I9I2.] LYMAN— NATURE OF THE JAPANESE VERB. 101 



are no punctuation-marks, the meaning is not always clear to a 

 beginner. We have the same source of obscurity in English, espe- 

 cially in shop-signs and brief inscriptions. A Chinaman might, for 

 example, find it difficult to know the precisely correct meaning of an 

 inscription on a certain wagon in Philadelphia : " The largest old 

 book store in the city " ; or of the signs : " Circular Saw Mills " ; 

 " Fine Fur Felt Hats " ; " North Broad Street Farmers' Market " ; 

 or the advertisement-heading : " Excelsior Straightway Back Pres- 

 sure Valve"; or: "The Vare School Garden Base Ball Team." In 

 the spoken language, the pauses and intonations indicate the group- 

 ing of the words and the consequent meaning. The grouping might 

 well be shown in printing with the hyphen ; but that would be irk- 

 some in manuscript writing, unless the hyphen should convention- 

 ally be written with a little quirk, too small to be taken for the letter 

 e, and without lifting the pen: "Old-book store." 



It is clear, then, that the so-called Japanese verb is in reality 

 merely a verbal noun, and that much is to be gained by calling it by 

 its right name, and bearing its true character in mind, and remem- 

 bering that its connection with other words is precisely adjectival, 

 either as an adjective itself, or as the substantive to an adjective. 

 It is plain, too, that in European languages the terminations that 

 give to words the distinctive meaning of different parts of speech 

 were originally separate words connected in the same adjectival 

 manner to the present roots, and that the original significance of 

 those separate words before being welded into mere terminations 

 was, in the case of the Latin and English genitive and plural termi- 

 nations in J- and the Latin infinitive termination in se (now re), 

 simply tiling; which, also, is the original meaning of the German 

 possessive, plural and infinitive terminations in en, and of the anti- 

 quated English plural termination in en; and of the termination ing 

 of English verbal nouns. The resemblance between the two western 

 terminations in s and en and the Japanese particles tsn and no of 

 like meaning, though not at all essential in identifying the character 

 of the terminations, is interesting, whether regarded as merely a 

 coincidence in languages grammatically far apart, or as possible 

 relics, together with many others equally remarkable, from some 



PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC, LI. 204 D, PRINTED MAY 23, I9I2. 



