ allows of two

interpretations; and in how many ways cannot such a proposition as

_Horatius et Virgilius poetæ Varii amici erant_ be construed? _Menenii

patris munus_ may mean ‘the gift of father Menenius,’ or ‘the gift of

Menenius’s father’; _expers illius periculi_ either ‘free from that

danger’ or ‘free from (sharing) that person’s danger’; in an infinitive

construction with two accusatives, the only way to know which is the

subject and which the object is to consider the context, and that is

not always decisive, as in the oracular response given to the Æacide

Pyrrhus, as quoted by Cicero from Ennius: “Aio _te_, Æacida, _Romanos_

vincere posse.” Such drawbacks seem to be inseparable from the

structure of the highly flexional Aryan languages; although they are

not logical consequences of a wealth of forms, yet historically they

cling to those languages which have the greatest number of grammatical

endings. And as we are here concerned not with the question how to

construct an artificial language (and even there I should not advise

the adoption of many case distinctions), but with the valuation of

natural languages as actually existing in their earlier and modern

stages, we cannot accept Johannson’s verdict: “The greater the wealth

of forms, the more intelligible the speech.”

XVIII.--§ 5. Word Order.

If the German sentences quoted above are ambiguous, it is not only on

account of the want of clearness in the forms employed, but also on

account of the German rules of word order. One rule places the verb

last in subordinate sentences, and in two of the sentences there would

be no ambiguity in principal sentences: Die deutsche zunge klingt

und _singt gott_ im himmel lieder; or, Die deutsche zunge klingt,

und _gott im himmel singt_ lieder | _Sie erreicht_ freilich nicht

die spanische dichterin; or, Die spanische dichterin _erreicht sie_

freilich nicht. In one of the remaining sentences the ambiguity is

caused by the rule that the verb must be placed immediately after an

introductory subjunct: if we omit _doch_ the sentence becomes clear:

Die _gesellschaft der Indierin würde_ lästig gewesen sein, or, _Die

gesellschaft würde der Indierin_ lästig gewesen sein. Here, again we

see the ill consequences of inconsistency of linguistic structure; some

of the rules for word position serve to show grammatical relations,

but in certain cases they have to give way to other rules, which

counteract this useful purpose. If you change the order of words in a

German sentence, you will often find that the meaning is not changed,

but the result will be an unidiomatic construction (bad grammar);

while in English a transposition will often result in perfectly good

grammar, only the meaning will be an entirely different one from the

original sentence. This does not amount to saying that the German rules

of position are useless and the English ones all useful, but only to

saying that in English word order is utilized to express difference of

meaning to a far greater extent than in German.

One critic cites against me “one example, which figures in almost every

Rhetoric as a violation of clearness: _And thus the son the fervid sire

address’d_,” and he adds: “The use of a separate form for nominative

and accusative would clear up the ambiguity immediately.” The retort

is obvious: no doubt it would, but so would the use of a natural

word order. Word order is just as much a part of English grammar as

case-endings are in other languages; a violation of the rules of

word order may cause the same want of intelligibility as the use of

_dominum_ instead of _dominus_ would in Latin. And if the example is

found in almost every English Rhetoric, I am glad to say that equally

ambiguous sentences are very rare indeed in other English books. Even

in poetry, where there is such a thing as poetic licence, and where the

exigencies of rhythm and rime, as well as the fondness for archaic and

out-of-the-way expressions, will often induce deviations from the word

order of prose, real ambiguity will very seldom arise on that account.

It is true that it has been disputed which is the subject in Gray’s

line:

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

but then it does not matter much, for the ultimate understanding of

the line must be exactly the same whether the air holds stillness or

stillness holds the air. In ordinary language we may find similar

collocations, but it is worth saying with some emphasis that there can

never be any doubt as to which is the subject and which the object.

The ordinary word order is, Subject-Verb-Object, and where there is a

deviation there must always be some special reason for it. This may

be the wish, especially for the sake of some contrast, to throw into

relief some member of the sentence. If this is the subject, the purpose

is achieved by stressing it, but the word order is not affected.

But if it is the object, this may be placed in the very beginning

of the sentence, but in that case English does not, like German and

Danish, require inversion of the verb, and the order consequently is,

Object-Subject-Verb, which is perfectly clear and unambiguous. See, for

instance, Dickens’s sentence: “_Talent, Mr. Micawber_ has; _capital,

Mr. Micawber_ has not,” and the following passage from a recent novel:

“Even Royalty had not quite their glow and glitter; _Royalty you_ might

see any day, driving, bowing, smiling. The Queen had a smile for every

one; but _the Duchess no one, not even Lizzie_, ever saw.” Thus, also,

in Shakespeare’s:

_Things base and vilde_, holding no quantity,

_Loue_ can transpose to forme and dignity (_Mids._ I. 1. 233),

and in Longfellow’s translation from Logau:

A blind man is a poor man, and blind a poor man is;

For the former seeth no man, and _the latter no man_ sees.

The reason for deviating from the order, Subject-Verb-Object, may again

be purely grammatical: a relative or an interrogative pronoun must be

placed first; but here, too, English grammar precludes ambiguity, as

witness the following sentences: This picture, which surpasses Mona

Lisa | This picture, which Mona Lisa surpasses | What picture surpasses

Mona Lisa? | What picture does not Mona Lisa surpass? In German (dieses

bild, welches die M. L. übertrifft, etc.) all four sentences would

be ambiguous, in Danish the two last would be indistinguishable; but

English shows that a small number of case forms is not incompatible

with perfect clearness and perspicuity. If the famous oracular answer

(_Henry VI, 2nd Part_, I. 4. 33), “The Duke yet liues, that Henry shall

depose,” is ambiguous, it is only because it is in verse, where you

expect inversions: in ordinary prose it could be understood only in one

way, as the word order would be reversed if _Henry_ was meant as the

object.

XVIII.--§ 6. Gender.

Besides case distinctions the older Aryan languages have a rather

complicated system of gender distinctions, which in many instances

agrees with, but in many others is totally independent of, and even may

be completely at war with, the natural distinction between male beings,

female beings and things without sex. This grammatical gender is

sometimes looked upon as something valuable for a language to possess;

thus Schroeder (_Die formale Unterscheidung_ 87) says: “The formal

distinction of genders is decidedly an enormous advantage which the

Aryan, Semitic and Egyptian languages have before all other languages.”

Aasen (_Norsk Grammatik_ 123) finds that the preservation of the old

genders gives vividness and variety to a language; he therefore, in

constructing his artificial Norwegian ‘landsmaal,’ based it on those

dialects which made a formal distinction between the masculine and

feminine article. But other scholars have recognized the disadvantages

accruing from such distinctions; thus Tegnér (SM 50) regrets the fact

that in Swedish it is impossible to give such a form to the sentence

‘sin make må man ej svika’ as to make it clear that the admonition

is applicable to both husband and wife, because _make_, ‘mate,’ is

masculine, and _maka_ feminine. In Danish, where _mage_ is common to

both sexes, no such difficulty arises. Gabelentz (Spr 234) says: “Das

grammatische geschlecht bringt es weiter mit sich dass wir deutschen

nie eine frauensperson als einen menschen und nicht leicht einen mann

als eine person bezeichnen.”

As a matter of fact, German gender is responsible for many

difficulties, not only when it is in conflict with natural sex, as when

one may hesitate whether to use the pronoun _es_ or _sie_ in reference

to a person just mentioned as _das mädchen_ or _das weib_, or _er_ or

_sie_ in reference to _die schildwache_, but also when sexless things

are concerned, and _er_ might be taken as either referring to the man

or to _der stuhl_ or to _der wald_ just mentioned, etc. In France,

grammarians have disputed without end as to the propriety or not of

referring to the (feminine) word _personnes_ by means of the pronoun

_ils_ (see Nyrop, _Kongruens_ 24, and Gr. iii. § 712): “Les personnes

que vous attendiez sont _tous logés_ ici.” As a negative pronoun

_personne_ is now frankly masculine: ‘personne n’est _malheureux_.’

With _gens_ the old feminine gender is still kept up when an adjective

precedes, as in _les bonnes gens_, thus also _toutes les bonnes gens_,

but when the adjective has no separate feminine form, schoolmasters

prefer to say _tous les honnêtes gens_, and the masculine generally

prevails when the adjective is at some distance from _gens_, as in the

old school-example, _Instruits par l’expérience, toutes les vieilles

gens sont soupçonneux_. There is a good deal of artificiality in

the strict rules of grammarians on this point, and it is therefore

good that the Arrêté ministériel of 1901 tolerates greater liberty;

but conflicts are unavoidable, and will rise quite naturally, in

any language that has not arrived at the perfect stage of complete

genderlessness (which, of course, is not identical with inability to

express sex-differences).

Most English pronouns make no distinction of sex: _I_, _you_, _we_,

_they_, _who_, _each_, _somebody_, etc. Yet, when we hear that Finnic

and Magyar, and indeed the vast majority of languages outside the

Aryan and Semitic world, have no separate forms for _he_ and _she_,

our first thought is one of astonishment; we fail to see how it is

possible to do without this distinction. But if we look more closely

we shall see that it is at times an inconvenience to have to specify

the sex of the person spoken about. Coleridge (_Anima Poetæ_ 190)

regretted the lack of a pronoun to refer to the word _person_, as it

necessitated some stiff and strange construction like ‘not letting the

person be aware wherein offence had been given,’ instead of ‘wherein

he or she has offended.’ It has been said that if a genderless pronoun

could be substituted for _he_ in such a proposition as this: ‘It

would be interesting if each of the leading poets would tell us what

he considers his best work,’ ladies would be spared the disparaging

implication that the leading poets were all men. Similarly there is

something incongruous in the following sentence found in a German

review of a book: “Was Maria und Fritz so zueinander zog, war, dass

_jeder_ von ihnen _am anderen_ sah, wie _er_ unglücklich war.” Anyone

who has written much in Ido will have often felt how convenient it is

to have the common-sex pronouns _lu_ (he or she), _singlu_, _altru_,

etc. It is interesting to see the different ways out of the difficulty

resorted to in actual language. First the cumbrous use of _he or she_,

as in Fielding _TJ_ 1. 174, the reader’s heart (if he or she have

any) | Miss Muloch _H._ 2. 128, each one made his or her comment.[85]

Secondly, the use of _he_ alone: If anybody behaves in such and such

a manner, he will be punished (cf. the wholly unobjectionable, but

not always applicable, formula: Whoever behaves in such and such a

manner will be punished). This use of _he_ has been legalized by the

Act 13 and 14 Vict., cap. 21. 4: “That in all acts words importing the

masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females.” Third,

the sexless but plural form _they_ may be used. If you try to put the

phrase, ‘Does anybody prevent you?’ in another way, beginning with

‘Nobody prevents you,’ and then adding the interrogatory formula, you

will perceive that ‘does he’ is too definite, and ‘does he or she’ too

clumsy; and you will therefore naturally say (as Thackeray does, _P_ 2.

260), “Nobody prevents you, do they?” In the same manner Shakespeare

writes (_Lucr._ 125): “Everybody to rest themselves betake.” The

substitution of the plural for the singular is not wholly illogical;

for _everybody_ is much the same thing as ‘all men,’ and _nobody_ is

the negation of ‘all men’; but the phenomenon is extended to cases

where this explanation will not hold good, as in G. Eliot, _M._ 2. 304,

I shouldn’t like to punish any one, even if _they’d_ done me wrong.

(For many examples from good writers see my MEG. ii. 5, 56.)

The English interrogative _who_ is not, like the _quis_ or _quæ_ of the

Romans, limited to one sex and one number, so that our question ‘Who

did it?’ to be rendered exactly in Latin, would require a combination

of the four: _Quis hoc fecit?_ _Quæ hoc fecit?_ _Qui hoc fecerunt?_

_Quæ hoc fecerunt?_ or rather, the abstract nature of _who_ (and

of _did_) makes it possible to express such a question much more

indefinitely in English than in any highly flexional language; and

indefiniteness in many cases means greater precision, or a closer

correspondence between thought and expression.

XVIII.--§ 7. Nominal Concord.

We have seen in the case of the verbs how widely diffused in all the

old Aryan languages is the phenomenon of Concord. It is the same with

the nouns. Here, as there, it consists in secondary words (here chiefly

adjectives) being made to agree with principal words, but while with

the verbs the agreement was in number and person, here it is in number,

case and gender. This is well known in Greek and Latin; as examples

from Gothic may here be given Luk. 1. 72, _gamunan triggwos weihaizos

seinaizos_, ‘to remember His holy covenant,’ and 1. 75, _allans dagans

unsarans_, ‘all our days.’ The English translation shows how English

has discarded this trait, for there is nothing in the forms of (_his_),

_holy_, _all_ and _our_, as in the Gothic forms, to indicate what

substantive they belong to.

