Chapter V: The Morphology of Speech (2)

But it does not follow, as a good number of writers on language have assumed, that because some of the classificatory suffixes are examples of composition, all of them are so, any more than in the case of flection and the flectional suffixes. Indeed, we have only to glance at the numerous suffixes employed by our own Aryan family of speech in forming or “building” words to see how impossible it would be to trace back a large proportion of them to independent words. How, for instance, could we claim any such origin for the suffixes -_la_- and -_ra_- in _querela_ and λαμπρὸς, or the suffixes -_ana_-, -_na_, and -_an_ in _pecten_, _donum_, and ἱκανός? With such suffixes all we can do is to watch the changes they have undergone, or caused other sounds to undergo, through the action of phonetic decay and false analogy. Thus in Latin where the combination _sr_ changes into the softer _br_, stems like _ceres_ (Sanskrit _śiras_), “head,” and _fes_ (as in _festus_) have turned into _cerebrum_ and _Februus_ when combined with the suffix -_ra_; and if we take the suffix _as_ itself, we shall find its sibilant passing into _r_ before another vowel, and so originating a long series of curious transformations. The _r_ which we get in the genitive of _temporis_ was transferred by analogy to the nominative also, where no vowel followed it, and though there was a struggle at first between the twin forms in _s_ and _r_, traces of which survive in the twin _arbos_ and _arbor_, the later and incorrect form with _r_ finally carried the day, and classical Latin knows only of a _sopor_, not a _sopos_. But it may be asked why should the penultimate syllable of _sopōris_ be long whereas it is short in _tempŏris_ and _arbŏris_, and why, too, should _sopor_ be masculine while _tempus_ is neuter? Here, again, false analogy has been at work. A certain number of masculine nouns terminating in -_tor_ and denoting agents, like _dator_ or _victor_, existed in the language, and when _sopos_ was changed to _sopor_, it was assimilated to these both in gender and in declension. Even _victor_, however, had passed under the action of false analogy. When we compare the Latin _victor_ with _pater_, or the Greek σωτήρ with πατήρ, it is at once clear that we are dealing in each case with the same suffix, although in _victor_ the vowel has been thickened into the fuller _o_. But while _victor_ and σωτήρ have a long vowel in the oblique cases, this is not the case with the much older words _pater_ and πατήρ (accusative πατέρα). It is evident, therefore, that this long vowel must have been a sort of after-thought; and so, in fact, it was. First of all the vowel of the nominative was lengthened to compensate for the loss of the final sibilant (_paters_), and the quantity of the vowel in the nominative was then analogically extended to the other cases as well. How far this was from having been originally the case may be gathered from another form of the same suffix which we have in the Sanskrit _patram_, the Greek πτέρον, and the Latin _ara-tr-um_. Here the vowel between the two consonants of the suffix has disappeared altogether, as it has also in words like the Latin _sæclum_ for _sæ-culu-m_, or the Gothic _nê-thla_, our _needle_, where the suffix, in spite of the change it has suffered, really goes back to _tar_. The latter group of words (in _tar_), however, is distinguished from the former (in _trum_) in both signification and gender, the masculine agent being replaced by a neuter noun of instrumentality. We can easily see how such a transition of meaning must have come about. The agent presupposes the act just as much as the act presupposes the agent. Agent and act, in fact, are co-relative terms, and the parent-Aryan distinguished them, not by the classificatory suffix—for they both belonged to the same class—but by the flectional suffix, which was in the one case -_s_ in the nominative singular, and in the other -_m_. The Latin _trucidator_ and the English _murder_ (formerly _murther_, like _slaugh-ter_ and _laugh-ter_) have precisely the same suffix, and it is only a recollection of the difference in meaning in the flectional suffixes which has survived their loss that prevents them from being used with the same signification. Even these flectional suffixes themselves—as we shall see hereafter—did not originally imply that difference of meaning to the expression of which they were afterwards adapted. In nouns like the Latin _virus_ or the Sanskrit _śiras_-, the final sibilant denoted a neuter rather than a masculine or a feminine, while _servum_ or _humum_ show that the final labial might characterize the objective case of both masculine and feminine nouns.

