S9 



LANGUAGE. 



LANGUAGE. 



80 



rejection of the visual definition of the nominative, as the subject of the 

 proposition. If the original verbs were limited to those which express 

 action, a necessary consequence would be, that the nominative denotes 

 the agent. This consequence may be readily admitted, and the more 

 BO, as it meets what seems to be a grave difficulty. A linguistic paper 

 by Carl Bock, published in 12mo. at Berlin, in the year 1845, under 

 the title ' Analysis Verb!,' drew attention to the fact, that in some lan- 

 guages the personal suffixes exhibited the form of genitives ; and Mr. 

 Garnett's paper, already quoted, produces other examples of the same 

 apparent anomaly. But the moment that the idea of an agent or 

 cause attaches itself to the term nominative, the difficulty vanishes, 

 since the leading meaning of the genitive is the source "whence," 

 as calor solit " the heat/rom the sun." And if it be objected to the 

 theory, that the nominative is also used in connection with the passive, 

 the simple answer is, that the passive was in origin a reflective, or, as 

 our Greek grammarians prefer to say, a middle voice, so that the first 

 translation of lerrus occiditur is " the slave kills himself ;" and further 

 it may be noticed, that when the Latin, using the passive, wishes to 

 define the agent, it gives us iervus a domino occiditur, which, compared 

 with the equivalent phrase dominut servum occidit, teaches us that 

 dominus in the one, and a domino in the other, express the same idea, 

 the very point for which we are contending. 



But if in one of the simplest sentences of the primeval language, 

 the nominative denoted the agent or quarter " whence " the action 

 proceeded, so, on the other hand, the accusative must have denoted 

 the "whither;" and this result thoroughly accords with the habit 

 of language. Thus Varro expressly defines the Latin accusative 

 as answering to the question quo, " whither." It agrees too with 

 the use of the accusative in such a phrase as Romam eo, " I am going 

 to Rome," and with the Spanish practice of inserting the preposition 

 a, " to," before the object of a sentence. And as it has been shown 

 that the ideas of feeling required a wholly different construction 

 from verbs of action, so here again the former class in the oldest 

 varieties of language exhibit an antipathy to an accusative and indeed 

 very generally demand a genitive to denote the object of the feeling, 

 or as we should rather express it, the cause or source of the feeling. 

 Thus arose such constructions as : me tui pudet, memini virorum, 

 " venit mitif Platonis in mentcm ; " and if we go back to the earliest 

 Latin, " qua non reretur viri" (Afran.), " fastidit mei " (Plant.), " Justi- 

 tiiene print mirtr belline laborum ?" (Virg.) And we find parallel 

 examples in English, as it used to be spoken, as " Thou dislik'st of 

 virtue." (Shakspere, " All's Well that Ends Well," ii. 3.) 



One decided example of a verb formed by imitation of natural sound 

 must suffice in a short sketch such as the present. When a stone tied 

 to a string is whirjed violently round, or when we enter a room where 

 machinery with its many wheels is in rapid movement, the ear catches 

 very distinctly the sound which we may represent by whirr. Now 

 icirr-en, is the German " to twist," ri-rer, in French, "to turn ;" while we 

 apply the term wear to the turning of a ship, and rter to the turning 

 of a weathercock. The same root is seen in the English secondary 

 or derived words, leliirl, tehorl, world, warp, worm, writhe, wreath, 

 irrench, mreit, rnitt, wring, wriggle, wrap, mry. The Latin language 

 exhibits the same base in ver-t-ere, " to turn," ter-u, " a spit," vermis, " a 

 worm," m-minari, which signifies indifferently " to breed worms " 

 and " to writhe with pain," meanings which, however different in appli- 

 cation, have in common the idea of turning. The adjective vanu, 

 " with crooked legs," and raricet, " varicose veins " have the same origin. 

 But the sound passes at times into a something which we may 

 express by the softer and more musical ml, and then we have it 

 in the sense of the Greek h\-iaau, ffVi{, ftA-i-rpoxos, hi\a, FtiXuw, 

 the Latin ml-r-crc, ral-va, val-gus, " with crooked legs," and as might 

 easily be shown, if more room were at our disposal, volyus and volgare. 

 In our own language we have wheel, icall-ow, welter, while the Germans 

 have both the simple verb icall-en, " to roll," and the derived mal-rjen, 

 and walz-en. The list might be still further increased, if we called to 

 mind that many words which now begin with r have lost a preceding 

 ic, as rota, rotundas, in Latin, equivalent to vortu, rortundus, and in 

 English, roll, ring, sb. ringlet. The Latin orbi has also lost an initial v, 

 just as the Dani-h arm, ' worm,' has lost a w. 



Before passing from the question of original roots and their signifi- 

 cation, it seems due to the name of the German scholar, Bopp, to record 

 that in his view (' Vcrgleichende Graminatik/ 105) the main principle 

 of word-formation in the Indo-European class of languages consists in 

 the union of verbal and pronominal roots, which, to borrow his image, 

 represent as it were the body and soul of language. It does not appear 

 that many philologers have followed him in this doctrine. But the un- 

 aoundness of it seems almost to force itself on the mind in the very 

 term " pronominal." In fact pronouns are scarcely of a character to 

 have been part of any language in its earliest stages, simply because 

 they are, as their name tells us, but substitutes for other words ; and 

 assuredly a language might have attained to a very valuable consistency 

 without the possession of a single pronominal word. Reasons will 

 presently be given for referring a large majority of our third person 

 pronouns to one single verb ; and the pronouns of the first and second 

 persons seem aluo entitled to claim a close connection with some of the 

 : il, of which more presently. In the meanwhile the readers of 

 great work may be asked to notice the tendency in that writer 

 to refer the presence of an inconvenient vowel in word- formation to 



the presence of some pronominal base now i, now a, now ya, &c., 

 without much consideration of any meaning the too convenient 

 pronouns bring with them to the word in which he finds them. 