Wherever the same adjectival idea is to be joined to two substantives,

the concordless junction is an obvious advantage, as seen from a

comparison of the English ‘my wife and children’ with the French ‘ma

femme et mes enfants,’ or of ‘the _local_ press and committees’ with

‘_la_ presse _locale_ et _les_ comités _locaux_.’ Try to translate

exactly into French or Latin such a sentence as this: “What are

the present state and wants of mankind?” (Ruskin). Cf. also the

expression ‘a verdict of wilful murder against _some_ person or

persons _unknown_,’ where _some_ and _unknown_ belong to the singular

as well as to the plural forms; Fielding writes (_TJ_ 3. 65): “_Some

particular_ chapter, or perhaps chapters, _may be obnoxious_.” Where an

English editor of a text will write: “Some (indifferently singular and

plural) word or words wanting here,” a Dane will write: “Et (sg.) eller

flere (pl.) ord (indifferent) mangler her.” These last examples may be

taken as proof that it might even in some cases be advantageous to have

forms in the substantives that did not show number; still, it must be

recognized that the distinction between one and more than one rightly

belongs to substantival notions, but logically it has as little to do

with adjectival as with verbal notions (cf. above, Ch. XVII § 11). In

‘black spots’ it is the spots, but not the qualities of black, that

we count. And in ‘two black spots’ it is of course quite superfluous

to add a dual or plural ending (as in Latin _duo_, _duæ_) in order to

indicate once more what the word _two_ denotes sufficiently, namely,

that we have not to do with a singular. Compare, finally, E. _to the

father and mother_, Fr. _au père et à la mère_, G. _zu dem vater und

der mutter_ (_zum vater und zur mutter_).

If it is admitted that it is an inconvenience whenever you want to

use an adjective to have to put it in the form corresponding in case,

number and gender to its substantive, it may be thought a redeeming

feature of the language which makes this demand that, on the other

hand, it allows you to place the adjective at some distance from the

substantive, and yet the hearer or reader will at once connect the

two together. But here, as elsewhere in ‘energetics,’ the question

is whether the advantage counter-balances the disadvantage; in other

words, whether the fact that you are free to place your adjective where

you will is worth the price you pay for it in being always saddled

with the heavy apparatus of adjectival flexions. Why should you want

to remove the adjective from the substantive, which naturally must

be in your thought when you are thinking of the adjective? There is

one natural employment of the adjective in which it has very often

to stand at some distance from the substantive, namely, when it is

predicative; but then the example of German shows the needlessness of

concord in that case, for while the adjunct adjective is inflected (ein

_guter_ mensch, eine _gute_ frau, ein _gutes_ buch, _gute_ bücher)

the predicative is invariable like the adverb (der mensch ist _gut_,

die frau ist _gut_, das buch ist _gut_, die bücher sind _gut_). It

is chiefly in poetry that a Latin adjective is placed far from its

substantive, as in Vergil: “Et bene apud memores veteris stat gratia

facti” (_Æn._ IV. 539), where the form shows that _veteris_ is to

be taken with _facti_ (but then, where does _bene_ belong? it might

be taken with _memores_, _stat_ or _facti_). In Horace’s well-known

aphorism: “Æquam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem,” the flexional

form of _æquam_ allows him to place it first, far from _mentem_, and

thus facilitates for him the task of building up a perfect metrical

line; but for the reader it would certainly be preferable to have

had _æquam mentem_ together at once, instead of having to hold his

attention in suspense for five words, till finally he comes upon

a word with which to connect the adjective. There is therefore no

economizing of the energy of reader or hearer. Extreme examples may be

found in Icelandic skaldic poetry, in which the poets, to fulfil the

requirements of a highly complicated metrical system, entailing initial

and medial rimes, very often place the words in what logically must be

considered the worst disorder, thereby making their poem as difficult

to understand as an intricate chess-problem is to solve--and certainly

coming short of the highest poetical form.

XVIII.--§ 8. The English Genitive.

If we compare a group of Latin words, such as _opera virorum omnium

bonorum veterum_, with a corresponding group in a few other languages

of a less flexional type: OE. _ealra godra ealdra manna weorc_;

Danish _alle gode gamle mænds værker_; Modern English _all good old

men’s works_, we perceive by analyzing the ideas expressed by the

several words that the Romans said really: ‘work,’ plural, nominative

or accusative + ‘man,’ plural, masculine, genitive + ‘all,’ plural,

genitive + ‘good,’ plural, masculine, genitive + ‘old,’ plural,

masculine, genitive. Leaving _opera_ out of consideration, we find that

plural number is expressed four times, genitive case also four times,

and masculine gender twice;[86] in Old English the signs of number and

case are found four times each, while there is no indication of gender;

in Danish the plural number is marked four times and the case once. And

finally, in Modern English, we find each idea expressed once only; and

as nothing is lost in clearness, this method, as being the easiest and

shortest, must be considered the best. Mathematically the different

ways of rendering the same thing might be represented by the formulas:

anx + bnx + cnx = (an + bn + cn)x = (a + b + c)nx.

This unusual faculty of ‘parenthesizing’ causes Danish, and to a

still greater degree English, to stand outside the definition of the

Aryan family of languages given by the earlier school of linguists,

according to which the Aryan substantive and adjective can never

be without a sign indicating case. Schleicher (NV 526) says: “The

radical difference between Magyar and Indo-Germanic (Aryan) words is

brought out distinctly by the fact that the postpositions belonging to

co-ordinated nouns can be dispensed with in all the nouns except the

last of the series, e.g. _a jó embernek_, ‘dem guten menschen’ (_a_ for

_az_, demonstrative pronoun, article; _jó_, good; _ember_, man, _-nek_,

_-nak_, postposition with pretty much the same meaning as the dative

case), for _az-nak_ (annak) _jó-nak ember-nek_, as if in Greek you

should say το ἀγαθο ἀνθρώπῳ. An attributive adjective preceding its

noun always has the form of the pure stem, the sign of plurality and

the postposition indicating case not being added to it. Magyars say,

for instance, _Hunyady Mátyás magyar király-nak_ (to the Hungarian king

Mathew Hunyady), _-nak_ belonging here to all the preceding words.

Nearly the same thing takes place where several words are joined

together by means of ‘and.’”

Now, this is an exact parallel to the English group genitive in cases

like ‘all good old men’s works,’ ‘the King of England’s power,’

‘Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays,’ ‘somebody else’s turn,’ etc. The way

in which this group genitive has developed in comparatively recent

times may be summed up as follows (see the detailed exposition in my

ChE ch. iii.): In the oldest English _-s_ is a case-ending, like all

others found in flexional languages; it forms together with the body of

the noun one indivisible whole, in which it is sometimes impossible to

tell where the kernel of the word ends and the ending begins (compare

_endes_ from _ende_ and _heriges_ from _here_); only some words have

this ending, and in others the genitive is indicated in other ways.

As to syntax, the meaning or function of the genitive is complicated

and rather vague, and there are no fixed rules for the position of the

genitive in the sentence.

In course of time we witness a gradual development towards greater

regularity and precision. The partitive, objective, descriptive and

some other functions of the genitive become obsolete; the genitive is

invariably put immediately before the word it belongs to; irregular

forms disappear, the _s_ ending alone surviving as the fittest, so that

at last we have one definite ending with one definite function and one

definite position.

In Old English, when several words belonging together were to be put in

the genitive, each of them had to take the genitive mark, though this

was often different in different words, and thus we had combinations

like _anes reades mannes_, ‘a red man’s’ | _þære godlican lufe_, ‘the

godlike love’s’ | _ealra godra ealdra manna weorc_, etc. Now the _s_

used everywhere is much more independent, and may be separated from the

principal word by an adverb like _else_ or by a prepositional group

like _of England_, and one _s_ is sufficient at the end even of a long

group of words. Here, then, we see in the full light of comparatively

recent history a giving up of the old flexion with its inseparability

of the constituent elements of the word and with its strictness of

concord; an easier and more regular system is developed, in which the

ending leads a more independent existence and may be compared with the

‘agglutinated’ elements of such a language as Magyar or even with the

‘empty words’ of Chinese grammar. The direction of this development

is the direct opposite of that assumed by most linguists for the

development of languages in prehistoric times.

XVIII.--§ 9. Bantu Concord.

One of the most characteristic traits of the history of English is

thus seen to be the gradual getting rid of concord as of something

superfluous. Where concord is found in our family of languages, it

certainly is an heirloom from a primitive age, and strikes us now as

an outcome of a tendency to be more explicit than to more advanced

people seems strictly necessary. It is on a par with the ‘concord of

negatives,’ as we might term the emphasizing of the negative idea by

seemingly redundant repetitions. In Old English it was the regular

idiom to say: _n_an man _n_yste _n_an þing, ‘no man not-knew nothing’;

so it was in Chaucer’s time: he _n_euere yet _n_o vileynye _n_e sayde

In all his lyf unto _n_o manner wight; and it survives in the vulgar

speech of our own days: there was _n_iver _n_obody else gen (gave) me

_n_othin’ (George Eliot); whereas standard Modern English is content

with one negation: no man knew anything, etc. That concord is really a

primitive trait (though not, of course, found equally distributed among

all ‘primitive peoples’) will be seen also by a rapid glance at the

structure of the South African group of languages called Bantu, for

here we find not only repetition of negatives, but also other phenomena

of concord in specially luxuriant growth.

I take the following examples chiefly from W. H. I. Bleek’s excellent,

though unfortunately unfinished, _Comparative Grammar_, though I am

well aware that expressions like _si-m-tanda_ (we love him) “are never

used by natives with this meaning without being determined by some

other expression” (Torrend, p. 7). The Zulu word for ‘man’ is _umuntu_;

every word in the same or a following sentence having any reference to

that word must begin with something to remind you of the beginning of

_umuntu_. This will be, according to fixed rules, either _mu_ or _u_,

or _w_ or _m_. In the following sentence, the meaning of which is ‘our

handsome man (or woman) appears, we love him (or her),’ these reminders

(as I shall term them) are printed in italics:

_umu_ntu _w_etu _omu_chle _u_yabonakala, si_m_tanda (1)

man ours handsome appears, we love.

If, instead of the singular, we take the corresponding plural _abantu_,

‘men, people’ (whence the generic name of Bantu), the sentence looks

quite different:

_aba_ntu _b_etu _aba_chle _ba_yabonakala, si_ba_tanda (2).

In the same way, if we successively take as our starting-point

_ilizwe_, ‘country,’ the corresponding plural _amazwe_, ‘countries,’

_isizwe_, ‘nation,’ _izizwe_, ‘nations,’ _intombi_, ‘girl,’

_izintombi_, ‘girls,’ we get:

_ili_zwe _l_etu _eli_chle _li_yabonakala, si_li_tanda (5)

_ama_zwe _e_tu _ama_chle _a_yabonakala, si_wa_tanda (6)

_isi_zwe _s_etu _esi_chle _si_yabonakala, si_si_tanda (7)

_izi_zwe _z_etu _ezi_chle _zi_yabonakala, si_zi_tanda (8)

_in_tombi _y_etu _en_chle _i_yabonakala, si_yi_tanda (9)

_izin_tombi _z_etu _ezin_chle _zi_yabonakala, si_zi_tanda (10)

(girls) our handsome appear, we love.[87]

In other words, every substantive belongs to one of several classes, of

which some have a singular and others a plural meaning; each of these

classes has its own prefix, by means of which the concord of the parts

of a sentence is indicated. (An inhabitant of the country of _U_ganda

is called _mu_ganda, pl. _ba_ganda or _wa_ganda; the language spoken

there is _lu_ganda.)

It will be noticed that adjectives such as ‘handsome’ or ‘ours’ take

different shapes according to the word to which they refer; in the Zulu

Lord’s Prayer ‘thy’ is found in the following forms: _l_ako (referring

to _i_gama, ‘name,’ for _ili_gama, 5), _b_ako, (_ubu_kumkani,

‘kingdom,’ 14), _y_ako (_in_tando, ‘will,’ 9). So also the genitive

case of the same noun has a great many different forms, for the

genitive relation is expressed by the reminder of the governing word

+ the ‘relative particle’ _a_ (which is combined with the following

sound); take, for instance, _inkosi_, ‘chief, king’:

_umu_ntu _w_enkosi, ‘the king’s man’ (1; _we_ for _w_ + _a_ + _i_).

