Iteration in Language. 435 



civilised languages by analytic expressions, but they are common in 

 less civilised languages and in older forms of civilised speech. Thus 

 the continuous or intensified form of the Dayak kaka, to laugh, is 

 kaka-kaka ; the Brazillian acem — I go out, has the frequentative form 

 ace-acem. It is tempting to believe that in the common frequentative 

 or intensive suffixes in Latin and other language {e.g., rapio, rapto, 

 raptito, capio, capto, captito), we may have a relic of the same 

 usage. 



{d) Ver}- closely allied to this continuous or intensive use of 

 Iteration is the employment of it in the formation of the present forms 

 of verbs in which the idea of continuous action is often present. 

 This use is very characteristic of the Indo-European languages, and 

 is seen conspicuously in Sanskrit and Greek. The Iteration is only 

 partial, and assumes the form we are familiar with under the name 

 of reduplication — dadami, ci2w^i, etc. 



{e) Reduplication is also extensively used as a grammatical 

 device for expressing tenses of the verb other than the present, more 

 especially the perfect and to a less extent the aorist ^idcjKa, dedi, 

 did — ijyayov, etc., etc., will ser\'e as instances of a class of 

 phenomena which is very familiar in the Indo-European languages. 



There can be little doubt that phonetic change has in a great 

 many instances veiled original iteration in the verb forms till it can 

 no longer be recognised. Some have fancied that the augment which 

 is characteristic of past tenses in such languages as Sanskrit, 

 Armenian, and Greek may be a veiled form of iteration, and if we 

 could believe that a device first used in verbs beginning with a vowel 

 afterwards became general the theory might be a plausible one, but 

 the evidence is altogether wanting. 



(/) Another use to which Iteration may be put in the grammati- 

 cal structure of languages is seen very well exemplified in Latin, where 

 indefinite pronouns or pronominal adverbs are commonly formed by 

 reduplication; thus, quis-quis — whoever; quo-quo — whithersoever; 

 quot-quot — how many soever, etc. 



(g) The most striking of all the various grammatical uses to 

 which Iteration may be put is afforded by the languages which have 

 been called variously Alliteral, Euphonic, Pretix-Pronominal, and 

 which are more or less familiar to us as the languages spoken by the 

 Bantu tribes in the Southern half of Africa. In the case of these 

 languages the whole sentence structure is dominated by an elaborate 

 form of Iteration, by which the governing noun of the sentence 

 draws all the other words of the sentence into phonetic harmony 

 with it, the various words being altered in their prefixes to suit the 

 noun. In Kaffir, " with the exception of a change of termination in 

 the ablative case of the noun and five changes of which the verb is 

 susceptible in its principle tenses, the whole business of declension, 

 conjugation, etc., is carried on by prefixes and by the changes whicb 

 take place in the initial letters or syllables of words subject to gram- 

 matical government. By this principle of the language there occurs 

 the repetition of the same letter or letters in the commencement of 

 several words in the same sentence." e.g.. Izono zam zininzi" 