The suffix _tar_ (_ter_) brings us back to those classificatory suffixes which trace their descent from independent words, if, as is very probable, we have to connect it with the root found in our _through_, the Latin _trans_ and _ter-minus_, the Zend _tarô_, “across,” the Sanskrit _tar-âmi_, “I pass over,” and perhaps, too, the numeral _tri_, _tres_, _three_.[258] It is not difficult to understand how a word signifying “to go through with a thing,” could be taken to form nouns of agency. What more suitable description could be given of “a giver” than “one who goes through with giving,” _dator(s)_? The antiquity of this use of the suffix in our family of speech may be gathered from the fact that it is employed to form those nouns of relationship which are the first to require a name. _Brother_, _sister_, _daughter_, _mother_, _father_, all contain this ancient suffix. _Brother_ (_bhrâ-tar_) is “the bearer,” from the root _bhar_, _daughter_, “the milker” or rather “sucker,” from the root _dugh_, while the Sanskrit grammarians derive _father_ (_pitar_) and _mother_ (_mâtar_) from the roots _pâ_ and _mâ_, which respectively mean “to defend” and “to create.” It is obvious, however, that both “father” and “mother” must have received names long before it was necessary to speak of “going across” or “passing through,” and that our Aryan ancestors would not have waited to compound two words together before giving names to the nearest and dearest of relationships. As a matter of fact, in almost all languages names have been found for the parent in the two simple labial utterances _pa_ and _ma_; and the identity of these with the Aryan roots _pâ_ and _mâ_ must be a pure accident. What seems to have happened in the case of our names of relationship was this. When the Aryan family first comes before us in the records of speech, it is as a civilized clan with a vast but indeterminate background of unknown history lying behind them. They had long since entered upon what may be termed the epithetic stage, when man discovered that he was a poet, and began to invent epithets for the objects about him, and to form compounds. It was at this stage of culture and civilization that the Aryan community coined compound epithets for _brother_, for _daughter_, and for _sister_, which succeeded in driving out and replacing the older words that had preceded them. The new compounds in _tar_ took the fancy of the community, and were widely extended by the force of analogy. The old labials which had done duty for the ideas of “father” and “mother” followed the fashion set by the younger names of relationship, and so just as _bhrâ-tar_ had come to signify “brother,” _pa-tar_ and _mâ-tar_ came to signify “father” and “mother.”

Languages do not begin with composition. If the sentence is anterior to the word, a considerable time must elapse between the first beginnings of a language and the piecing together of two independent words. Isolating tongues like the Chinese or the Burman, where so much use is made of composition in order to create new conceptions or to define old ones, are shown by this very fact to have passed into a decrepit stage of existence. The epithetic stage is one far advanced in the history of a speech; it implies poetic imagination, a certain measure of culture and civilization, and the germs of a mythology. The new compounds of this epithetic stage follow the genius and analogy of the language to which they belong. If the formation of words depends largely on the use of suffixes, the newly coined words will in time adapt themselves to the old rule; what were once independent words will become suffixes, and be employed in exactly the same way as the other suffixes of the language.

The very existence, then, of classificatory suffixes due to composition in our Indo-European idioms implies the existence of earlier suffixes for which we cannot claim a similar origin. We have already seen that this is the case with many of the suffixes which serve the purposes of flection; though the person-endings of the verb go back to separate words, every attempt to discover such a derivation for the principal case-endings has ended in failure. What is true of the case-endings is pre-eminently true of those suffixes which are neither flectional nor classificatory. If we analyze the Latin _alumnus_, we find first of all the flectional suffix -_(u)s_, then the classificatory suffix _mino_, which relegates the word to the same class of middle participles as the Greek τυπτόμενος, and lastly, the suffix _u_, which intervenes between the root _al_ and the classificatory suffix _mino_. We may call this _u_ a “connecting-vowel,” or “an euphonic vowel,” or anything else we choose, but the fact remains that it is a suffix which can be separated from the root _al_. It is a suffix, however, which is neither flectional nor classificatory, and may be termed secondary for want of a better name. Secondary suffixes play an important part in our family of speech, and just as a flectional suffix often appears as a classificatory one, so, too, a classificatory suffix may appear as a secondary one. If, for example, we compare a word like _civitas_ (_civ-i-ta-t-s_) with _sec-ta_, we may not only get the secondary suffix -_i_-, following immediately upon the root, but also a reduplication of the classificatory suffix _ta_, which here at least can have no classificatory sense. We may accordingly define a secondary suffix as one which does not refer the word of which it forms a part to any particular class; and where we have several classificatory suffixes amalgamated together the first of these have generally become secondary. Thus the English _songstress_ is a combination of two suffixes, one Saxon and the other Romanic, which equally denoted the feminine. By the side of _sang-ere_, “the singer,” stood in Anglo-Saxon _sang-estre_, “the songstress;” it was only when the classificatory significance of the termination had died out that a new one which really went back to the Greek -ισσα through the Latin _issa_ (as in _abbatissa_), and the French -_esse_ (as in _justesse_),[259] was attached to it, and so the old classificatory suffix became a merely secondary one. In fact, as soon as the force of a classificatory suffix has been weakened in a word, a fresh classificatory suffix is always ready to be attached to it, just as children will talk of _more-er_ and _most-est_, or as Lord Brougham introduced the equally anomalous _worser_.

