148 REPORT 1851. 



etymological activity bf the idiom was still unimpaired. According to this 

 view, it is quite clear that the particular form of the Indo-Germanic lan- 

 guages, under which such a permanence of crude trigrammatism became 

 possible, must have been tliat which we recognise in the Sclavonian family, 

 namely, a state of accretion, in which the separability and independent sig- 

 nificance of the monosyllabic root are no longer regarded, or taken into con- 

 sideration. The converse phasnomena, in the case of the Sporadic or Tura- 

 nian languages, furnish the best illustration of the Semitic word — forms. It 

 cannot be doubted that the tribes which supplied the continents of Asia, 

 Europe and America with the first Avide-spread sprinkling of population, mi- 

 grated from the central district, while the monosyllabic root was still regarded 

 as independent and separable, and the civilization which gathered round a 

 fresh nucleus in China has not been able to deprive the monosyllabic lan- 

 guage of this inherited characteristic. As then we have in the one case a 

 luxtaposition of formative contrivances without any real fusion, we observe 

 in the Semitic languages the development of etymology checked after it had 

 assumed the concrete forms of Sclavonic agglutination. We require then, 

 for the explanation of the only known condition of the Semitic languages, 

 that ethnographic fact of Sclavonian antiquity to which another train of rea- 

 soning had already conducted us. 



Again, it is a distinguishing characteristic of the Semitic languages to have 

 a great abundance of derivative forms for the verb itself by the side of a 

 striking parsimony in the inherent tense-forms. This is equally a character- 

 istic of the Sclavonian idioms. The Semitic languages have no proper di- 

 stinctions of tense as past and present; the forms which they use designate 

 transient or momentary, as distinguished from continuous states or actions. 

 The derivative forms which are called conjugations, such as NipMial, Hi" 

 ph^'hil, Hithj}a"hel, are contrivances for expressing the various relations, de- 

 grees, and modes of agency. Precisely the same is the anatomy of the Scla- 

 vonic verb. Instead of the proper distinctions of tense, the verb-forms are 

 divided according to the mode of action into branches or classes, which 

 modern grammarians designate as semelfactive or monologous (in Polish 

 iednotliwe) as opposed to frequentative or iterative (in Polish czestotliwe), and 

 complete or perfect (in Polish dokonane) as opposed to incomplete or imper- 

 fect (iiiedokonane). A simple examjjle will show, even to those M'ho have 

 not studied the subject, how completely the usual distinctions of tense are 

 set aside by this mechanism. The Russian verb trogaf, 'to touch,' makes 

 ja trogaiti, ' 1 am touching,' in the present tense of w hat is called the indefi- 

 nite branch. But if we prefix the particle ras, we get^'a rastrogaiu, ' I shall 

 touch,' for the future of the perfect branch, which, in its so-called present 

 ja rastrogaV, 'I touched,' exhibits all the characteristics of a past tense. In 

 the same way, we find no real present tense in the semelfactive tronut, ' to 

 touch once,' and in the iterative trogivat', ' to touch repeatedly,' but only 

 the past forms ya tronid', 'I touched,' and ^a trogivaV, 'I kept touching,* 

 while the present form of the semelfactive ja tronu is used as a future, 'I 

 shall touch.' This habit of substituting distinctions of complete or incom- 

 plete, of single and continued or repeated action, for the true distinction 

 between past, present, and future, is peculiar to the Sclavonic as compared 

 with other Indo-German idioms, but common to all the Semitic dialects. 

 The internal or etymological modifications by which the change of significa- 

 tion is expressed are, of course, less distinct in the Semitic idioms, but they 

 are still sufficiently apparent. Into the origin and value of these pronominal 

 insertions, it is not my business to enter on the present occasion. I will only 

 call the attention of scholars to the fact, hitherto unnoticed and unexplained, 