_aba_ntu _b_enkosi, ‘the king’s men’ (2).

_ili_zwe _l_enkosi, ‘the king’s country’ (5).

_ama_zwe _e_nkosi, ‘the king’s countries’ (6).

_isi_zwe _s_enkosi, ‘the king’s nation’ (7).

_uku_tanda _kw_enkosi, ‘the king’s love’ (15).

Livingstone says that these apparently redundant repetitions “impart

energy and perspicuity to each member of a proposition, and prevent

the possibility of a mistake as to the antecedent.” These prefixes are

necessary to the Bantu languages; still, Bleek is right as against

Livingstone in speaking of the repetitions as cumbersome, just as the

endings of Latin _multorum virorum antiquorum_ are cumbersome, however

indispensable they may have been to the contemporaries of Cicero.

These African phenomena have been mentioned here chiefly to show to

what lengths concord may go in the speech of some primitive peoples.

The prevalent opinion is that each of these prefixes (_umu_, _aba_,

_ili_, etc.) was originally an independent word, and that thus words

like _umuntu_, _ilizwe_, were at first compounds like E. _steamship_,

where it would evidently be possible to imagine a reference to this

word by means of a repeated _ship_ (our ship, which ship is a great

ship, the ship appears, we love the ship); but at any rate the Zulus

extend this principle to cases that would be parallel to an imagined

repetition of _friendship_ by means of the same _ship_, or to referring

to _steamer_ by means of the ending _er_ (Bleek 107). Bleek and

others have tried to find out by an analysis of the words making up

the different classes what may have been the original meaning of the

class-prefix, but very often the connecting tie is extremely loose,

and in many cases it seems that a word might with equal right have

belonged to another class than the one to which it actually belongs.

The connexion also frequently seems to be a derived rather than an

original one, and much in this class-division is just as arbitrary as

the reference of Aryan nouns to each of the three genders. In several

of the classes the words have a definite numerical value, so that

they go together in pairs as corresponding singular and plural nouns;

but the existence of a certain number of exceptions shows that these

numerical values cannot originally have been associated with the class

prefixes, but must be due to an extension by analogy (Bleek 140 ff.).

The starting-point may have been substantives standing to each other

in the relation of ‘person’ to ‘people,’ ‘soldier’ to ‘army,’ ‘tree’

to ‘forest,’ etc. The prefixes of such words as the latter of each of

these pairs will easily acquire a certain sense of plurality, no matter

what they may have meant originally, and then they will lend themselves

to forming a kind of plural in other nouns, being either put instead of

the prefix belonging properly to the noun (_ama_zwe, ‘countries,’ 6;

_ili_zwe, ‘country,’ 5), or placed before it (_ma-lu_to, ‘spoons,’ 6,

_lu_to, ‘spoon,’ 11).

In some of the languages “the forms of some of the prefixes have been

so strongly contracted as almost to defy identification.” (Bleek 234).

All the prefixes probably at first had fuller forms than appear now.

Bleek noticed that the _ma-_ prefix never, except in some degraded

languages, had a corresponding _ma-_ as particle, but, on the contrary,

is followed in the sentence by _ga-_, _ya-_, or _a-_, and _mu-_ (3)

generally has a corresponding particle _gu-_. Now, Sir Harry Johnston

(_The Uganda Protectorate_, 1902, 2. 891) has found that on Mount Eldon

and in Kavirondo there are some very archaic forms of Bantu languages,

in which _gumu-_ and _gama-_ are the commonly used forms of the _mu-_

and _ma-_ prefixes, as well as _baba-_ and _bubu-_ for ordinary _ba-_,

_bu-_; he infers that the original forms of _mu-_, _ma-_ were _ngumu-_,

_ngama-_. I am not so sure that he is right when he says that these

prefixes were originally “words which had a separate meaning of their

own, either as directives or demonstrative pronouns, as indications of

sex, weakness, littleness or greatness, and so on”--for, as we shall

see in a subsequent chapter, such grammatical instruments may have been

at first inseparable parts of long words--parts which had no meaning

of their own--and have acquired some more or less vague grammatical

meaning through being extended gradually to other words with which

they had originally nothing to do. The actual irregularity in their

distribution certainly seems to point in that direction.

XVIII.--§ 10. Word Order Again.

Mention has already been made here and there of word order and its

relation to the great question of simplification of grammatical

structure; but it will be well in this place to return to the subject

in a more comprehensive way. The theory of word order has long been

the Cinderella of linguistic science: how many even of the best and

fullest grammars are wholly, or almost wholly, silent about it! And

yet it presents a great many problems of high importance and of the

greatest interest, not only in those languages in which word order has

been extensively utilized for grammatical purposes, such as English and

Chinese, but in other languages as well.

In historical times we see a gradual evolution of strict rules for

word order, while our general impression of the older stages of our

languages is that words were often placed more or less at random. This

is what we should naturally expect from primitive man, whose thoughts

and words are most likely to have come to him rushing helter-skelter,

in wild confusion. One cannot, of course, apply so strong an expression

to languages such as Sanskrit, Greek or Gothic; still, compared with

our modern languages, it cannot be denied that there is in them much

more of what from one point of view is disorder, and from another

freedom.

This is especially the case with regard to the mutual position of the

subject of a sentence and its verb. In the earliest times, sometimes

one of them comes first, and sometimes the other. Then there is a

growing tendency to place the subject first, and as this position is

found not only in most European languages but also in Chinese and other

languages of far-away, the phenomenon must be founded in the very

nature of human thought, though its non-prevalence in most of the older

Aryan languages goes far to show that this particular order is only

natural to _developed_ human thought.

Survivals of the earlier state of things are found here and there;

thus, in German ballad style: “Kam ein schlanker bursch gegangen.”

But it is well worth noticing that such an arrangement is generally

avoided, in German as well as in the other modern languages of Western

Europe, and in those cases where there is some reason for placing the

verb before the subject, the speaker still, as it were, satisfies his

grammatical instinct by putting a kind of sham subject before the verb,

as in E. _there_ comes a time when ..., Dan. _der_ kommer en tid da

..., G. _es_ kommt eine zeit wo ..., Fr. _il_ arrive un temps où....

In Keltic the habitual word order placed the verb first, but little

by little the tendency prevailed to introduce most sentences by a

periphrasis, as in ‘(it) is the man that comes,’ and as that came to

mean merely ‘the man comes,’ the word order Subject-Verb was thus

brought about circuitously.

Before this particular word order, Subject-Verb, was firmly established

in modern Gothonic languages, an exception obtained wherever the

sentence began with some other word than the subject; this might be

some important member of the proposition that was placed first for the

sake of emphasis, or it might be some unimportant little adverb, but

the rule was that the verb should at any rate have the second place,

as being felt to be in some way the middle or central part of the

whole, and the subject had then to be content to be placed after the

verb. This was the rule in Middle English and in Old French, and it is

still strictly followed in German and Danish: Gestern _kam das schiff_

| Pigen _gav jeg kagen, ikke drengen_. Traces of the practice are

still found in English in parenthetic sentences to indicate who is the

speaker (‘Oh, yes,’ said he), and after a somewhat long subjunct, if

there is no object (‘About this time died the gentle Queen Elizabeth’),

where this word order is little more than a stylistic trick to avoid

the abrupt effect of ending the sentence with an isolated verb like

_died_. Otherwise the order Subject-Verb is almost universal in English.

XVIII.--§ 11. Compromises.

The inverted order, Verb-Subject, is used extensively in many languages

to express questions, wishes and invitations. But, as already stated,

this order was not originally peculiar to such sentences. A question

was expressed, no matter how the words were arranged, by pronouncing

the whole sentence, or the most important part of it, in a peculiar

rising tone. This manner of indicating questions is, of course, still

kept up in modern speech, and is often the only thing to show that

a question is meant (‘John?’ | ‘John is here?’). But although there

was thus a natural manner of expressing questions, and although the

inverted word order was used in other sorts of sentences as well, yet

in course of time there came to be a connexion between the two things,

so that putting the verb before the subject was felt as implying a

question. The rising tone then came to be less necessary, and is

much less marked in inverted sentences like ‘Is John here?’ than in

sentences with the usual word order: ‘John is here?’

Now, after this method of indicating questions had become comparatively

fixed, and after the habit of thinking of the subject first had

become all but universal, these two principles entered into conflict,

the result of which has been, in English, Danish and French, the

establishment in some cases of various kinds of compromise, in which

the interrogatory word order has formally carried the day, while

really the verb, that is to say the verb which means something, is

placed after its subject. In English, this is attained by means of the

auxiliary _do_: instead of Shakespeare’s “Came he not home to-night?”

(_Ro._ II. 4. 2) we now say, “Did he not (or, Didn’t he) come home

to-night?” and so in all cases where a similar arrangement is not

already brought about by the presence of some other auxiliary, ‘Will he

come?’, ‘Can he come?’, etc. Where we have an interrogatory pronoun as

a subject, no auxiliary is required, because the natural front position

of the pronoun maintains the order Subject-Verb (Who came? | What

happened?). But if the pronoun is not the subject, _do_ is required to

establish the balance between the two principles (Who(m) did you see?

| What does he say?).

In Danish, the verb _mon_, used in the old language to indicate a

weak necessity or a vague futurity, fulfils to a certain extent the

same office as the English _do_; up to the eighteenth century _mon_

was really an auxiliary verb, followed by the infinitive: ‘Mon han

komme?’; but now the construction has changed, the indicative is used

with _mon_: ‘Mon han kommer?’, and _mon_ is no longer a verb, but an

interrogatory adverb, which serves the purpose of placing the subject

before the verb, besides making the question more indefinite and vague:

‘Kommer han?’ means ‘Does he come?’ or ‘Will he come?’ but ‘Mon han

kommer?’ means ‘Does he come (Will he come), do you think?’

French, finally, has developed two distinct forms of compromise between

the conflicting principles, for in ‘Est-ce que Pierre bat Jean?’

_est-ce_ represents the interrogatory and _Pierre bat_ the usual word

order, and in ‘Pierre bat-il Jean?’ the real subject is placed before

and the sham subject after the verb. Here also, as in Danish, the

ultimate result is the creation of ‘empty words,’ or interrogatory

adverbs: _est-ce-que_ in every respect except in spelling is one word

(note that it does not change with the tense of the main verb), and

thus is a sentence prefix to introduce questions; and in popular speech

we find another empty word, namely _ti_ (see, among other scholars,

G. Paris, _Mélanges ling._ 276). The origin of this _ti_ is very

curious. While the _t_ of Latin _amat_, etc., coming after a vowel,

disappeared at a very early period of the French language, and so

produced _il aime_, etc., the same _t_ was kept in Old French wherever

a consonant protected it,[88] and so gave the forms _est_, _sont_,

_fait_ (from _fact_, for _facit_), _font_, _chantent_, etc. From

_est-il_, _fait-il_, etc., the _t_ was then by analogy reintroduced in

_aime-t-il_, instead of the earlier _aime il_. Now, towards the end

of the Middle Ages, French final consonants were as a rule dropped in

speech, except when followed immediately by a word beginning with a

vowel. Consequently, while _t_ is mute in sentences like ‘Ton frère

_dit_ | Tes frères _disent_,’ it is sounded in the corresponding

questions, ‘Ton frère _dit-il_? Tes frères _disent-ils_?’ As the final

consonants of _il_ and _ils_ are also generally dropped, even by

educated speakers, the difference between interrogatory and declarative

sentences in the spoken language depends solely on the addition of _ti_

to the verb: written phonetically, the pairs will be:

[tɔ̃ frɛ·r di--tɔ̃ frɛ·r di ti]

[te frɛ·r di·z--te frɛ·r di·z ti].

Now, popular instinct seizes upon this _ti_ as a convenient sign of

interrogative sentences, and, forgetting its origin, uses it even with

a feminine subject, turning ‘Ta sœur di(t)’ into the question ‘Ta sœur

di ti?’, and in the first person: ‘Je di ti?’ ‘Nous dison ti?’ ‘Je vous

fais-ti tort?’ (Maupassant). In novels this is often written as if it

were the adverb _y_: C’est-y pas vrai? | Je suis t’y bête! | C’est-y

vous le monsieur de l’Académie qui va avoir cent ans? (Daudet). I have

dwelt on this point because, besides showing the interest of many

problems of word order, it also throws some light on the sometimes

unexpected ways by which languages must often travel to arrive at new

expressions for grammatical categories.