Now these secondary suffixes play a most important part in a large number of languages, and more especially in our own Aryan ones. It is seldom that a classificatory or flectional suffix can be added immediately to the root, as in the Sanskrit _ad-mi_, “I eat;” a secondary suffix has usually to intervene, by means of which the root is raised to what has been variously termed a base, a theme, or a stem. So far as the Indo-European family of speech is concerned, it is probable that even such exceptions to the general rule as that of _ad-mi_ are really due to phonetic decay, which has worn away the original stem to a simple monosyllable, as it has done in so many English words like _man_ or _fall_. When we come to deal with roots, we shall see good reason for believing that they were all or for the most part once dissyllabic, and the tendency that many children show to turn the monosyllables of modern English into dissyllabic words may be but an instinctive reversion to the early type of speech. No doubt it is very possible that just as classificatory suffixes have been changed into secondary ones, so on the other hand secondary suffixes may have come in course of time to assume a classificatory character. A conspicuous example of this may be found in the suffix _ya_, which in Greek words like φέρουσα for φερο-ντ-yα, or δότειρα for δοτ-ερ-yα, has become a mark of the feminine gender. A distinction of gender is by no means engrained in the nature of things, and the majority of spoken languages, such as most of those which are agglutinative or isolating, know nothing at all of it. In some idioms, those of the Eskimo, Chocktaw, Mushtogee, and Caddo, for instance,[260] the place of gender is taken by the division of objects into animate and inanimate, while elsewhere they are divided into rational and irrational. In the Bâ-ntu dialects of South Africa, nouns are separated into a number of classes, in one case as many as eighteen, by means of prefixes which were originally substantives like our -_dom_, -_ship_, or -_hood_; and the agreement of the pronoun, adjective, and verb with the substantive is denoted by the employment of the same suffix. Bleek has not inaptly compared these classes of the Bâ-ntu noun with the genders of our own family of speech. Thus if we were to take a noun like I-SI-_zwe_, “nation,” which belongs to the _si_-class or gender, in order to express the sentence “our fine nation appears, and we love it,” the Kafir would have to say I-SI-_zwe_ S-_etu_ E-SI-χ’_le_ SI-_ya-bonakala_ _si_-SI-_tanda_, literally “nation ours appears, we-it-love.” Similarly the noun U-LU-_ti_, “stick,” would require a corresponding change of prefix in the words in agreement with it; and the sentence would run: U-LU-_ti_ LW-_etu_ O-LU-χ’_le_ LU-_ya-bonakala_ _si_-LU-_tanda_.[261] There are many indications that the Aryan language, or rather the ancestor of that hypothetical speech which we term the parent-Aryan, was once itself without any signs of gender. We have only to turn to Latin and Greek to see that the words which denote “father” and “mother,” _pater_ and _mater_, πατὴρ and μητὴρ, have exactly the same termination, while so-called diphthongal stems as well as stems in _i_ (_ya_) and _u_ (like ναῦς and νέκυς, πόλις and λῖς) may be indifferently masculine and feminine. Even stems in _o_ and _a_, though the first are generally masculine and the second generally feminine, by no means invariably maintain the rule, and feminines like _humus_ and ὁδός or masculines like _advena_ and πολίτης show us that there was a time when these stems also indicated no particular gender, but owed their subsequent adaptation, the one to mark the masculine and the other to mark the feminine, to the influence of analogy. How analogy came to act seems to have been as follows. First of all the idea of gender was suggested by the difference between man and woman, male and female, and, as in so many languages at the present day, was represented not by any outward sign, but by the meaning of the words themselves. Thus in the Hidacha of North America we are told that “gender is distinguished by using, for the masculine and feminine, different words, which may either stand alone or be added to nouns of the common gender,”[262] and in the Sonorian languages further south it can only be denoted by the addition of words which signify “man” and “woman.”[263] Then when the conception of gender had once been arrived at it was extended to other objects besides those to which it properly belongs. The primitive Aryan had not yet distinguished the object thought of from the subject that thought of it; he was still in the stage of childhood, and just as he transferred the actions and attributes of inanimate objects to himself, so too he transferred to them the actions and attributes of himself, and endowed them with a life similar to his own. The same age which saw the creation and growth of a mythology saw also the origin of gender in nouns, and the distinction of gender in the demonstrative pronouns, due to their reference to animate beings, reacted on the nouns expressive of inanimate objects to which they likewise referred. As soon as the preponderant number of stems in _o_ in daily use had come to be regarded as masculine on account of their meaning, other stems in _o_, whatever might be their signification, had to follow the general rule and be classed as masculine nouns. How readily the gender of a word may be determined by its termination has been already seen in the history of the Latin stems in -_os_. Here and there the constant use of a word with particular pronouns or its obvious and natural meaning resisted the common tendency, and hence the preservation of such anomalies as ὁδός, _humus_,[264] and _advena_ mentioned above. The suffix _ya_, however, like the suffix -ιδ- (as in αὐλητρίς) in Greek or the suffix -_ic_- (as in _victrix_) in Latin, formed part of a class of words which all followed the dominant type; neither use nor meaning interfered with the appropriation of them all to express the feminine gender. The accident by which the suffix was attached to words which chiefly denoted female agents eventually caused it to become a classificatory instead of remaining a mere secondary suffix. But the Aryans were not contented with only two genders, as the Semites and some other races were. A time came when the Aryan awoke to the consciousness that he was essentially different from the objects about him, that the life with which he had clothed them was really but the reflection of his own. He began to distinguish the agent from the patient, and to turn his middle conjugation into a passive one. The first sign of this new-grown consciousness was the formation of a nominative for the first personal pronoun; _ego_, ἐγών, the Sanskrit _aham_, is a far later creation than the objective _me_ or _mâ_, and whether it be a compound or not, as some scholars believe, at all events it marks the epoch when the “me” became an “I.” The discovery had been made that a difference existed between the nominative and the accusative. But this difference existed only in the case of animate beings, or of those objects which the custom of language and the habits of thought it had produced regarded as animate; there was another class of objects and ideas which were beginning to require a name and yet could not be reckoned as coming under either of the two genders with which the language was already acquainted. The same development of thought which had revealed the distinction between subject and object brought with it also the conception of abstracts or general terms. Besides the individual trees which had long ago received their names, the idea of “tree” itself now needed a word to express it, and the speaker was no longer contented with detailing his single utterances one by one, but wanted a general term like “word” or “speech” wherein to sum them up. And so the new class of neuter nouns came into existence, which were really nothing more than old accusative cases or bare stems used as nominatives and given a separate life of their own. So far as form goes, the Greek δένδρον and ἔπος cannot be distinguished from λόγον and ὄπες, the Sanskrit _vâchas_ representing both ἔπος and ὄπες alike, any more than the Latin _regnum_ and _vulgus_ can be distinguished from _dominum_ and _reges_. In the pronouns the bare stem in _t_ or _d_, which had once served for all cases and all genders, was set apart for neuter nouns, and the Aryan declension was made complete with its encumbrance of three genders, which it has needed the practical genius of the English language to shake off. The further changes that took place in the distribution of these three genders must be described by the historical grammars of the special languages of the Aryan family: the age came when their original meaning and intention was as much forgotten as that of mythology; they were looked upon as the functions of certain suffixes which thus became classificatory, and, as in Latin stems in -_as_ or French nouns like _mer_ which owe their gender to the confusion of the plural nominative _maria_ with the singular nominative of _musa_, they became the sport and puppet of false analogy. The mixture of dialects which varied as to the genders they assigned to particular nouns completed the confusion, and modern German is an instance of a language which still clings to an outward excrescence of speech which originated in childish habits of thought and has now lost all sense and reason for its existence. A mere tax upon the memory and an embarrassment to free literary expression, it is no wonder that German genders are a sore trial to the children, who are sometimes several years before they learn to use them correctly. In this respect they resemble the Swedish peasantry, who are said to find an equal difficulty with the genders of their own tongue.

