THE WITNESS OF PHILOLOGY. yyj 



So much, then, for substantives and adjectives : it cannot 

 be said that there is any evidence of historical priority of the 

 one over the other ; but rather that so soon as the denotative 

 meanings of substantives became fixed, they admitted of 

 having imparted to them the meanings of adjectives, genitives, 

 and predicates, by the simple expedient of apposition — an 

 expedient which, as we have seen in earlier chapters, is 

 rendered inevitable by the laws of association and " the logic 

 of events:" it is an expedient that must have been furnished 

 to the mind, and therefore need never have been intentionally 

 devised by it. 



Turning next to the case of verbs, or the class of words 

 upon which more especially devolves the office of predication, 

 it is the opinion of some philologists that these arose through 

 the apposition of substantives with the genitives of pronouns.* 

 And there can be no doubt that in many actually existing 

 languages the functions of predication are still discharged in 

 this way, without the existence of any verbs at all, as we shall 

 see later on. But, on the other hand, it is shown that a great 

 many Aryan substantives were formed by joining pronominal 

 elements to previously existing verbal roots, in a manner so 

 strongly suggestive of pointing-gestures, that it is difficult 

 to doubt the highly primitive source of the construction. 

 For example " digging-he " = labourer, " digging-it " = spade, 

 "digging-here" = labour, " digging-there " = hole,t &c. Or 

 again, " ' The hole is dark ' would have been expressed origin- 

 ally (in Aryan) by 'digging-it,' 'hiding here,' or, 'hiding- 

 somewhere.' ' Hiding-here ' might afterwards be used in the 

 sense of a hiding-place. But when it was used as a mere 

 qualifying predicate in a sentence in which there was but one 

 subject, it assumed at once the character of an adjective." % 



To me it appears evident that there is truth in both these 

 views, which, therefore, are in no way contradictory to one 

 another. We have evidence that many substantives were of 



• See especially Gamett, On the Nature and Analysis of the FerA, 

 t Science of 'I hought^ p. 223. 

 \ Ibid.y p. 442. 



