120 The Rev. Dr. Wall on the Nature, Age, and Origin of the 



responds to any Inflexion, and so is a significant term at the same time that it 

 does not belong to any gramraatic part of speech ;* — a description which in some 

 degree involves a contradiction ; for if an articulate sound be significant it is a 

 word, but it cannot be a word without coming under the head of some part or 

 other of speech. Now, I maintain it, this is a mere artificial contrivance, and 

 not a natural production of the human understanding. In fact, mankind, consi- 

 dered at large, would never go to the trouble of framing words of which yet they 

 were not to make any use in mutual intercourse. The Sanscrit grammarians 

 call these dhdtus by a term which signifies nature ; but surely no appellation was 

 ever more misplaced ; such monstrosities must have sprung, not from the plain, 

 natural sense of unsophisticated minds, but from the fanciful conceit and per- 

 verted ingenuity of wrong-headed metaphysicians. In languages destitute of 

 inflexions, like the Chinese, there are words which may in turn serve the office 

 of every part of speech according to their position in sentences ; but this is a very 

 different thing from their belonging to no part of speech. In those which are 

 distinguished by inflexions, it is generally the simplest form of a word that is 

 looked upon as the root; and if the language be only partly inflected, this root 

 may be common to more parts of speech than one. Thus in English the root of 

 the words lowest, Xoveth, loved, \oying, \o\ely, is love, which may be either a 

 noun or a verb ; but this again is a very different case from its being neither the 

 one nor the other, and yet signifying the abstract thought of love. If we take an 

 example of a set of words of the same general meaning, in any of the more com- 

 pletely inflected languages, as for instance in Latin ; amo is usually considered 

 as the simplest form of the verb expressive of love, and, consequently, as the root 

 of all the other forms of it; but this root agrees not with the notion of a dhdtu, 

 for not only does it belong to a particular part of speech, but also it includes a 

 particular inflexion of that part. If on the other hand we confine ourselves to 

 the syllable am, which is common to all the modifications of the word in question, 

 we in one respect approach nearer to our Indian model, in that we have got an 

 articulate sound that is not in Latin either a noun or a verb, or any other part of 



* In reference to the Sanscrit roots of verbs, Mr. Carey informs us, that " The meaning affixed 

 to the dhatus is designed to express merely the simple idea, they being in their crude state neither 

 nouns nor verbs." — Carey's Gram. p. 137, 