The origin of gender is one of the questions belonging to what some German scholars have termed “the metaphysics of language.” The metaphysics of language deals with the source and nature of grammatical ideas as distinct from the phonetic machinery by which they are expressed; it seeks by a comparison, firstly of cognate dialects and then of families of speech, to discover the conception which lay at the bottom of such grammatical facts as gender, number, and the like. We want to know not merely how the relations between the several parts of the sentence are expressed, but what those relations actually are. The idea must exist before phonetic means are adapted to represent it, and in order to reach it we must scientifically trace the history of the phonetic means. The metaphysics of speech, therefore, is but the second branch and division of its morphology, bearing the same relation to the inquiry into the growth and origin of stems and suffixes and suchlike phonetic forms of grammar that sematology does to phonology. The morphology of language is as much concerned with grammatical ideas as with the external form in which they are embodied. It is these grammatical ideas more than their phonetic embodiment that constitute the _structure_ of a tongue.

Let us see, for example, whether we can track the conception of number back to its first starting-point. Strange as it may seem there are some uncivilized languages which make as little distinction between the singular and the plural as we do ourselves when we use words like _sheep_. Thus Mr. Matthews states that “Hidatsa nouns suffer no change of form to indicate the difference between singular and plural,”[265] and in the Sonorian tongues, according to Buschmann,[266] “the simple word in the singular serves also for the plural,” while the monosyllabic Othomi can distinguish between singular and plural only by the prefixed article _na_ and _ya_,[267] and the Amara of Africa can only say _fŭrŭsn ayŭhu_, “I have seen horse,” leaving the hearer to decide whether the horse is one or many. In spite of the vast length of time during which these languages have been shaping and perfecting themselves, the conception of number is still so far from being consciously realized that no phonetic means have yet been adapted or devised to express it. If we turn to the Tumali of Africa we find in the case of the personal pronouns _ngi_, “I,” _ngo_, “thou,” and _ngu_, “he,” a slight advance upon this poverty of thought. Here the plural is denoted by the postposition _da_, “with,” so that _ngi-n-da_, “we,” is literally “(some one) with me.” The mind has come to distinguish between itself and that which is outside itself, to realize, in fact, that it has an individual existence distinct from that of some one else, and so the conception of duality is attained. At this conception mankind stopped for a long while; indeed, there are many races and tribes who have not even yet passed beyond it. Wherever the so-called plural is formed by means of reduplication—that is to say, wherever the doubling of a thing is the furthest point of multiplicity to which the mind can reach, there we have not yet a true plural, but only a dual. All over the world reduplication seems to have been the earliest contrivance for denoting something beyond the singular, and to this day in Bushman, as in many other savage jargons, it serves for a plural.[268] The same evidence that is borne by the so-called reduplicated plural is borne also by the numerals. The aborigines of Victoria, according to Mr. Stanbridge, “have no name for numerals above two;”[269] the Puris of South America call “three” _prica_ or “many,” which is also the original meaning of the same numeral in Bushman, and “the New Hollanders,” says Mr. Oldfield of the western tribes, “have no names for numbers beyond _two_.” It is even possible, as has been already noticed, that our own Aryan _tri_, _three_, goes back to the same root as that of the Sanskrit _tar-ô-mi_, “I pass beyond,” and once signified nothing more than that which is “beyond” two. The fact that the conception of duality preceded the conception of plurality, explains how it is that the seemingly useless dual has been preserved in so many languages by the side of the plural. It is a relic of a bygone epoch, a survival, as Mr. Tylor would call it, which tends to be more and more restricted in use until it disappears altogether. In both Aryan and Semitic the dual appears only as an archaic and perishing form. The Æolic, in this as in the throwing back of the accent, the least conservative of the Greek dialects, has lost it entirely; the Latin keeps it merely in _duo_, _octo_, and _ambo_, and if we pass to the Semitic idioms, the dual of the noun is preserved only in words which denote natural pairs like “the eyes” or “the ears,” while in the verb it has been maintained by Arabic alone, and in some exceptional cases by Assyrian. Language, however, did not always proceed at once from the dual to the plural, from the conception, that is, of limited plurality to the conception of unlimited plurality. Many languages possess a trinal number, or what are called inclusive and exclusive forms of the personal pronouns, and in one of the Melanesian idioms, as well as in Vitian or Fijian, we even find a quadruple number formed by the attachment of _tavatz_ or _tovatz_, “four,” to the pronouns _na_, “you,” and _dra_, “we.”[270] In Cheroki the dual of the first person has one form when one of two persons speaks to the other, another form when the one speaks of the other to a third, _inaluiha_ being “we two (_i.e._ thou and I) are tying it;” _awstaluiha_, “we two (_i.e._ he and I) are tying it.” In Annatom, again, _aniyak_ is “I,” _akaijan_, “you two + I,” _ajumrau_, “you two - I,” _akataij_, “you three + I,” _aijumtaij_, “you three - I.” More usually the reduplicated dual led to a plural without the intervention of a trinal number, or the plural was denoted by some word like “multitude” or “heap,” which in course of time came to be a plural sign, just as in other instances it came to signify the numeral “three.” In the Aryan languages M. Bergaigne has shown[271] that the plural of the weak cases (nominative, accusative, and vocative) was identical with the singular of abstract nouns, and their formatives, -_as_ or -_âs_, -_i_ or -_î_, -_â_ or -_yâ_, and -_an_, continued to the last to mark abstracts like the Sanskrit _áhan_, “the day,” _lipi_, “writing,” _vrajyâ_, “the act of travelling,” or _mudâ_, “joy.” So in Semitic Assyrian, where an abstract is generally regarded as feminine, the feminine plural in -_utu_ has become the termination of singular nouns like _śarrutu_, “a kingdom,” and then by a curious change of function been appropriated to a certain class of masculine plurals. There are reasons for thinking that the Semitic plural has been based on the dual; however this may be, the suffixes of the Aryan plural, so far at least as the weak cases are concerned, are suffixes which we find elsewhere used as secondary and not classificatory ones.