It was mentioned above that the inverted order, Verb-Subject, is used

extensively, not only in questions, but also to express wishes and

invitations. Here, too, we find in English compromises with the usual

order, Subject-Verb. For, apart from such formulas as ‘Long live the

King!’ a wish is generally expressed by means of _may_, which is

placed first, while the real verb comes after the subject: ‘May she be

happy!’, and instead of the old ‘Go we!’ we have now ‘Let us go!’ with

_us_, the virtual subject, placed before the real verb. When a pronoun

is wanted with an imperative, it used to be placed after the verb, as

in Shakespeare: ‘_Stand thou_ forth’ and ‘_Fear_ not _thou_,’ or in the

Bible: ‘_Turn ye_ unto him,’ but now the usual order has prevailed:

‘_You try!_’ ‘_You take_ that seat, and _somebody fetch_ a few more

chairs!’ But if the auxiliary _do_ is used, we have the compromise

order: ‘_Don’t you stir!_’

XVIII.--§ 12. Order Beneficial?

I have here selected one point, the place of the subject, to illustrate

the growing regularity in word order; but the same tendency is

manifested in other fields as well: the place of the object (or of two

objects, if we have an indirect besides a direct object), the place

of the adjunct adjective, the place of a subordinate adverb, which

by coming regularly before a certain case may become a preposition

‘governing’ that case, etc. It cannot be denied that the tendency

towards a more regular word order is universal, and in accordance with

the general trend of this inquiry we must next ask the question: Is

this tendency a beneficial one? Does the more regular word order found

in recent stages of our languages constitute a progress in linguistic

structure? Or should it be deplored because it hinders freedom of

movement?

In answering this question we must first of all beware of letting our

judgment be run away with by the word ‘freedom.’ Because freedom is

desirable elsewhere, it does not follow that it should be the best

thing in this domain; just as above we did not allow ourselves to be

imposed on by the phrase ‘wealth of forms,’ so here we must be on

our guard against the word ‘free’: what if we turned the question in

another way: Which is preferable, order or disorder? It may be true

that, viewed exclusively from the standpoint of the speaker, freedom

would seem to be a great advantage, as it is a restraint to him to be

obliged to follow strict rules; but an orderly arrangement is decidedly

in the interest of the hearer, as it very considerably facilitates his

understanding of what is said; it is therefore, though indirectly, in

the interest of the speaker too, because he naturally speaks for the

purpose of being understood. Besides, he is soon in his turn to become

the hearer: as no one is exclusively hearer or speaker, there can be no

real conflict of interest between the two.

If it be urged in favour of a free word order that we owe a certain

regard to the interests of poets, it must be taken into consideration,

first, that we cannot all of us be poets, and that a regard to all

those of us who resemble Molière’s M. Jourdain in speaking prose

without being aware of it is perhaps, after all, more important than a

regard for those very few who are in the enviable position of writing

readable verse; secondly, that a statistical investigation would, no

doubt, give as its result that those poets who make the most extensive

use of inversions are not among the greatest of their craft; and,

finally, that so many methods are found of neutralizing the restraint

of word order, in the shape of particles, passive voice, different

constructions of sentences, etc., that no artist in language need

despair.

So far, we have scarcely done more than clear the ground before

answering our question. And now we must recognize that there are some

rules of word order which cannot be called beneficial in any way; they

are like certain rules of etiquette, in so far as one can see no reason

for their existence, and yet one is obliged to bow to them. Historians

may, in some cases, be able to account for their origin and show that

they had a _raison d’être_ at some remote period; but the circumstances

that called them into existence then have passed away, and they are

now felt to be restraints with no concurrent advantage to reconcile

us to their observance. Among rules of this class we may reckon those

for placing the French pronouns now before, and now after, the verb,

now with the dative and now with the accusative first, ‘elle _me le_

donne | elle _le lui_ donne | donnez-_le moi_ | ne _me le_ donnez pas.’

And, again, the rules for placing the verb, object, etc., in German

subordinate clauses otherwise than in main sentences. That the latter

rules are defective and are inferior to the English rules, which are

the same for the two kinds of sentences, was pointed out before, when

we examined Johannson’s German sentences (p. 341), but here we may

state that the real, innermost reason for condemning them is their

inconsistency: the same rule does not apply in all cases. It seems

possible to establish the important principle that the more consistent

a rule for word order is, the more useful it is in the economy of

speech, not only as facilitating the understanding of what is said, but

also as rendering possible certain thoroughgoing changes in linguistic

structure.

XVIII.--§ 13. Word Order and Simplification.

This, then, is the conclusion I arrive at, that as simplification of

grammatical structure, abolition of case distinctions, and so forth,

always go hand in hand with the development of a fixed word order,

this cannot be accidental, but there must exist a relation of cause

and effect between the two phenomena. Which, then, is the _prius_

or cause? To my mind undoubtedly the fixed word order, so that the

grammatical simplification is the _posterius_ or effect. It is,

however, by no means uncommon to find a half-latent conception in

people’s minds that the flexional endings were first lost ‘by phonetic

decay,’ or ‘through the blind operation of sound laws,’ and that then

a fixed word order had to step in to make up for the loss of the

previous forms of expression. But if this were true we should have to

imagine an intervening period in which the mutual relations of words

were indicated in neither way; a period, in fact, in which speech was

unintelligible and consequently practically useless. The theory is

therefore untenable. It follows that a fixed word order must have come

in first: it would come quite gradually as a natural consequence of

greater mental development and general maturity, when the speaker’s

ideas no longer came into his mind helter-skelter, but in orderly

sequence. If before the establishment of some sort of fixed word order

any tendency to slur certain final consonants or vowels of grammatical

importance had manifested itself, it could not have become universal,

as it would have been constantly checked by the necessity that speech

should be intelligible, and that therefore those marks which showed the

relation of different words should not be obliterated. But when once

each word was placed at the exact spot where it properly belonged, then

there was no longer anything to forbid the endings being weakened by

assimilation, etc., or being finally dropped altogether.

To bring out my view I have been obliged in the preceding paragraph

to use expressions that should not be taken too literally; I have

spoken as if the changes referred to were made ‘in the lump,’ that

is, as if the word order was first settled in every respect, and

after that the endings began to be dropped. The real facts are, of

course, much more complicated, changes of one kind being interwoven

with changes of the other in such a way as to render it difficult,

if not impossible, in any particular case to discover which was the

_prius_ and which the _posterius_. We are not able to lay our finger

on one spot and say: Here final _m_ or _n_ was dropped, because it was

now rendered superfluous as a case-sign on account of the accusative

being invariably placed after the verb, or for some other such

reason. Nevertheless, the essential truth of my hypothesis seems to

me unimpeachable. Look at Latin final _s_. Cicero (_Orat._ 48. 161)

expressly tells us, what is corroborated by a good many inscriptions,

that there existed a strong tendency to drop final _s_; but the

tendency did not prevail. The reason seems obvious; take a page of

Latin prose and try the effect of striking out all final _s_’s, and

you will find that it will be extremely difficult to determine the

meaning of many passages; a consonant playing so important a part in

the endings of nouns and verbs could not be left out without loss in

a language possessing so much freedom in regard to word position as

Latin. Consequently it was kept, but in course of time word position

became more and more subject to laws; and when, centuries later, after

the splitting up of Latin into the Romanic languages, the tendency to

slur over final _s_ knocked once more at the door, it met no longer

with the same resistance: final _s_ disappeared, first in Italian and

Rumanian, then in French, where it was kept till about the end of the

Middle Ages, and it is now beginning to sound a retreat in Spanish; see

on Andalusian Fr. Wulff, _Un Chapitre de Phonétique Andalouse_, 1889.

The main line of development in historical times has, I take it, been

the following: first, a period in which words were placed somewhere or

other according to the fancy of the moment, but many of them provided

with signs that would show their mutual relations; next, a period

with retention of these signs, combined with a growing regularity in

word order, and at the same time in many connexions a more copious

employment of prepositions; then an increasing indistinctness and

finally complete dropping of the endings, word order (and prepositions)

being now sufficient to indicate the relations at first shown by

endings and similar means.

Viewed in this light, the transition from freedom in word position to

greater strictness must be considered a beneficial change, since it has

enabled the speakers to do away with more circumstantial and clumsy

linguistic means. Schiller says:

Jeden anderen meister erkennt man an dem, was er ausspricht;

Was er weise verschweigt, zeigt mir den meister des stils.

(Every other master is known by what he says, but the master of style

by what he is wisely silent on.) What style is to the individual, the

general laws of language are to the nation, and we must award the

palm to that language which makes it possible “to be wisely silent”

about things which in other languages have to be expressed in a

troublesome way, and which have often to be expressed over and over

again (vir_orum_ omn_ium_ bon_orum_ veter_um_, eal_ra_ god_ra_ eald_ra_

mann_a_). Could any linguistic expedient be more worthy of the genus

_homo sapiens_ than using for different purposes, with different

significations, two sentences like ‘John beats Henry’ and ‘Henry beats

John,’ or the four Danish ones, ‘Jens slaar Henrik--Henrik slaar

Jens--slaar Jens Henrik?--slaar Henrik Jens?’ (John beats Henry--H.

beats J.--does J. beat H.?--does H. beat J.?), or the Chinese use of

_či_ in different places (Ch. XIX § 3)? Cannot this be compared with

the ingenious Arabic system of numeration, in which 234 means something

entirely different from 324, or 423, or 432, and the ideas of “tens”

and “hundreds” are elegantly suggested by the order of the characters,

not, as in the Roman system, ponderously expressed?

Now, it should not be forgotten that this system, “where more is meant

than meets the ear,” is not only more convenient, but also clearer

than flexions, as actually found in existing languages, for word

order in those languages which utilize it grammatically is used much

more consistently than any endings have ever been in the old Aryan

languages. It is not true, as Johannson would have us believe, that

the dispensing with old flexional endings was too dearly bought, as it

brought about increasing possibilities of misunderstandings; for in

the evolution of languages the discarding of old flexions goes hand in

hand with the development of simpler and more regular expedients that

are rather less liable than the old ones to produce misunderstandings.

Johannson writes: “In contrast to Jespersen I do not consider that

the masterly expression is the one which is ‘wisely silent,’ and

consequently leaves the meaning to be partly guessed at, but the one

which is able to impart the meaning of the speaker or writer clearly

and perfectly”--but here he seems rather wide of the mark. For, just as

in reading the arithmetical symbol 234 we are perfectly sure that two

hundred and thirty-four is meant, and not three hundred and forty-two,

so in reading and hearing ‘The boy hates the girl’ we cannot have the

least doubt who hates whom. After all, there is less guesswork in the

grammatical understanding of English than of Latin; cf. the examples

given above, Ch. XVIII § 4, p. 343.

The tendency towards a fixed word order is therefore a progressive one,

directly as well as indirectly. The substitution of word order for

flexions means a victory of spiritual over material agencies.

XVIII.--§ 14. Summary.

We may here sum up the results of our comparison of the main features

of the grammatical structures of ancient and modern languages belonging

to our family of speech. We have found certain traits common to the

old stages and certain others characteristic of recent ones, and have

thus been enabled to establish some definite tendencies of development

and to find out the general direction of change; and we have shown

reasons for the conviction that this development has on the whole and

in the main been a beneficial one, thus justifying us in speaking about

‘progress in language.’ The points in which the superiority of the

modern languages manifested itself were the following:

(1) The forms are generally shorter, thus involving less muscular

exertion and requiring less time for their enunciation.

(2) There are not so many of them to burden the memory.

(3) Their formation is much more regular.

(4) Their syntactic use also presents fewer irregularities.

(5) Their more analytic and abstract character facilitates expression

by rendering possible a great many combinations and constructions which

were formerly impossible or unidiomatic.

(6) The clumsy repetitions known under the name of concord have become

superfluous.

(7) A clear and unambiguous understanding is secured through a regular

word order.

These several advantages have not been won all at once, and languages

differ very much in the velocity with which they have been moving

in the direction indicated; thus High German is in many respects

behindhand as compared with Low German; European Dutch as compared

with African Dutch; Swedish as compared with Danish; and all of them

as compared with English; further, among the Romanic languages we see

considerable variations in this respect. What is maintained is chiefly

that there is a general tendency for languages to develop along the

lines here indicated, and that this development may truly, from the

anthropocentric point of view, which is the only justifiable one, be

termed a progressive evolution.

But is this tendency really general, or even universal, in the world

of languages? It will easily be seen that my examples have in the

main been taken from comparatively few languages, those with which

I myself and presumably most of my readers are most familiar, all

of them belonging to the Gothonic and Romanic branches of the Aryan

family. Would the same theory hold good with regard to other languages?

