I9I2.] LYMAN— NATURE OF THE JAPANESE VERB, 95 



The widespread use of these sounds with unchanged significance, in 

 different languages, seems to point clearly to a common origin of 

 the languages, in spite of differences of grammar, which, to be sure, 

 indicate remoteness of affinity, yet cannot make it credible that the 

 origin of human language was multiplex. Language can have had 

 but a single origin, and all languages must have come eventually 

 from one source ; and distant as may be the branching from com- 

 mon stocks, it should not be considered incredible that occasional 

 traces of the original source should be found in languages of unhke 

 grammar. 



Indeed, there are many resemblances, coincidences, if you please, 

 between Japanese and European words; such as : mushi, an insect, 

 and Latin musca and French mouche, a fly. But yet more striking, 

 because more complicated, is such a resemblance as is to be seen in 

 the demonstrative pronouns, this (near me), that (near you) and 

 yonder (distant from both of us). In Japanese, though there are 

 no strictly personal pronouns, these demonstratives are respectively 

 korc, sore, are (the re appearing to mean thing), or in the adjective 

 pronoun forms, kono, sono, ano ; in which the distinctive syllables 

 of at least the first two have a remarkable etymological likeness to 

 the Latin hie, iste and ille (formerly olle), as well as, for the first 

 two, the Greek iyo) and cru and the Latin ego and tu. The word so 

 (according to what you have heard) is almost, or quite, identical, 

 both in meaning and sound, in Japanese and English and German; 

 but is said to be derived from shika. 



One fundamental way of grammatically classifying languages 

 might be based upon the general structure of their sentences; and 

 then, further, on the welding, or not welding into terminations. A 

 sentence has a subject, or theme (which is not necessarily the agent 

 of an action, the subject of the Latin verb), an agent, an object 

 (sometimes) and a verbal word. The sentence, or thesis, is a de- 

 scription of either the agent, the object, or the action. In Japanese, 

 the verbal noun, naming the action, comes last, is the goal, the 

 thing described by the sentence; the object (indicated by the post- 

 position 0, or zvo, which might be translated, in connection with) 

 comes before the verbal noun, and the agent (sometimes indicated 

 by the postposition ga or no, genitive particles) comes before the 