Even the genitive case, necessary as it appears to us to be, once had no existence, as indeed it still has none in groups of languages like the Taic or the Malay. Instead of the genitive, we here have two nouns placed in apposition to one another, two individuals, as it were, set side by side without any effort being made to determine their exact relations beyond the mere fact that one precedes the other, and is therefore thought of first. Which of the two should thus precede depended on the psychological point of view of the primitive speaker. We are all acquainted with the distinction between the objective genitive where the governed word is the object of the other, as in _amor Socratis_, “love felt for Socrates,” and the subjective genitive where the converse is the case, as in _Socratis amor_, “love felt by Socrates,” and this distinction has led to two different conceptions of the genitive relation being formed by different races. In the Aryan family, for instance, the genitive must precede its governing noun; _Horsetown_, equally with _horse’s town_, means “town of the horse.” In Semitic, on the contrary, the position of the words is reversed; here the genitive has to follow, not precede. Perhaps we may see in the position of the genitive in the two great inflectional families of speech a symbol of the characters of the two races. The Aryan, the inventor of induction and the scientific method, fixes his first attention on the phænomenon and traces it up to its source; the Semite, on the other hand, makes the first cause his starting-point, and derives therefrom with easy assurance all the varying phænomena that surround him.

Now, this apposition of two nouns, which still serves the purpose of the genitive in many languages, might be regarded either as attributive or as predicative. If predicative, then the two contrasted nouns formed a complete sentence, “cup gold,” for instance, being equivalent to “the cup is gold.” If attributive, then one of the two nouns took the place of an adjective, “gold cup” being nothing more than “a golden cup.” The apposition of two substantives is thus the germ out of which no less than three grammatical conceptions have developed—those of the genitive, of the predicate, and of the adjective. It is but another instance of that principle of differentiation which we have found at work upon the phonetic forms whereby the relations of grammar are expressed. Dr. Friedrich Müller has observed[272] that, as a general rule, the attribute and the genitive, or as he terms it the possessive, occupy the same place, and are treated as one and the same relation. In Hottentot, as in Chinese, where the defining noun must precede that which is defined, “right-path” means equally “the right path” and “the path of right,” and our own English language is another example of the same usage. In Malay, on the contrary, as in the Semitic tongues, both adjective and genitive have to follow the noun they define; thus the Malayan _ōran ūtan_, or “man of the wood,” is literally “man-wood,” and _gūmin besar_, “a great mountain,” “mountain-great.” On the other hand, the predicative relation is marked off from the attributive and genitival by a converse order of words; in Malay, for instance, the predicate is placed before its subject, as in _besar gūmin_, “great (is) the mountain,” and the Semitic perfect is formed by affixing the pronouns of the first and second persons to a participle or verbal noun.[273] These primitive contrivances for distinguishing between the predicate, the attribute, and the genitive, when the three ideas had in the course of ages been evolved by the mind of the speaker, gradually gave way to the later and more refined machinery of suffixes, auxiliaries, and the like.