Without pretending to an intimate knowledge of the history of many

languages, I yet dare assert that my conclusions are confirmed by all

those languages whose history is accessible to us. Colloquial Irish

and Gaelic have in many ways a simpler grammatical structure than the

Oldest Irish. Russian has got rid of some of the complications of Old

Slavonic, and the same is true, even in a much higher degree, of some

of the other Slavonic languages; thus, Bulgarian has greatly simplified

its nominal and Serbian its verbal flexions. The grammar of spoken

Modern Greek is much less complicated than that of the language of

Homer or of Demosthenes. The structure of Modern Persian is nearly as

simple as English, though that of Old Persian was highly complicated.

In India we witness a constant simplification of grammar from Sanskrit

through Prakrit and Pali to the modern languages, Hindi, Hindostani

(Urdu), Bengali, etc. Outside the Aryan world we see the same movement:

Hebrew is simpler and more regular than Assyrian, and spoken Arabic

than the old classical language, Koptic than Old Egyptian. Of most

of the other languages we are not in possession of written records

from very early times; still, we may affirm that in Turkish there has

been an evolution, though rather a slow one, of a similar kind; and,

as we shall see in a later chapter, Chinese seems to have moved in

the same direction, though the nature of its writing makes the task

of penetrating into its history a matter of extreme difficulty. A

comparative study of the numerous Bantu languages spoken all over South

Africa justifies us in thinking that their evolution has been along

the same lines: in some of them the prefixes characterizing various

classes of nouns have been reduced in number and in extent (cf. above,

§ 9). Of one of them we have a grammar two hundred years old, by

Brusciotto à Vetralla (re-edited by H. Grattan Guinness, London, 1882).

A comparison of his description with the language now spoken in the

same region (Mpongwe) shows that the class signs have dwindled down

considerably and the number of the classes has been reduced from 16 to

10. In short, though we can only prove it with regard to a minority of

the multitudinous languages spoken on the globe, this minority embraces

_all_ the languages known to us for so long a period that we can talk

of their history, and we may, therefore, confidently maintain that what

may be briefly termed the tendency towards grammatical simplification

is a universal fact of linguistic history.

That this simplification is progressive, i.e. beneficial, was

overlooked by the older generation of linguistic thinkers, because

they saw a kosmos, a beautiful and well-arranged world, in the old

languages, and missed in the modern ones several things that they had

been accustomed to regard with veneration. To some extent they were

right: every language, when studied in the right spirit, presents so

many beautiful points in its systematic structure that it may be called

a ‘kosmos.’ But it is not in every way a kosmos; like everything human,

it presents fine and less fine features, and a comparative valuation,

such as the one here attempted, should take both into consideration.

There is undoubtedly an exquisite beauty in the old Greek language,

and the ancient Hellenes, with their artistic temperament, knew how to

turn that beauty to the best account in their literary productions;

but there is no less beauty in many modern languages--though its

appraisement is a matter of taste, and as such evades scientific

inquiry. But the æsthetic point of view is not the decisive one:

language is of the utmost importance to the whole practical and

spiritual life of mankind, and therefore has to be estimated by such

tests as those applied above; if that is done, we cannot be blind

to the fact that modern languages as wholes are more practical than

ancient ones, and that the latter present so many more anomalies

and irregularities than our present-day languages that we may feel

inclined, if not to apply to them Shakespeare’s line, “Misshapen chaos

of well-seeming forms,” yet to think that the development has been from

something nearer chaos to something nearer kosmos.

FOOTNOTES:

[84] Thus also the corresponding Lat. _jecur_ by _ficatum_, Fr. _foie_.

[85] This ungainly repetition is frequent in the Latin of Roman law,

e.g. _Digest._ IV. 5. 2, _Qui quæve_ ... capite _diminuti diminutæ_

esse dicentur, in _eos easve_ ... iudicium dabo. | XLIII. 30, _Qui

quæve_ in potestate Lucii Titii est, si _is eave_ apud te est, dolove

malo tuo factum est quominus apud te esset, ita _eum eamve_ exhibeas.

| XI. 3, Qui _servum servam alienum alienam_ recepisse persuasisseve

quid ei dicitur dolo malo, quo _eum eam_ deteriorem faceret, in eum,

quanti ea res erit, in duplum iudicium dabo. I owe these and some other

Latin examples to my late teacher, Dr. O. Siesbye. From French, Nyrop

(_Kongruens_, p. 12) gives some corresponding examples: _tous ceux

et toutes celles_ qui, ayant été orphelins, avaient eu une enfance

malheureuse (Philippe), and from Old French: Lors donna congié à _ceus

et à celes_ que il avoit rescous (Villehardouin).

[86] If instead of _omnium veterum_ I had chosen, for instance,

_multorum antiquorum_, the meaning of masculine gender would have been

rendered four times: for languages, especially the older ones, are not

distinguished by consistency.

[87] The change of the initial sound of the reminder belonging to the

adjective is explained through composition with a ‘relative particle’

_a_; _au_ becoming _o_, and _ai_, _e_. The numbers within parentheses

refer to the numbers of Bleek’s classes. Similar sentences from Tonga

are found in Torrend’s _Compar. Gr._ p. 6 f.

[88] This protecting consonant was dropped in pronunciation at a later

period.

CHAPTER XIX

ORIGIN OF GRAMMATICAL ELEMENTS

§ 1. The Old Theory. § 2. Roots. § 3. Structure of Chinese. § 4.

History of Chinese. § 5. Recent Investigations. § 6. Roots Again.

§ 7. The Agglutination Theory. § 8. Coalescence. § 9. Flexional

Endings. § 10. Validity of the Theory. § 11. Irregularity Original. §

12. Coalescence Theory dropped. § 13. Secretion. § 14. Extension of

Suffixes. § 15. Tainting of Suffixes. § 16. The Classifying Instinct.

§ 17. Character of Suffixes. § 18. Brugmann’s Theory of Gender. § 19.

Final Considerations.

XIX.--§ 1. The Old Theory.

What has been given in the last two chapters to clear up the problem

“Decay or progress?” has been based, as will readily be noticed,

exclusively on easily controllable facts of linguistic history. So far,

then, it has been very smooth sailing. But now we must venture out into

the open sea of prehistoric speculations. Our voyage will be the safer

if we never lose sight of land and have a reliable compass tested in

known waters.

In our historical survey of linguistic science we have already seen

that the prevalent theory concerning the prehistoric development of

our speech is this: an originally isolating language, consisting of

nothing but formless roots, passed through an agglutinating stage, in

which formal elements had been developed, although these and the roots

were mutually independent, to the third and highest stage found in

flexional languages, in which formal elements penetrated the roots and

made inseparable unities with them. We shall now examine the basis of

this theory.

In the beginning was the root. This is “the result of strict and

careful induction from the facts recorded in the dialects of the

different members of the family” (Whitney L 260). “The firm foundation

of the theory of roots lies in its logical necessity as an inference

from the doctrine of the historical growth of grammatical apparatus”

(Whitney G 200). “An instrumentality cannot but have had rude and

simple beginnings, such as, in language, the so-called roots ... such

imperfect hints of expression as we call roots” (Whitney, _Views of

L._ 338). These are really three different statements: induction from

the facts, a logical inference from the doctrine about grammatical

apparatus (i.e. the usually accepted doctrine, but on what is that

built up except on the root theory?), and the _a priori_ argument that

an ‘instrumentality’ must have simple beginnings. Even granted that

these three arguments given at different times, each of them in turn

as the sole argument, must be taken as supplementing each other, the

three-legged stool on which the root theory is thus made to sit is a

very shaky one, for none of the three legs is very solid, as we shall

soon have occasion to see.

XIX.--§ 2. Roots.

In the beginning was the root--but what was it like? Bopp took over

the conception of root from the Indian grammarians, and like them

was convinced that roots were all monosyllabic, and that view was

accepted by his followers. These latter at times attributed other

phonetic qualities to these roots, e.g. that they always had a short

vowel (Curtius C 22). I quote from a very recent treatise (Wood,

“Indo-European Root-formation,” _Journal of Germ. Philol._ 1. 291): “I

range myself with those who believe that IE. roots were monosyllabic

... these roots began, for the most part, with a vowel. The vowels

certainly were the first utterances,[89] and though we cannot make

the beginning of IE. speech coeval with that of human speech, we may

at least assume that language, at that time, was in a very primitive

state.”

The number of these roots was not very great (Curtius, l.c.; Wood 294).

This seems a natural enough conclusion when we picture the earliest

speech as the most meagre thing possible.

These few short monosyllabic roots were real words--this is a necessary

assumption if we are to imagine a root stage as a real language, and it

is often expressly stated; Curtius, for instance, insists that roots

are real and independent words (C 22, K 132); cf. also Whitney, who

says that the root _VAK_ “had also once an independent status, that

it was a word” (L 255). We shall see afterwards that there is another

possible conception of what a ‘root’ is; but let us here grant that

it is a real word. The question whether a language is possible which

contains nothing but such root words was always answered affirmatively

by a reference to Chinese--and it will therefore be well here to give

a short sketch of the chief structural features of that language.

XIX.--§ 3. Structure of Chinese.

Each word consists of one syllable, neither more nor less. Each of

these monosyllables has one of four or five distinct musical tones

(not indicated here). The parts of speech are not distinguished: _ta_

means, according to circumstances, great, much, magnitude, enlarge.

Grammatical relations, such as number, person, tense, case, etc., are

not expressed by endings and similar expedients; the word in itself

is invariable. If a substantive is to be taken as plural, this as a

rule must be gathered from the context; and it is only when there is

any danger of misunderstanding, or when the notion of plurality is to

be emphasized, that separate words are added, e.g. _ki_ ‘some,’ _šu_

‘number.’ The most important part of Chinese grammar is that dealing

with word order: _ta kuok_ means ‘great state(s),’ but _kuok ta_

‘the state is great,’ or, if placed before some other word which can

serve as a verb, ‘the greatness (size) of the state’; _tsï niu_ ‘boys

and girls,’ but _niu tsï_ ‘girl (female child),’ etc. Besides words

properly so called, or as Chinese grammarians call them ‘full words,’

there are several ‘empty words’ serving for grammatical purposes,

often in a wonderfully clever and ingenious way. Thus _či_ has besides

other functions that of indicating a genitive relation more distinctly

than would be indicated by the mere position of the words; _min_

(people) _lik_ (power) is of itself sufficient to signify ‘the power

of the people,’ but the same notion is expressed more explicitly by

_min či lik_. The same expedient is used to indicate different sorts

of connexion: if _či_ is placed after the subject of a sentence it

makes it a genitive, thereby changing the sentence into a kind of

subordinate clause: _wang pao min_ = ‘the king protects the people’;

but if you say _wang či pao min yeu_ (is like) _fu_ (father) _či pao

tsï_, the whole may be rendered, by means of the English verbal noun,

‘the king’s protecting the people is like the father’s protecting

his child.’ Further, it is possible to change a whole sentence into

a genitive; for instance, _wang pao min či tao_ (manner) _k’o_ (can)

_kien_ (see, be seen), ‘the manner in which the king protects (the

manner of the king’s protecting) his people is to be seen’; and in yet

other positions _či_ can be used to join a word-group consisting of a

subject and verb, or of verb and object, as an adjunct (attribute) to a

noun; we have participles to express the same modification of the idea:

_wang pao či min_ ‘the people protected by the king’; _pao min či wang_

‘a king protecting the people.’ Observe here the ingenious method of

distinguishing the active and passive voices by strictly adhering to

the natural order and placing the subject before and the object after

the verb. If we put _i_ before, and _ku_ after, a single word, it

means ‘on account of, because of’ (cf. E. for ...’s sake); if we place

a whole sentence between these ‘brackets,’ as we might term them, they

are a sort of conjunction, and must be translated ‘because.’[90]

XIX.--§ 4. History of Chinese.

These few examples will give some faint idea of the Chinese language,

and--if the whole older generation of scholars is to be trusted--at

the same time of the primeval structure of our own language in the

root-stage. But is it absolutely certain that Chinese has retained

its structure unchanged from the very first period? By no means. As

early as 1861, R. Lepsius, from a comparison of Chinese and Tibetan,

had derived the conviction that “the monosyllabic character of Chinese

is not original, but is a lapse (!) from an earlier polysyllabic

structure.” J. Edkins, while still believing that the structure of

Chinese represents “the speech first used in the world’s grey morning”

(_The Evolution of the Chinese Language_, 1888), was one of the

foremost to examine the evidence offered by the language itself for the

determination of its earlier pronunciation. This, of course, is a much

more complicated problem in Chinese than in our alphabetically written

languages; for a Chinese character, standing for a complete word, may

remain unchanged while the pronunciation is changed indefinitely. But

by means of dialectal pronunciations in our own day, of remarks in

old Chinese dictionaries, of transcriptions of Sanskrit words made by

Chinese Buddhists, of rimes in ancient poetry, of phonetic or partly

phonetic elements in the word-characters, etc., it has been possible

to demonstrate that Chinese pronunciation has changed considerably,

and that the direction of change has been, here as elsewhere, towards

shorter and easier word-forms. Above all, consonant groups have been

simplified.

