I9I2.] LYMAN— NATURE OF THE JAPANESE VERB. 93 



idea was of the greatest value in aiding progress in the use of the 

 language. It seemed, however, certain that a principle so ele- 

 mentary, important and obvious must have been long ago perceived 

 by professed philologists, and should have been made familiar to 

 schoolchildren at the outset of linguistic studies. At length, after 

 two or three months more of absence in the mountains, a return to 

 Tokio made possible a confident and successful search for some 

 previously published elucidation of the facts. It was, to be sure, 

 found only in one place, in a brief and much too neglected note by 

 the great Wm. von Humboldt on Oyanguren's Japanese Grammar, 

 published by the Societe Asiatique in the Supplement a la Gram- 

 maire Japonaise du Pere Rodriguez, Paris, 1826. Notwithstanding 

 Humboldt's knowledge of Japanese was doubtless very slight, com- 

 pared with what hundreds of Americans and Europeans now pos- 

 sess, his acumen was sufficient to perceive that the Japanese verbal 

 forms essentially differed from the European verb. He said 

 (page 6) : 



" Les verbes Japonais portent moins que ceux des autres langues le car- 

 actere verbal, par la circonstance que leurs inflexions ne varient jamais, 

 quant aux personnes (gram, de Rodr., § 26) ; car ce qui caracterise surtout 

 le verba, c'est qu'il doit toujours y avoir une personne qui y soit affectee, 

 tandisque les noms ne se rapportent aux personnes que dans certains cas, ou 

 sous certaines suppositions." 



He further points out that the subject of the so-called verb is con- 

 nected with the verb by the postpositions no and ga, genitive particles 

 turning the pronominal subjects into possessive pronouns, 



" et le verbe est ainsi traite comme un nom substantif. Le Japonais n'est pas 

 la premiere langue dans laquelle j'ai cru trouver ce singulier phenomene." 



On my pointing out, some weeks later, this evidence of the sub- 

 stantive character of the verb to a fellow American exile who was 

 beginning to talk Japanese, he said : " But what difference does it 

 make whether you call it a verb or a verbal noun?" Certainly, the 

 recognition of the difference by name, and in fact, aids greatly in 

 learning the language. You, thereby, readily acquire the habit of 

 boldly, and to the Japanese altogether intelligibly and naturally, con- 

 necting the verbal noun with other nouns or pronouns by the pos- 

 sessive or other particles, or of using the verbal noun simply (like 