Now it will be noticed that while the predicative relation is contrasted with the attributive and the genitival, the two latter assume the same form. Where the relations of grammar are denoted by position alone, no distinction is made between the attribute and the possessive. There is nothing in the outward form to tell us whether in expressions like _horsetown_ or _ōran ūtan_, _horse_ and _ūtan_ are to be considered as adjectives or as genitives. And in point of fact there is at bottom little or no difference between them. The primitive instinct of language did not err in treating the two conceptions as essentially one and the same. A “gold cup” is exactly equivalent to a “cup of gold.” The adjective describes the attribute which defines and limits the class to which its substantive belongs; and so, too, does the genitive. Both indicate the species of a genus, limiting the signification of the substantive, and so having the same functions as those determinatives which, as we have seen, play so large a part in a Chinese or Burman dictionary. In such languages these defining words perform the same classificatory office as the classificatory suffixes of an Aryan dialect; but whereas the classificatory suffixes of an inflectional tongue are neither adjectives nor attributes, the classificatory substantives of the isolating language are really both. We are told that a school-inspector plucked some children a short time ago for saying that _cannon_ in _cannon-ball_ was a noun instead of an adjective; the pedantry of the act was only equal to the ignorance it displays, and illustrates how often the artificial nomenclature of grammar breaks down when confronted with the real facts of language.

So long therefore as the adjective or genitive is denoted by position only, we cannot draw any true line of distinction between them and the determinatives of the Taic idioms. They all have the same end—that of limiting and defining a noun—of referring it to some special class or investing it with some special quality. Hence it is that the genitive case so frequently assumes the form of an adjective, even in those languages in which the adjective and the genitive have been eventually distinguished from one another. In the Tibetan dialects adjectives are formed from substantives by the addition of the sign of the genitive, as _ser-gyi_, “golden,” from _ser_, “gold;” and in Hindustani the genitive takes the marks of gender according to the words to which it refers.[274] Greek adjectives like δημό-σιο-ς remind us of the old genitive δημοσιο, which has become δημοῖο in Homer, or the Sanskrit genitive _śiva-sya_ and the pronouns _ta-syâ-s_ and _ta-sya-i_, and though the suffix of δημό-σιο-ς was originally rather -_tya_ than -_sya_, since a Greek sibilant between two vowels tends to disappear, the two suffixes once performed the same functions and bore the same relation to each other as the demonstratives _sa_ and _ta_. The Aryan genitive stands on the same footing as the other cases of the nouns which have been traced back by M. Bergaigne to adjectives used adverbially. If we look at the Bâ-ntu languages we shall have little difficulty in understanding the reason of this close connexion between adjective and genitive. As we have seen, the agreement of words together in these languages is pointed out by the use of common prefixes, which were once independent substantives, and have come to answer somewhat to the marks of gender in Greek and Latin. The same prefixes, however, not only indicate the concord of adjective and substantive, of verb and subject, but also of nominative and genitive. Thus the Zulu would say I-SI-_tya_ S-O-_m-fazi_, “the dish of the woman,” where the common prefix _si_ declares the relation that exists between the two ideas. If we assume that the primary meaning of _si_ was “mass,” the words I-SI-_tya_ S-O-_m-fazi_ would properly be read “mass-dish mass-woman.” The word _si_ is thus the standard and connecting link by means of which the other two are brought together and compared. It had been attached to a certain group of words at a time when the conception of adjective or genitive had not yet been clearly realized, and when mere position, mere apposition, indicated by itself the association of two ideas. This close association caused it finally to lose all distinctive existence of its own, to become, in short, an “empty word” or formative, the index of a particular class like the classificatory suffixes of our own tongues. Like these suffixes, again, it came to have what would be called in Sanskrit or Greek a flectional power; it not only marked the class to which the substantive belonged, but also the fact that another word was in concord with it. Whether this were a concord of the adjective or the genitive, however, the Kafir dialects have never advanced so far as to determine.

Unlike either the Kafir with prefixes which denote at once attribute, possessive, and even predicate, or the Aryan languages with their suffixes each fulfilling a special function, the Semitic tongues distinguished between genitive and adjective by subordinating the governing word to its “genitive,” and keeping the attention fixed on the characteristics which separated species from species within a common genus. While the adjective constituted an independent word by the side of the substantive with which it was joined, the genitive was regarded merely as the latter half of a compound of which the word defined by it was the first part. In the so-called _construct state_, the governing noun is pronounced, as it were, in one breath with the genitive that follows it; its vowels are shortened, and its case-terminations tend to disappear. Thus in Assyrian, while _śarru rabu_ is “great king,” _śar rabi_ is “king of great ones,” and in Hebrew the construct _dhiv’rê hâ’âm_, “words of the people,” stands in marked contrast to the simple _dhĕvârim_, “words.”