In 1894 I ventured to offer my mite to these investigations by

suggesting an explanation of one phenomenon of pronunciation in

present-day Chinese. I refer to the change sometimes wrought in the

meaning of a word by the adoption of a different tone. Thus _wang_

with one tone is ‘king,’ with another ‘to become king’; _lao_ with one

is ‘work,’ with another ‘pay the work’; _tsung_ with one tone means

‘follow,’ with another ‘follower,’ and with a third ‘footsteps’; _tshi_

with one tone is ‘wife,’ with another ‘marry’; _haò_ is ‘good,’ and

_haó_ is ‘love.’ Nay, meanings so different as ‘acquire’ and ‘give’

(_sheu_) or ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ (_mai_) are only distinguished by the

tones. Edkins and V. Henry (_Le Muséon_, Louvain, 1882, i. 435) have

attempted to explain this from gestures; but this is palpably wrong.

In the Danish dialect spoken in Sundeved, in southernmost Jutland,

two tones are distinguished, one high and one low (see articles by

N. Andersen and myself in _Dania_, vol. iv.). Now, these tones often

serve to keep words or forms of words apart that but for the tone,

exactly as in Chinese, would be perfect homophones. Thus _na_ with the

low tone is ‘fool,’ but with the high tone it is either the plural

‘fools’ or else a verb ‘to cheat, hoax’; _ri_ ‘ride’ is imperative or

infinitive according to the tone in which it is uttered; _jem_ in the

low tone is ‘home’ and in the high ‘at home’; and so on in a great

many words. There is no need, however, in this language to resort to

gestures to explain these tonic differences: the low tone is found in

words originally monosyllabic (compare standard Danish _nar_, _rid_,

_hjem_), and the high tone in words originally dissyllabic (compare

Danish _narre_, _ride_, _hjemme_). The tones belonging formerly to

two syllables are now condensed on one syllable. Although, of course,

Chinese tones cannot in every respect be paralleled with Scandinavian

ones, we may provisionally conjecture that the above-mentioned pairs

of Chinese words were formerly distinguished by derivative syllables

or flexional endings (see below, p. 373) which have now disappeared

without leaving any traces behind them except in the tones. This

hypothesis is perhaps rendered more probable by what seems to be an

established fact--that one of the tones has arisen through the dropping

of final stopped consonants (_p_, _t_, _k_).

However this may be, the death-blow was given to the dogma of the

primitiveness of Chinese speech by Ernst Kuhn’s lecture _Ueber

Herkunft und Sprache der Transgangetischen Völker_ (Munich, 1883). He

compares Chinese with the surrounding languages of Tibet, Burmah and

Siam, which are certainly related to Chinese and have essentially the

same structure; they are isolating, have no flexion, and word order

is their chief grammatical instrument. But the laws of word order

prove to be different in these several languages, and Kuhn draws the

incontrovertible conclusion that it is impossible that any one of these

laws of word position should have been the original one; for that would

imply that the other nations have changed it without the least reason

and at a risk of terrible confusion. The only likely explanation is

that these differences are the outcome of a former state of greater

freedom. But if the ancestral speech had a free word order, to be at

all intelligible it must have been possessed of other grammatical

appliances than are now found in the derived tongues; in other words,

it must have indicated the relations of words to each other by

something like our derivatives or flexions.

To the result thus established by Kuhn, that Chinese cannot have had

a fixed word order from the beginning, we seem also to be led if we

ask the question, Is primitive man likely to have arranged his words

in this way? A Chinese sentence, according to Gabelentz (Spr 426), is

arranged with the same logical precision as the direction on an English

envelope, where the most specific word is placed first, and each

subsequent word is like a box comprising all that precedes--only that a

Chinaman would reverse the order, beginning with the most general word

and then in due order specializing. Now, is it probable that primitive

man, that unkempt, savage being, who did not yet deserve the proud

generic name of _homo sapiens_, but would be better termed, if not

_homo insipiens_, at best _homo incipiens_--is it probable that this

_urmensch_, who was little better than an _unmensch_, should have been

able at once to arrange his words, or, what amounts to the same thing,

his thoughts, in such a perfect order? I incline to believe rather

that logical, orderly thinking and speaking have only been attained by

mankind after a long and troublesome struggle, and that the grammatical

expedient of a fixed word order has come to Chinese as to European

languages through a gradual development in which other, less logical

and more material grammatical appliances have in course of time been

given up.

We have thus arrived at a conception of Chinese which is _toto cælo_

removed from the view formerly current. The Chinese language can

no longer be adduced in support of the hypothesis that our Aryan

languages, or all human languages, started at first as a grammarless

speech consisting of monosyllabic root-words.

XIX.--§ 5. Recent Investigations.

I have reprinted the above sketch of Chinese, with a few very

insignificant verbal changes, as I wrote it about thirty years ago,

because I think that the main reasoning is just as valid now as then,

and because everything I have since then read about this interesting

language has only confirmed the opinion I ventured to express after

what was certainly a very insufficient study. Chinese pronunciation,

including its tones, may now be studied in two excellent books,

dealing with two different dialects--Daniel Jones and Kwing Tong Woo,

_A Cantonese Phonetic Reader_, London, 1912, and Bernhard Karlgren,

_A Mandarin Phonetic Reader in the Pekinese Dialect_, Upsala, Leipzig

and Paris, 1917 (Archives d’Études Orientales, vol. 13). Karlgren is

also the author of _Études sur la Phonologie Chinoise_ (ib. vol. 15,

1915-19), in which he deals with the history of Chinese sounds and the

reconstruction of the old pronunciation in a thoroughly scholarly

manner on the basis of an intimate knowledge of spoken and written

Chinese, and in _Ordet och pennan i mittens rike_ (Stockholm, 1918),

he has given a masterly popular sketch of the structure of the Chinese

language and its system of writing.

Of the greatest importance for our purposes is the same scholar’s

recent brilliant discovery of a real case distinction in the oldest

Chinese. In classical Chinese there are four pronouns of the first

person (I, we) which have always been considered as absolutely

synonymous. But Karlgren shows that the two of them which occur as the

usual forms in Confucius’s conversations are so far from being used

indiscriminately that one is nearly always a nominative and the other

an objective case; the exceptions are not numerous and are easily

explained. The present Mandarin pronunciation of the first is [u], of

the second either [uo] or [ŋo]. But if we go back to the sixth century

of our era we are able with certainty to say that the pronunciation of

the former was [ŋuo], and of the latter [ŋa]. This, then, constitutes

a real declension. Now, in the second person Karlgren is also able to

point out a distinction of two pronouns, though not quite so clearly

marked as in the first person, the objective showing here a greater

tendency to encroach on the nominative (Karlgren here ingeniously

adduces the parallel from our languages that the first person has

retained the suppletive system _ego: me_, while the second uses the

same stem _tu: te_). The oldest Chinese thus has the following case

flexion:

1st Per. 2nd Per.

Nom. ŋuo nźiwo

Obj. ŋa nźia

(See “Le Proto-chinois, langue flexionnelle,” _Journal Asiatique_,

1920, 205 ff.).[91]

XIX.--§ 6. Roots Again.

To return to roots. The influence of Indian grammar on European

linguists with regard to the theory of roots extended also to the

meanings assigned to roots, which were all of them of verbal

character, and nearly always highly general or abstract, such as

‘breathe, move, be sharp or quick, blow, go,’ etc. The impossibility of

imagining anybody expressing himself by means of a language consisting

exclusively of such abstracts embarrassed people much less than one

would expect: Chinese, of course, has plenty of words for concrete

objects.

The usual assumption was that there was one definite root period

in which all the roots were created, and after which this form of

activity ceased. But Whitney demurred to this (M 36), saying that E.

_preach_ and _cost_ may be considered new roots, though ultimately

coming from Lat. _præ-dicare_ and _con-stare_: these old compounds

are felt as units, “reducing to the semblance of roots elements that

are really derivative or compound.” As Whitney goes no further than

to establish the _semblance_ of new roots, he might be taken as an

adherent rather than as an opponent of the theory he objects to. But,

as a matter of fact, new words _are_ created in modern languages, and

if they form the basis of derived words, we may really speak of new

roots (_pun--punning_, _punster_; _fun--funny_; etc.). Why not say

that we have a French root _roul_ in _rouler_, _roulement_, _roulage_,

_roulier_, _rouleau_, _roulette_, _roulis_? This only becomes

unjustifiable if we think that the establishment of this root gives

us the ultimate explanation of these words; for then the linguistic

historian steps in with the objection that the words have been formed,

not from a root, but from a real word, which is not even in itself

a primary word, but a derivative, Lat. _rotula_, a diminutive of

_rota_ ‘wheel.’ (I take this example from Bréal M 407). To the popular

instinct _sorrow_ and _sorry_ are undoubtedly related to one another,

and we may say that they contain a root _sorr-_; but a thousand years

ago they had nothing to do with one another, and belonged to different

roots: OE. _sorg_ ‘care’ and _sārig_ ‘wounded, afflicted.’ If all

traces of Latin and Greek were lost, a linguist would have no more

scruples about connecting _scene_ with _see_ than most illiterate

Englishmen have now. Who will vouch that many Aryan roots may not have

originated at various times through similar processes as these new

roots _preach_, _cost_, _roul_, _sorr_, _see_?

The proper definition of a root seems to be: what is common to a

certain number of words felt by the popular instinct of the speakers as

etymologically belonging together. In this sense we may of course speak

of roots at any stage of any language, and not only at a hypothetical

initial stage. In some cases these roots may be used as separate

words (E. _preach_, _fun_, etc., Fr. _roul_ = what is spelt _roule_,

_roules_, _roulent_); in other cases this is impossible (Lat. _am_ in

_amo_, _amor_, _amicus_; E. _sorr_); in many cases because the common

element cannot, for phonetic reasons, be easily pronounced, as when E.

_drink, drank, drunk_ or _sit, sat, seat, set_ are naturally felt to

belong together, though it is impossible to state the root except in

some formula like _dr.nk_, _s.t_, where the dot stands for some vowel.

Similar considerations may be adduced with regard to the consonants if

we want to establish what is felt to be common in _give_ and _gift_

(_gi_ + labiodental spirant) or in _speak_ and _speech_, etc.; but this

need not detain us here.

In my view, then, the root is something real and important, though

not always tangible. And as its form is not always easy to state or

pronounce, so must its meaning, as a rule, be somewhat vague and

indeterminate, for what is common to several ideas must of course be

more general and abstract than either of the more special ideas thus

connected; it is also natural that it will often be necessary to state

the signification of a root in terms of verbal ideas, for these are

more general and abstract than nominal ideas. But roots thus conceived

belong to any and all periods, and we must cease to speak of the

earliest period of human speech as ‘the root period.’

XIX.--§ 7. The Agglutination Theory.

According to the received theory (see above, § 1) some of the roots

became gradually attached to other roots and lost their independence,

so as to become finally formatives fused with the root. This theory,

generally called the agglutination theory, contains a good deal of

truth; but we can only accept it with three important provisos, namely,

first, that there has never been one definite period in which those

languages which are now flexional were wholly agglutinative, the

process of fusion being liable to occur at any time; second, that the

component parts which become formatives are not at first roots, but

real words; and third, that this process is not the only one by which

formatives may develop: it may be called the rectilinear process, but

by the side of that we have also more circuitous courses, which are no

less important in the life of languages for being less obvious.

In the process of coalescence or integration there are many possible

stages, which may be denominated figuratively by such expressions

as that two words are placed together (that is--in non-figurative

language--pronounced after one another), tied together, knit together,

glued together (‘agglutinated’), soldered together, welded together,

fused together or amalgamated. What is really the most important part

of the process is the degree in which one of the components loses its

independence, phonetically and semantically.