From the question of monosyllabic roots the next step should be the 

 principle of word formation or derivation ; but a preliminary matter 

 presents itself. There are those who would divide languages into genera, 

 and claim for each a special formation. Thus we read of monosylla- 

 bic and polysyllabic languages, languages with triconsonantal roots, a 

 synthetic or analytic method of formation, words formed by agglutina- 

 tion and others by internal change of the root syllable or syllables ; and 

 lastly, affixes are treated by this writer as having in themselves no 

 signification, by another as expressing the additional idea which their 

 addition carries to the root-syllable or simpler word. In all this there 

 appears to be a very large proportion of error. A deeper examination 

 of languages will perhaps always lead to a common result, that the 

 roots were originally of one syllable, and that longer words are formed 

 by the agglutination of such roots, with the understanding, however, 

 that the affixed syllables, though in themselves originally roots, play 

 commonly a less important part in the construction of the composite 

 word. It may be useful to point to the causes which have given cur- 

 rency to the errors we have been speaking of. To begin with the 

 Chinese language and others commonly classified with it, we are told 

 that it is a monosyllabic language, " incapable of composition and con- 

 sequently without organism, without grammar" (Bopp., V. G., s. 108, 

 and A. W. v. Schlegel, ibid.). In other words we are taught to 

 believe that it is altogether like those one-syllable stories which are 

 considerately placed before the eyes of the child, when it takes its first 

 lessons in reading. Unfortunately our knowledge of Chinese was first 

 obtained through a medium which produced much distortion. The 

 distance of the country and the opposition of Chinese authorities to all 

 intercourse with foreigners, were serious obstacles to the attainment of 

 accurate information. Many of our Chinese scholars made their 

 studies of the language at Singapore instead of China ; and of those 

 who have had opportunities for a nearer view, too many have found, 

 even at Macao, but very imperfect means of mingling with educated 

 natives. Again, what we commonly call Chinese seems to stand to the 

 languages generally spoken in that country, much as Latin did a few 

 centuries ago to the vulgar tongue of Italy or France. In other words 

 it is rather a dead than a living tongue. But there has been a still 

 greater hindrance in the channel through which Chinese is studied. 

 Our scholars have learnt it, as scholars always love to do, through 

 books, rather than by oral communication. Thus, they have allowed 

 themselves to be led astray by what is merely an accident of the 

 written language. The characters being monosyllabic, they have 

 hastily assumed the language to be the same ; and thus Europeans 

 commonly believe that the Chinese have been contented with a form of 

 speech which, by its mere monotony, would have dispirited any other 

 race of beings ; while some have thought that this painful monotony 

 may be, in native practice, partially corrected by the mysterious influ- 

 ence of the so-called four tones. Such views are upset by the simple 

 testimony of one who had the best opportunities of obtaining exact 

 knowledge, the late English consul at Ningpo, Mr. Robert Thorn. 

 From him we learn that the Chinese, like our own tongue, though rich 

 in monosyllabic words, has no scarcity of disyllables and polysyllables. 

 In the preface to his ' Chinese Speaker' (Part. 1, Ningpo, 1846,) he 

 directs one who would learn the language to try to get an intelligent 

 native of Pekin to read the Chinese and to follow him on the English 

 side of the page (that is the side with the Chinese written in English 

 characters, and having an interlinear English translation) " as a clerk 

 follows the parson in church ;" and he goes on to say, that such a 

 student " cannot fail to observe, as he reads along, that many words 

 are disyllables and not a few polysyllables ; that some are accented on the 

 ultimate, others on the penult, and others again on the antepenult, 

 &c." Indeed Mr. Thorn was prevented from marking the said accents 

 solely by the paucity of accentuated letters at his command. A short 

 example from his book may be of use : 



Ylb-ko-jin heu Kwau-hwa lai teo shim-mo-tl ne ? 



Now-a-man in learning the Mandarine language wh at is his object I 



Those who deny to the Chinese a grammar, seem to have started 

 with wrong notions of what grammar is in their own language, and on 

 that account alone have failed to find in Chinese that of which they were 

 in search. The merest inspection of a Chinese grammar tells us that 

 a certain syllable tii, or in Mandarine more commonly Ii, affixed to a 

 substantive, serves to express the relation which Europeans denote by 

 the term "genitive case," that another syllable, tn for example, added 

 may imply plurality, and so on with the other secondary notions of 

 grammar. Thus ue-tdi siny, " the origin, of things," Wen-wang-tci IS- 

 tc'i shun, " the purity of the virtue of the Wen-wang," or more literally, 

 for the Chinese genitive always precedes, " the Wen-vvang's virtue's 

 purity," IS denoting " virtue," and shun, " purity." So again, fiin is 

 " a man," ijin-tu, " men." It is also true that at times the mere 

 proximity of two words is sufficient to express a relation between 

 them without the formal employment of a special particle. So 

 witli us, the nominative and accusative are sufficiently pointed out by 

 their mere position, whereas in Greek and Latin, a suitable affix is 

 required for the office. So again we say moonlight, when we mean the 

 ' ' moon's light." But it may by some be thought detrimental to what 