The agglutinative languages of Western Asia, again, traversed an altogether different road. In the Accadian of ancient Chaldea, we still find instances in the oldest inscriptions of a genitive by position, which only differs from an adjective by the meaning it bears. Thus, _lugal calga_ is “strong king,” _lugal’Uru_, “king of Ur.” But a postposition soon came to be added to the second substantive in order to point out more distinctly its place in the sentence, and these postpositions seem originally to have been verbs. At all events, such is the case with one of the postpositions, _lal_, used for the genitive; _lugal ’Uru-lal_, for instance, being literally “king Ur-filling,” though the more usual postposition -_na_ has lost all traces of its source and derivation. The latter postposition is found throughout the Ural-Altaic family, as in the Turkish _evin_, “of a house,” or the Votiak _murten_, “by a man.” It indicates the genitive in Finnish and Lapp, in Mordvin and Samoyed, in Mongol (-_yin_, -_un_), and Mantschu (-_ni_). It is somewhat remarkable that though the Ural-Altaic family is characterized by the use of postpositions, that is, by making the defining word follow that which it defines, the modern dialects, with a few exceptions,[275] have discarded the general rule and placed the adjective before its noun. This change of position must be ascribed to a wish for differentiation, when the employment of a special postposition for the genitival relation had familiarized the speaker with the distinction between adjective and genitive. Elsewhere the distinction was brought into relief by the help of special words or symbols to denote the genitive relation. Just as the Accadians or the Finns employed a postposition which was originally an independent word with a meaning of its own, so, too, the Semites replaced the “construct state” by the insertion of the demonstrative or relative pronoun, _śarru sa rabi_, for example, literally “king that (is) the great ones,” coming to signify simply “king of the great ones,” and the Chinese assigned the same office to their _tchi_, “place.” The analytic languages of modern Europe have followed in the same track, only employing prepositions like _de_, _of_, or _von_, instead of demonstrative pronouns or other words. When the conception of the genitive had once been clearly recognized, means were soon found for making it as clear in phonetic expression as it was in idea, and the ambiguous machinery of flection was superseded by a method of expression which had been familiar to the more advanced Ural-Altaic idioms from a very remote period.

The history of the genitive has shown us that the same germ may develop very differently in different families of speech. The conception of the genitival relation, when fully realized, has worn a varying aspect to Aryans and Semites, to Accadians and Kafirs. The same grammatical relation admits of being looked at from many points of view, and of being expressed in many ways. Let us now turn to another adjunct of grammar which has assumed more than one form within the same family of speech itself. A definite article is by no means a universal possession of language; on the contrary, the majority of languages want it altogether, and wherever it makes its appearance we can trace it back to the demonstrative pronoun, with which it is still identical in German. “That man” and “the man” are in fact one and the same, the only difference between them being that the demonstrative draws emphatic attention to a particular individual, while the article acts like a classificatory suffix by narrowing the boundaries of a genus and reducing it to the condition of a species. The article has thus the same ultimate function as the adjective or the genitive, and we should therefore expect to find it following the lead of the latter and occupying the same position in the sentence. This, however, is not the case. It is true that in English and German the article precedes the noun, but it does the same in Hebrew and Arabic, as also in Old Egyptian, where the adjective follows its substantive; while, on the other hand, in Scandinavian, as in Wallach, Bulgarian, and Albanian, the place of the article is after its noun. The cause of this irregularity is the fact that the article is a very late product in any speech; it does not grow out of the demonstrative until an age which has lost all recollection of the early contrivances of language and found other means than mere position for indicating the attribute of the noun. How late this is may be judged from the absence of the definite article in dialects cognate to those which possess one. Thus in the Semitic languages there is none in either Ethiopic or Assyrian, except in the very latest period of the latter tongue; among the Aryan dialects, Russian and the other Slavonic idioms (Bulgarian excepted) have no article, the Greek article being very inadequately represented by the relative pronoun _ije_ in Old Slavonic, while Sanskrit also may be said to be without one, though the demonstrative _sa_ sometimes takes its place, as in _sa purusha_ like _ille vir_ in Latin. Neither the Finnic nor the Turkish-Tatar languages have an article, Osmanli Turkish alone occasionally having recourse to the Persian mode of expressing it by a _kezra_ (_i_) or _hemza_ (ʾ) as in _nawale-y-ushk_, “the lamentations of love;” Hungarian, however, has been so far influenced by the neighbouring German dialects as to turn the demonstrative _az_ or _a_ into a genuine article, as in _az atya_, “the father,” _a leány_, “the daughter.” On the other hand, the objective case, or “casus definitus,” as Böhtlingk terms it, seems formed by a demonstrative affix not only in Turkish-Tatar, but also in Mongol and even Tibetan; in Mongol, for instance, it is marked by a suffix which is commonly pronounced -_yighi_.[276] This definite case very often answers exactly to the use of a definite article with the noun, and has arisen through a similar desire to give definiteness and precision to the expression. So, too, Castrén tells us that an affix -_et_ or -_t_, which he believes to be the pronoun of the third person, is sometimes attached to the Ostiak accusative, and in Hindustani, where there is no definite article, its place is taken before the accusative by a dative with the suffix -_ko_, and in Persian by the suffix -_ra_, a suffix, by the way, which Schott considers to have been borrowed from the Tatar or Mongol tongues. We may judge how attributive and defining is the nature of the objective case from the Chinese, where the same empty word _tchi_, which, according to Dr. Edkins, was originally _ti_, is the affix of both the objective and the possessive cases. Passing to the New World, we find the Algonkins alone among the North American Indians prefixing the article _mo_ or _m’_, originally a contracted form of the demonstrative _monko_, “that,” while the monosyllabic Othomis use _na_ and _ya_ in the same sense.