As ‘agglutination’ is thus only one intermediate stage in a continuous

process, it would be better to have another name for the whole

theory of the origin of formatives than ‘the agglutination theory,’

and I propose therefore to use the term ‘coalescence theory.’ The

usual name also fixes the attention too exclusively on the so-called

agglutinative languages, and if we take the formatives of such a

language as Turkish, as in _sev-mek_ ‘to love,’ _sev-il-mek_ ‘to be

loved,’ _sev-dir-mek_ ‘to cause to love,’ _sev-dir-il-mek_ ‘to be made

to love,’ _sev-ish-mek_ ‘to love one another,’ _sev-ish-dir-il-mek_

‘to be made to love one another’--who will vouch that these formatives

were all of them originally independent words? Those who are most

competent to have an opinion on the matter seem nowadays inclined to

doubt it and to reject much of what was current in the description

of these languages given by the earlier scholars; see, especially,

the interesting final chapter of V. Grønbech, _Forstudier til tyrkisk

lydhistorie_ (København, 1902).

XIX.--§ 8. Coalescence.

The various degrees of coalescence, and the coexistence at the same

linguistic period of these various degrees, may be illustrated

by the old example, English _un-tru-th-ful-ly_, and by German

_un-be-stimm-bar-keit_. Let us look a little at each of these

formatives. The only one that can still be used as an independent word

is _ful_(l). From the collocation in ‘I have my hand full of peas’

the transition is easy to ‘a handful of peas,’ where the accentual

subordination of _full_ to _hand_ paves the way for the combination

becoming one word instead of two: this is not accomplished till it

becomes possible to put the plural sign at the end (_handfuls_, thus

also _basketfuls_ and others), while in less familiar combinations

the _s_ is still placed in the middle (_bucketsful_, two _donkeysful_

of children, see MEG ii. 2. 42). In these substantives _-ful_ keeps

its full vowel [u]. But in adjectival compounds, such as _peaceful_,

_awful_, there is a colloquial pronunciation with obscured or omitted

vowel [-fəl, -fl], in which the phonetic connexion with the full word

is thus weakened; the semantic connexion, too, is loosened when it

becomes possible to form such words as _dreadful_, _bashful_, in which

it is not possible to use the definition ‘full of ...’ Here, then, the

transition from a word to a derivative suffix is complete.

English _-hood_, _-head_ in _childhood_, _maidenhead_ also is

originally an independent word, found in OE. and ME. in the form _had_,

meaning ‘state, condition,’ Gothic _haidus_. In German it has two

forms, _-heit_, as in _freiheit_, and _-keit_, whose _k_ was at first

the final sound of the adjective in _ewigkeit_, MHG. _ewecheit_, but

was later felt as part of the suffix and then transferred to cases in

which the stem had no _k_, as in _tapferkeit_, _ehrbarkeit_.

The suffix _-ly_ is from _lik_, which was a substantive meaning

‘form, appearance, body’ (‘a dead body’ in Dan. _lig_, E. _lich_ in

_lichgate_); _manlik_ thus is ‘having the form or appearance of a

man’; the adjective _like_ originally was _ge-lic_ ‘having the same

appearance with’ (as in Lat. _con-form-is_). In compounds _-lik_

was shortened into _-ly_: in some cases we still have competing

forms like _gentlemanlike_ and _gentlemanly_. The ending was, and is

still, used extensively in adjectives; if it is now also used to turn

adjectives into adverbs, as in _truthful-ly_, _luxurious-ly_, this is a

consequence of the two OE. forms, adj. _-lic_ and adv. _-lice_, having

phonetically fallen together.

It may perhaps be doubtful whether the G. suffix _-bar_ (OHG. _-bari_,

OE. _bære_) was ever really an independent word, but its connexion with

the verb _beran_, E. _bear_, cannot be doubted: _fruchtbar_ is what

bears fruit (cf. OE. _æppelbære_ ‘bearing apples’), but the connexion

was later loosened, and such adjectives as _ehrbar_, _kostbar_,

_offenbar_ have little or nothing left of the original meaning of

the suffix. The two prefixes in our examples, _un-_ and _be-_, are

differentiated forms of the old negative _ne_ and the preposition

_by_, and the only affix in our two long words which is thus left

unexplained is _-th_, which makes _true_ into _truth_ and is found also

in _length_, _health_, etc.

XIX.--§ 9. Flexional Endings.

There can be no doubt, therefore, that some at any rate of our suffixes

and prefixes go back to independent words which have been more or less

weakened to become derivative formatives. But does the same hold good

with those endings which we are accustomed to term flexional endings?

The answer certainly must be in the affirmative with regard to _some_

endings.

Thus the Scandinavian passive originates in a coalescence of the

active verb and the pronoun _sik_: Old Norse _(þeir) finna sik_ (‘they

find themselves’ or ‘each other’), gradually becomes one word _(þeir)

finnask_, later _finnast_, _finnaz_, Swedish _(de) finnas_, Dan.

_(de) findes_ ‘they are found.’ In Old Icelandic the pronoun is still

to some extent felt as such, though formally an indistinguishable part

of the verb; thus combinations like the following are very frequent:

_Bolli kvaz þessu ráða vilja_ = _kvað sik vilja_; “Bolli dixit se

velle: B. said that he would have his own way” (Laxd. 55). In Danish

a distinction can sometimes be made between a reflexive and a purely

passive employment: _de slås_ with a short vowel is ‘they fight

(one another),’ but with a long vowel ‘they are beaten.’ A similar

coalescence is taking place in Russian, where _sja_ ‘himself’ (myself,

etc.) dwindles down to a suffixed _s_: _kazalos_ ‘it showed itself,

turned out.’

A similar case is the Romanic future: It. _finiro_, Sp. _finire_, Fr.

_finirai_, from _finire habeo_ (_finir ho_, etc.), originally ‘I have

to finish.’ Before the coalescence was complete, it was possible to

insert a pronoun, Old Sp. _cantar-te-hé_ ‘I shall sing to you.’

A third case in point is the suffixed definite article, if we are

allowed to consider that as a kind of flexion: Old Norse _mannenn_

(_manninn_) accusative ‘the man,’ _landet_ (_landit_) ‘the land’;

Dan. _manden_, _landet_, from _mann_, _land_ + the demonstrative

pronoun _enn_, neuter _et_. Rumanian _domnul_ ‘the lord,’ from Lat.

_dominu(m) illu(m)_, is another example.

XIX.--§ 10. Validity of the Theory.

Now, does this kind of explanation admit of universal application--in

other words, were all our derivative affixes and flexional endings

originally independent words before they were ‘glued’ to or fused with

the main word? This has been the prevalent, one might almost say the

orthodox, view of all the leading linguists, who may be mustered in

formidable array in defence of the agglutination theory.[92]

Against the universality of this origin for formatives I adduced in my

former work (1894, p. 66 f., cf. _Kasus_, 1891, p. 36) four reasons,

which I shall here restate in a different order and in a fuller form.

(1) Nothing can be proved with regard to the ultimate genesis of

flexion in general from the adduced examples, for in all of them the

elements were already fully flexional before the coalescence (cf. ON.

_finnask_, _fannsk_; It. _finirò_, _finirai_, _finira_; ON. _maðrenn_,

_mannenn_, _mansens_, etc.). What they show, then, is really nothing

but the growth of new flexional formations on an old flexional soil,

and it might be imagined that the fusion would not have taken place, or

not so completely, if the minds of the speakers had not been already

prepared to accept formations of this character. I do not, however,

attach much importance to this argument, and turn to those that are

more cogent.

(2) The number of actual forms proved beyond a doubt to have

originated through coalescence is comparatively small. It is true that

not a few derivative syllables were originally independent; still,

if we compare them with the number of those for which no such origin

has been proved or even proposed, we find that the proportion is very

small indeed. In the list of English suffixes enumerated in Sweet’s

_Grammar_, only eleven can be traced back to independent words, while

74 are not thus explicable. Anyone going through the countless suffixes

enumerated in the second volume of Brugmann’s _Vergleichende Grammatik_

will, I think, be struck with the impossibility of any great number of

them being traced back to words in the same way as _hood_, etc., above:

their forms and, still more, their vague spheres of meaning, and on the

whole their manner of application, distinctly speak against such an

origin.

As to real flexional endings traceable to words, their number is even

comparatively smaller than that of derivative suffixes; the three or

four instances named above are everywhere appealed to, but are there

so many more than these? And are they numerous enough to justify so

general an assertion? My impression is that the basis for the induction

is very far from sufficient.

(3) This argument is strengthened when we are able to point out

instances in which, as a matter of fact, flexional endings have arisen

in a way that is totally opposed to the agglutinative, which then must

renounce all claims to be the _only_ possible way for a language to

arrive at flexional formatives. See below (§ 13) on Secretion.

(4) Assuming the theory to be true, we should expect much greater

regularity, both in formal (morphological) and in semantic (syntactic)

respect than we actually find in the old Aryan languages; for if one

definite element was added to signify one definite modification of

the idea, we see no reason why it should not have been added to all

words in the same way. As a matter of fact, the Romanic future, the

Scandinavian passive voice and definite article present much greater

regularity than is found in the flexion of nouns and verbs in old Aryan.

XIX.--§ 11. Irregularity Original.

It will be objected that the irregularity which we find in these old

languages is of later growth, and that, in fact, flexion, as Schuchardt

says, is “anomal gewordene agglutination.” Whitney said that “each

suffix has its distinct meaning and office, and is applied in a whole

class of analogous words” (L. 254), and in reading Schleicher’s

_Compendium_ one gains the impression that the old Aryan sounds and

forms were like a regiment of well-trained soldiers marching along

in the best military style, while all irregularities were the result

of later decay in each language separately. But the trend of the

whole scientific development of the last fifty years has been in the

direction of demonstrating more and more irregularity in the original

forms: where formerly only one ending was assumed for the same case,

etc., now several are assumed. (See, e.g., Walde in Streitberg’s

_Gesch._, 2. 194, Thumb, ib. 2. 69.) And as with the forms, so also

with the meanings and applications of the forms. Madvig as early as

1857 (p. 27. Kl 202) had seen that the signification of the grammatical

forms must originally have been extremely vague and fluctuating, but

most scholars went on imagining that each case, each tense, each mood

had originally stood for something quite settled and definite, until

gradually the progress of linguistics made away with that conception

point by point. In place of the belief that the original Aryan verb

had a definite system of tense forms, it is now generally assumed

that different ‘aspects’ (‘aktionsarten’), somewhat like those of

Slav verbs, were indicated, and that the notion of ‘time’ differences

was only afterwards developed out of the notion of aspect: but if

we compare the divisions and definitions of these aspects given by

various scholars, we see how essentially vague this notion is; instead

of being a model system of nice logical distinctions, the original

condition must rather have been one in which such notions as duration,

completion, result, beginning, repetition were indistinctly found

as germs, from which such ideas as perfect and imperfect, past and

present, were finally evolved with greater and greater clearness.

Similar remarks apply to moods. All attempts at finding out,

deductively or inductively, the fundamental notion (grundbegriff)

attached to such a mood as the subjunctive have failed: it is

impossible to establish one original, sharply circumscribed sphere of

usage, from which all the various, partly conflicting, usages in the

actually existing languages can be derived. The usual theory is that

there existed one true subjunctive, characterized by long thematic

vowels _-ē-_, _-ā-_, _-ō-_, and distinct from that an optative,

characterized by a formative _-iē-_: _-ī-_,[93] and that these two were

fused in Latin. But, as Oertel and Morris have shown in their valuable

article “An Examination of the Theories regarding the Nature and Origin

of Indo-European Inflection” (_Harvard Studies in Classical Philol._

XVI, 1905) it is probably safer to assume for the Indo-European period

substantial identity of meaning in the modal formatives _iē_: _ī_ and

the long thematic vowels _-ē-_, _-ā-_, _-ō-_, which were then continued

undifferentiated in Latin, while on the one hand the Germanic branch

has practically discarded the forms with long thematic vowel and

confined itself to the _i_ suffix, and on the other hand two branches,

Greek and Indo-Iranic, have availed themselves of the formal difference

and separated a ‘subjunctive’ and an ‘optative’ mood.

XIX.--§ 12. Coalescence Theory dropped.

In the historical part I have already mentioned some instances of

coalescence explanations of Aryan forms which have been abandoned by

most scholars, such as the theory that the _r_ of the Latin passive is

a disguised _se_, which would agree very well with the Scandinavian

passive, but falls to the ground when one remembers that corresponding

forms are found in Keltic, where the transition from _s_ to _r_ is

otherwise unknown: these forms are now believed to be related to some

_r_ forms found in Sanskrit, but there not possessed of any passive

signification, this latter being thus a comparatively late acquisition

of Keltic and Italic: these two branches turning an existing,

non-meaning consonant to excellent use in their flexional system and

generalizing it in the new application.[94]

The explanation of the ‘weak’ Gothonic preterit from a coalescence of

_did_ (_loved_ = _love did_) was long one of the strongholds of the

agglutination theory, Bopp’s original collocation of these forms with

other forms which could not be thus explained (see above 51) having

passed into oblivion. Now we have Collitz’s comprehensive book _Das

schwache Präteritum_, 1912, in which the formative consonant is shown

to have been Aryan _t_, and the close correspondence not only with the

passive participle, but also with the verbal nouns in _-ti_ is duly

emphasized.

