Brinton.] «-»0^ | March 20, 



On the Verb in American Lavgvages. By WiJJielvi von Humboldt. 

 Translated from the un-publislied original. By D. G. Brinton, M.D. 



You recently had the goodness to give an appreciative hearing to my 

 essay on The Origin of Grammatical Forms. 



I desire to-day to apply the principles which I then stated in general 

 to a particular grammatical point through a series of languages. I 

 choose those of America as best suited to such a purpose, and select 

 the Yerb as the most important part of speech, and the central point of 

 every language. Without entering into an analysis of the different 

 parts of the verb, I shall confine myself to that which constitutes its 

 peculiar verbal character — the union of the subject and predicate of 

 the sentence by means of the notion of Being. This alone forms the 

 essence of the verb ; all other relations, as of persons, tenses, modes 

 and classes, are merely secondary properties. 



The question to be answered is therefore : — 



Through what form of grammatical notation do the languages imder 

 consideration indicate that subject and predicate are to be united by 

 means of the notion of Being ? 



I believe I have shown with sufficient clearness that a language may 

 have a great diversity of apparent forms, and may express all gram- 

 matical relations with definiteness, and yet when taken as a whole it 

 may lack true grammatical form. From this arises an essential and 

 real graduated difference between languages. This difference, how- 

 ever, has nothing to do with the question wliether particular languages 

 employ exclusively agglutination or inflection, as all began with agglu- 

 tination; but in the languages of the higher class, it became in its 

 effects on the mind, identical with inflection. 



As languages of the higher class, one has but to name the cultivated 

 idioms of Asia and Europe, Sanscrit, Greek and Latin, in order to 

 apply to them the above statement. It is still more necessary, how- 

 ever, to understand thoroughly the structure of those languages which 

 are on a lower plane, partly because this will convince us of the cor- 

 rectness of the classification, partly because these tongues are less 

 generally known. 



It is enough to take up some single leading grammatical relation. I 

 select for tliis purpose the verb as the most important part of speech, 

 with which most of the others come into relation, and which completes 

 the formation of the sentence, the grammatical purpose of all language 

 — and often embraces it wholly in itself. But I shall confine myself 

 solely to that which makes the verb a verb, the characteristic notation 

 of its peculiar verbal nature. In every language this point is the most 

 important and the most difficult, and cannot be made too clear to 

 throw light vipon the whole of the language. Linguistic character can 

 be ascertained through this point in the shortest and most certain 

 flianner. 