But now the question arises—granting the late growth of the definite article and its appearance only here and there in a group of allied languages—Why do some of these use it as a prefix and others as an affix? As in Greek, or Keltic, or Teutonic, the Romanic article which has been developed out of the Latin _ille_ always precedes its noun, except in Wallachian, where “the master” must be rendered by _domnul_, that is, _dominus ille_. Professor Max Müller thinks that this position of the article was borrowed from Wallachian by the Bulgarians and Albanians;[277] M. Benlöw, on the contrary, holds that Albanian set the example both to Wallach and to Bulgarian.[278] Assuming that Albanian belongs to the Indo-European family of speech—a point, however, which has yet to be satisfactorily determined—we should still have an Aryan language reversing the usual order of Aryan speech. Thus ἔμερ is “name,” but ἔμερι, “the name;” δέ is “earth,” but δέου, “the earth;” δέῤῥε, “door,” but δέῤῥα, “the door;” νιερὶ, “man,” in the accusative, but νιερί-νε, “the man;” νιέρεζ, “men,” but νιέρεζι-τ(ε), “the men.” Whatever may be thought of Albanian, however, we have a clear case of the postposition of the Aryan article in the Scandinavian tongues, where the Swedish _werld-en_, for instance, signifies “the world,” _luft-en_, “the air,” and it is, perhaps, curious that the Scandinavians, like the Albanians, are natives of a comparatively cold and mountainous country. Mountaineers are famous for the use of their lungs, and a postfixed article is necessarily more emphatic than a prefixed one. More effort is required in laying stress on the last syllable of a word than in slurring it over and throwing the accent back.

Now M. Bergaigne has shown[279] that in the primitive Aryan sentence the qualifying word, whether adjective or genitive or adverb, came before the subject and governing word, and this agrees with what we have seen was the early conception formed by the Aryan mind of the attributive relation in contrast to that formed by the Semitic. We should therefore expect to find the article following the rule of other qualifying words, and standing before its noun in the Aryan tongues, and after its noun in the Semitic tongues. So far as the Aryan tongues are concerned, this is its general position. The German dialects which have maintained so firmly the place of the adjective and the genitive have been equally firm in maintaining the place of the definite article.[280] If Wallach influenced Bulgarian and Albanian in affixing the article, an explanation may be found in the forgetfulness shown by the Romanic idioms of the early rule of Aryan speech, as evidenced by their putting the adjective after the substantive; if, as seems more probable, Wallach and Bulgarian were influenced by Albanian, we must bear in mind that the latter language may not be Aryan at all. As for Swedish and the other Scandinavian dialects, the inverted position of the article may be ascribed to what we may call the disorganization of their syntax. While Gothic observed the old rule which made the dependent and defining word precede, it is very noticeable that already in the Icelandic Snorra Edda the genitive without a preposition occurs not only before, but also after its noun. The syntactical instinct of the language was thus disturbed, and there was therefore little to prevent a new defining word like the article from occupying an anomalous place. In the Semitic languages Aramaic alone assigns a natural position to the article, which is represented by the so-called _emphatic aleph_ attached to a noun when not otherwise defined by being in the construct state. Now there are many reasons which would lead us to believe that Aramaic was the first of the Semitic dialects in which the article developed itself, and that this happened shortly after its separation from the dialect which subsequently branched off into Hebrew, Phœnician, and Assyrian. The article did not make its appearance in Hebrew or Arabic until the old order of the sentence had been thrown into confusion by rhetorical inversions and the periphrastic genitive formed by the demonstrative pronoun. How it came to be prefixed to its noun is illustrated by the Assyrian. Here a kind of article makes its appearance in the Persian period, which, when placed after its noun, has the force of the demonstrative “this” or “that.” Now and then, however, we find it in conjunction with another demonstrative before the noun, a construction which can easily be explained if we regard the demonstrative and the noun as having been first in apposition, and then brought so closely together that the demonstrative became an article. In Arabic, too, the demonstrative can be prefixed to a noun which is already furnished with the article, and the pronoun and noun are thus regarded as being in apposition to one another. The same is the case in Hebrew, where we occasionally meet with a construction like _zeh hâ’âm_, “this people,” literally “this the people,” as well as _zeh Mosheh_, “this Moses.”[281] The last example shows us that a proper name was considered definite enough to be put in apposition to the pronoun, even when without the article, and it is not difficult to assume that an usage which first grew up in the case of proper names, should in time have extended itself to all nouns which were considered definite. Even the adjective _rabbim_, “many,” is found preceding its noun.[282] The preservation of the case-endings in Hebrew and Arabic may have had something to do with the position chosen by the article; it was easy enough for a demonstrative to pass into an affixed article in Aramaic, where the case-endings seem to have perished early, but it was only possible for it to do so in languages where they were preserved by its standing before the noun. Old Egyptian agrees with Hebrew and Arabic in the general rule of placing the determining word after the word it determines; it also agrees with them in prefixing the article. But this, again, may be explained by the use of the demonstrative as an article having originated in its apposition to the substantive; while the use of _ua_, “one,” as an indefinite article probably assisted in the process. Of course, when a definite article had once come into existence, a difference of position served to distinguish it from the demonstrative pronouns to which it had formerly belonged.