The impossibility of explaining the Latin perfect in _-vi_ from

composition with _fui_ has been demonstrated by Merguet (see Walde

in Streitberg’s _Gesch._, 2. 220). Instead of this rectilinear

explanation, scholars now incline to assume an intricate play of

various analogical influences starting from a pre-ethnic perfect in _w_

in isolated instances.

Many have explained the case ending _-s_ as a coalesced demonstrative

pronoun _sa_ or, as it is now given, _so_; the difficulty that the same

_s_ denotes now the nominative and now the genitive was got over by

Curtius (C 12) by the assumption that _sa_ was added at two distinct

periods, and that each period made a different use of the addition,

though Curtius does not tell us how one or the other function could be

evolved from such a pronoun. The latest attempt at explanation, which

reaches me as I am writing this chapter, is by Hermann Möller (KZ 49.

219): according to him the common Aryan and Semitic nominative ended in

_o_ and the genitive in _e_, but to this was added in the masculine,

and more rarely in the feminine, the pronoun _s_ as a definite

article, so that the primitive form corresponding to Lat. _lupus_

meant ‘the wolf’ and _lupu_ ‘(a) wolf’; later the _s_-less form was

given up, and _lupus_ came to be used for both ‘the wolf’ and ‘wolf’

(similarly presumably in the genitive, if we translate the presumed

original forms into Latin _lupis_ ‘the wolf’s’ and _lupi_ ‘(a) wolf’s,’

later _lupi_ in both functions). In Semitic, inversely, an element

_m_, corresponding to the Aryan accusative ending, was added as an

_in_definite article, the _m_-less form thus becoming definite, but in

the oldest Babylonian-Assyrian the distinction has been given up, and

the form in _m_ is (like the Latin form in _s_) used both definitely

and indefinitely. Ingenious as these constructions are, the whole

theory seems to me highly artificial, and it is difficult to imagine

that both Aryans and Semites, after having evolved such a valuable

distinction as that between ‘the wolf’ and ‘a wolf,’ expressed by

simple means, should have wilfully given it up--to evolve it again in a

later period.[95] Fortunately one is allowed to confess one’s ignorance

of the origin of the case endings _s_ and _m_, but if I were on pain

of death to choose between Möller’s hypothesis and the suggestion

thrown out by Humboldt (Versch 129), that the light (high-pitched) _s_

symbolized the living (personal) and active (the subject), and the dark

(low-pitched) _m_ the lifeless (neutral) and passive (the object), I

should certainly prefer the latter explanation.

Hirt (GDS 37) also thinks that the _s_ found in Aryan cases is an

originally independent word, only he thinks that this _se_, _so_ was

not originally a demonstrative pronoun, but the particle, which with

the extension _i_ is found in Gothic _sai_ ‘ecce,’ and as it can thus

be compared with the particle _c_ in Lat. _hic_, it is clear that it

might be added in all cases--and as a matter of fact Hirt finds it in

six different cases in the singular and in all cases in the plural

except the genitive. Hirt makes no attempt at explaining how these

various case-forms have come to acquire the signification (function)

with which we find them in the oldest documents; “the _s_ element had

nothing to do with the denotation of any case, number or gender, and

only after it had been added to some cases and not to others could

it come to be distinctive of cases” (p. 39). In other words, his

explanation explains just nothing at all. The same is true with regard

to the ‘particles’ _om_ or _em_, _e_, _o_, _i_, which he thinks were

added in other cases, and when he ends (p. 42) by saying that “this

must be sufficient to give a glimpse of the way in which Aryan flexion

originated,” the only thing we have really seen is the haphazard way

in which this flexion is formed, and the impossibility at present of

arriving at a fully satisfactory explanation of these things. I should

especially demur to the two suppositions underlying Hirt’s theory

that Aryan had at one period a completely flexionless structure, and

that the same sound when occurring in various cases must have had the

same origin: it seems much more probable to me that the _s_ of the

nominative and the _s_ of the genitive were not at first identical.[96]

That item of the coalescence theory which probably appealed most to

the fancy of scholars and laymen alike was the explanation of the

personal endings in the verbs from the personal pronouns: we have an

_m_ in the first person of the _mi_-verbs (_esmi_) and in the pronoun

_me_, etc., and we have a _t_ in the third person (_esti_) and in a

third-person pronoun or demonstrative (_to_); it is, therefore, quite

natural to think that _esmi_ is simply the root _es_ ‘to be’ + the

pronoun _mi_ ‘I,’ and _esti_ _es_ + the other pronoun, and to extend

this view to the other persons. And yet not even this has been allowed

to stand unchallenged by later disrespectful linguists, headed by A. H.

Sayce (Techmer’s _Zeitschr. f. allg. Sprwiss._ i. 22) and Hirt. As a

matter of fact, the theory is based exclusively on the above-mentioned

correspondence in the first and third persons singular, while the dual

and plural endings do not at all agree with the corresponding personal

pronouns and the endings of the second person can only be compared with

the pronoun through the employment of phonological tricks unworthy of

a scientific linguist. Even in the first person the correspondence is

not complete, for besides _-mi_ we have other endings: _-m_, which

cannot be very well considered a shortened _-mi_ (and which agrees,

as Sayce remarks, much more closely with the accusative ending of

nouns), _-o_ and _-a_, neither of which can be explained from any known

pronoun. There is thus nothing for it except to say, as Brugmann does

(KG § 770): “The origin of the personal endings is not clear”; cf. also

Misteli 47: “The relations between personal endings and the independent

personal pronouns must be much more evident to justify this view....

The Aryan language offers direct evidence against the assumption that

a sentence has been thus drawn together, because it uses in the verbal

forms of the first and third person sg. pronominal stems which are

otherwise employed only as objects, and, moreover, would here place

the subject after the predicate, though in sentences it observes

the opposite order.” Meillet expresses himself very categorically

(_Bulletin de la Soc. de Ling._ 1911, 143): “Scarcely any linguist who

has studied Aryan languages would venture to affirm that *_-mi_ of the

type Gr. _fēmi_ is an old personal pronoun.”

The impression left on us by all these cases is that many of the

earlier explanations by agglutination have proved unsatisfactory, and

that linguists are nowadays inclined either to leave the forms entirely

unexplained or else to admit less rectilinear developments, in which

we see the speakers of the old languages groping tentatively after

means of expression and finding them only by devious and circuitous

courses. It is, of course, difficult to classify such explanations,

and the agglutination or coalescence theory has to be supplemented by

various other kinds of explanation; but I think one of these, which

has not received its legitimate share of attention, is important and

distinctive enough to have its own name, and I propose to term it the

‘secretion’ theory.

XIX.--§ 13. Secretion.

By secretion I understand the phenomenon that one integral portion

of a word comes to acquire a grammatical signification which it had

not at first, and is then felt as something added to the word itself.

Secretion thus is a consequence of a ‘metanalysis’ (above, Ch. X § 2);

it shows its full force when the element thus secreted comes to be

added to other words not originally possessing this element.

A clear instance is offered in the history of some English possessive

pronouns. In Old English _min_ and _þin_ the _n_ is kept throughout

as part and parcel of the words themselves, the other cases having

such forms as _mine_, _minum_, _minre_, exactly as in German _mein_,

_meine_, _meinem_, _meiner_, etc. But in Middle English the endings

were gradually dropped, and _min_ and _þin_ for a short time became

the only forms. Soon, however, _n_ was dropped before substantives

beginning with a consonant, but was retained in other positions

(_my_ father--_mine_ uncle, it is _mine_); then the former form was

transferred also to those cases in which the pronoun was used (as

an adjunct) before words beginning with vowels (_my_ father, _my_

uncle--it is _mine_). The distinction between _my_ and _mine_, _thy_

and _thine_, which was originally a purely phonetic one, exactly like

that between _a_ and _an_ (_a_ father, _an_ uncle), gradually acquired

a functional value, and now serves to distinguish an adjunct from a

principal (or, to use the terms of some grammars, a conjoint from

an absolute form); _my_ came to be looked upon as the proper form,

while the _n_ of _mine_ was felt as an ending serving to indicate the

function as a principal word. That this is really the instinctive

feeling of the people is shown by the fact that in dialectal and vulgar

speech the same _n_ is added to _his_, _her_, _your_ and _their_, to

form the new pronouns _hisn_, _hern_, _yourn_, _theirn_: “He that prigs

what isn’t hisn, when he’s cotch’d, is sent to prison. She that prigs

what isn’t hern, At the treadmill takes a turn.”

Another instance of secretion is _-en_ as a plural ending in E. _oxen_,

G. _ochsen_, etc. Here originally _n_ belonged to the word in all

cases and all numbers, just as much as the preceding _s_; _ox_ was an

_n_ stem in the same way as, for instance, Lat. (homo), homi_n_em,

homi_n_is, etc., or Gr. kuō_n_, ku_n_a, ku_n_os, etc., are _n_ stems.

In Gothic _n_ is found in most of the cases of similar _n_ stems. In

OE. the nom. is _oxa_, the other cases in the sg. _oxan_, pl. _oxan_

(_oxen_), _oxnum_, _oxena_, but in ME. the _n_-less form is found

throughout the singular (gen. analogically _oxes_), and the plural only

kept _-n_. Thus also a great many other words, e.g. (I give the plural

forms) _apen_, _haren_, _sterren_ (stars), _tungen_, _siden_, _eyen_,

which all of them belonged to the _n_ declension in OE. When _-en_ had

thus become established as a plural sign, it was added analogically to

words which were not originally _n_ stems, e.g. ME. _caren_, _synnen_,

_treen_ (OE. _cara_, _synna_, _treow_), and this ending even seemed

for some time destined to be the most usual plural ending in the South

of England, until it was finally supplanted by _-s_, which had been

the prevalent ending in the North; _eyen_, _foen_, _shoen_ were for

a time in competition with _eyes_, _foes_, _shoes_, and now _-n_ is

only found in _oxen_ (and _children_). In German to-day things are

very much as they were in Southern ME.: _-en_ is kept extensively in

the old _n_ stems and is added to some words which had formerly other

endings, e.g. _hirten_, _soldaten_, _thaten_. The result is that

now plurality is indicated by an ending which had formerly no such

function (which, indeed, had no function at all); for if we look upon

the actual language, _oxen_ (G. _ochsen_) is = _ox_ (_ochs_) singular

+ the plural ending _-en_; only we must not on any account imagine

that the form was originally thus welded together (agglutinated)--and

if in G. _soldaten_ we may speak of _-en_ being glued on to _soldat_,

this ending is not, and has never been, an independent word, but is an

originally insignificative part secreted by other words.

A closely similar case is the plural ending _-er_. The consonant

originally was _s_, as seen, for instance, in the Gr. and Lat. nom.

_genos_, _genus_, gen. Gr. _gene(s)os_, _genous_, Lat. _generis_ for

older _genesis_. In Gothonic languages _s_, in accordance with a

regular sound shift in this case, became _r_ (through _z_) whenever it

was retained, but in the nom. sg. it was dropped, and thus we have in

OE. sg. _lamb_, _lambe_, _lambes_, but in the pl. _lambru_, _lambrum_,

_lambra_. In English only few words show traces of this flexion, thus

OE. _cild_, pl. _cildru_, ME. _child_, _childer_, whence, with an

added _-en_, our modern _children_. But in German the class had much

more vitality, and we have not only words belonging to it of old, like

_lamm_, pl. _lämmer_, _rind_, _rinder_, but also gradually more and

more words which originally belonged to other classes, but adopted

this ending after it had become a real sign of the plural number, thus

_wörter_, _bücher_.

There is one trait that should be noticed as highly characteristic

of these instances of secretion, that is, that the occurrence of the

endings originating in this way seems from the first regulated by the

purest accident, seen from the point of view of the speakers: they are

found in some words, but not in others, whereas the endings treated

of under the heading Coalescence are added much more uniformly to the

whole of the vocabulary. But as a similarly irregular or arbitrary

distribution is met with in the case of nearly all flexional endings

in the oldest stages of languages belonging to our family of speech,

the probability is that most of those endings which it is impossible

for us to trace back to their first beginnings have originated through

secretion or similar processes, rather than through coalescence of

independent words or roots.