LANGUAGE. 



steamer, but they remain two words, each with its 

 own accent ; the combination is not required 

 sufficiently often to have formed them into a 

 unity. There are a great many black' birds', but 

 only one black'bird. When a compound has 

 been long in use, the hyphen is dropped, and 

 phonetic corruption sets in, if not in the spelling, 

 in the pronunciation. In forehead and shepherd, 

 it is only on consideration that we feel the two 

 parts of the word as distinct. The sailor, familiar 

 only with bos'n, never thought of a boat or a swain 

 in connection with the officer so called, and would 

 not know what was meant by boat-swain if he 

 saw it, or heard it for the first time. In nostril, 

 we readily recognise the first syllable, but for the 

 second we must go back to Anglo-Saxon nas- 

 thyrel; and even then, it requires some etymol- 

 ogical expertness to connect this with ' to drill,' 

 'to bore, and to see that the full etymological 

 meaning is ' nose-bore.' In bos'n and nostril the 

 fusion is felt to be complete, and two words have 

 been welded into a single integral word ; and, what 

 it is of consequence to observe, this does not take 

 place until we cease to perceive the meanings of 

 the separate component parts, or at least of one 

 of them. The necessary obscuration is brought 

 about unintentionally, by slurring over the sounds ; 

 and thus the corruption of two old words results 

 in the birth of a new one. 



Affixes and other formative Particles. The im- 

 portant part played by phonetic degradation and 

 fusion is best seen in classes of words like god-ly, 

 friend-ly ; king-dom, heathen-dom ; good-ness, 

 hard-ness ; plen-ty, pover-ty ; bishop-ric ; hard- 

 ship, wor-ship ; plente-ous, graci-ous ; god-less, 

 aim-less. The affixes or derivative terminations 

 in such compounds were, there is little doubt, orig- 

 inally distinct words ; it is demonstrable in the 

 case of many of them, and may be^ confidently 

 inferred in the case of all. That ' godly/ ' friendly,' 

 are merely degraded forms of ' god-like,' ' friend- 

 like,' is made certain by a reference to the Anglo- 

 Saxon god-lie, freond-lic, and to the correspond- 

 ing forms in other Teutonic tongues. We have 

 shortened the Anglo-Saxon adverbial form -lice 

 also into -ly, and now add it to all manner of 

 adjectives to form adverbs : e. g. privately; we can 

 even say godlily, in which the word ' like ' occurs 

 twice. The affix -dom is doom, judgment, juris- 

 diction ; ric, in Anglo-Saxon, means kingdom, 

 rule, and is from the same root as rex ; -ship is 

 nothing else than shape, condition, dignity ; and 

 ' god-less ' is Ang.-Sax. god-leas, in which leas is 

 the adjective leas, loose, free from, without. The 

 affix -ty belongs, apparently, to an earlier stage 

 than the other elements we have been considering ; 

 it is through the French (pauvrete), from Lat. -fas, 

 -ta/(is), (pauper-fas, -tatis), in which, owing to the 

 wear and tear of long ages, it is difficult to say 

 what may have been the original form. 



The earlier and primitive affixes seem to have 

 been built up of monosyllables of the nature of 

 demonstrative adverbs or pronouns, indicating 

 primarily position in space 'here,' 'there,' 'up,' 

 ' down,' ' towards,' ' away from,' &c. Two of these 

 pronominal roots, ma, 'here' (pointing towards 

 the speaker), and sa, or ta, ' there,' can be traced 

 in all the Indo-European languages ; they enter 

 into the personal and other pronouns, and into the 

 cases of nouns and the terminations of verbs. In 

 the earliest form known, the three persons of the 



present singular of the verb ended in mi, si, ti. 

 These are evidently connected with the personal 

 pronouns, so that d^da-mi, dada-si, dada-ti, are 

 compound words, equivalent to 'give-I, give-thou 

 give-he;' or rather, ' giving-of-me, giving-of-theei 

 giving-of-him.' The plural terminations mas, tas, 

 nti, contain the same elements with an indication 

 of the plural number. The pronominal element 

 sa entered into the nominative singular of mas- 

 culine and feminine nouns, as in Lat. eguu-s, Gr. 

 hippo-?,. A bare stem or root, with a general 

 predicative meaning, was not considered a word 

 without an addition to limit and fix it down. Thus 

 voc in Latin has the sense of calling or sounding ; 

 voc-sa. or voc-s (vox) is 'sound' that, or that 

 which, sounds' the voice.' The plural zw-es is 

 believed to be a corruption of voc-sa-sa, 'sound 

 that and that,' the doubling of the pronoun 

 expressing symbolically a plurality of the same 

 thing. 



In many of the tense-endings it is possible to 

 recognise auxiliary verbs. Thus Lat.ama-vi is for 

 ama-fui, and/z is part of the verb/, to be ; so that 

 ama-vi is literally, ' love-was I,' or, ' I was in the act 

 of loving.' The future tense in French is known 

 to have been formed within historical times by 

 affixing the present tense of the auxiliary avoir, 'to 

 have,' to the infinitive of the verb for example, 

 finir-ai is, ' to-finish-have-I,' or, ' I have to finish.' 



The formation of the English past tense in d or 

 ed\5 a most instructive instance of this kind of 

 composition. One of the earliest expedients for 

 expressing past time seems to have been the 

 repetition of the root ; thus, from the root da, 

 'give,' the Sanscrit formed daddu, the Greek 

 dedoka, and the Latin dedi, in which the reduplica- 

 tion of the word symbolises thorough, complete 

 action ' have given ' thereby implying that the 

 action is over and past. Similarly, the root dha, 

 ' put ' or ' make,' furnished Gr. tetheika, Old High 

 German teta, Ang.-Sax. dide or did. In nearly all 

 simple Greek verbs, the perfect was formed by 

 reduplication. Many of the oldest Latin verbs 

 retained it, as cado, cecidi, to fall ; pello, pepuli, 

 to drive ; and its previous existence may be in- 

 ferred in tali for tetuli, fed contracted for fefici. 

 How readily the first syllable, being without the 

 accent, would fall off is seen in its uniform absence 

 in compound verbs : e. g. compello, compuK. In 

 modern Teutonic languages, the only remaining 

 instance of the reduplicated past is did (Ger. that} ; 

 but in Moeso-Gothic, the oldest form of Teutonic 

 known, there were a considerable number of re- 

 duplicated past tenses for example, haldan, to 

 hold, perfect haihald; in Ang.-Sax. heold, for 

 hehold; Goth, haita, to command, perfect haihait, 

 in Ang.-Sax. hdht for hehet; Old. Eng. hight; 

 letan, to permit, laildt. The reduplication, it is 

 to be observed, is usually accompanied by a 

 change of the root-vowel. This seems not to have 

 been an essential part of the process, or, at most, 

 only an accessory. The vowel-change was prob- 

 ably not intended to signify anything, but arose 

 from the lengthening of the word. The addition 

 of a syllable to a word has frequently this effect : 

 e. g. revise, revision; proclaim, proclamation; 

 nation, national. But when the reduplication 

 fell away, the altered radical vowel came to be 

 looked upon as in itself the mark of past time. 

 The vowel-changes, however, were irregular, and 

 seemingly capricious, so that no rule could be 



