PHONETIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE 

 ENGLISH VERB. 



BY HENRY L. BROOM ALL. 



The significance of a sentence lies as much in the recog- 

 nition of its several parts as verb, subject and object, each 

 with its qualifiers, as in the knowledge of the substantive 

 meanings of the words. Each language has its own gram- 

 matical formulae for the arrangement or modification of words 

 acting in the various relations the}' ma}' logically bear to the 

 whole proposition. In highly inflected languages, such as 

 Latin and Greek, these relations are indicated by modifica- 

 tions of or additions to the end of the word. Thus the Latin 

 sentence Caesar vicit Pompfium may also be written Pompeium 

 vicit Caesar, or in any order that emphasis or euphony may 

 suggest, because the Latin mind depended only on the varied 

 termination for the grammatical relation of the words. Caesar 

 vicit Pompeium and Caesarem vicit Pompeius expressed the 

 same diflfereuce of meaning that English conveys by Caesar 

 conquered Pompey and Pompcy conquered Caesar. To the Latin 

 mind these English sentences would be synonymous or equalh' 

 senseless because the change of order of words or their posi- 

 tion before or after the verb would mean nothing grammati- 

 cally to a speaker of that language. 



Modem English has discarded inflections so generally that 

 verbs, adjectives and nouns subjective and objective are 

 largely reduced to like form. We may )nan a ship or ship a 

 man. Only in pronouns is a distinction of case-form still 

 partly maintained. He hit her. when the proposition is 

 reversed, becomes she hit him . But even here it is the position 

 of the pronouns before and after the verb, rather than their 

 change of form that makes the sense, because this position is 

 essential and the form is not. Her hit he, said by a child or a 

 novice in English, is intelligible, despite the objective her for 

 subjective she and subjective he for objective him, because 

 it conforms to the grammatical formula of our tongue. The 



