346 THE LATIN VERB JUBERE. 



of any Latin word, and had besides a location in Italy long before 

 Rome was founded) has a verb a b a i r, " say," with a past tense 

 thubairt, " said," and a participle, radh, "saying or said." In 

 thubairt or dhubair t — the form which concerns us at 

 present — the t final is an affix and represents the te of the past 

 participle (in S. to) of many other verbs, a,sfag-te "abandoned," 

 from the I.-K. verb fag ; the bare form then is dhubair, or, 

 unaspirated, dubair, dabair. Now, if after the fashion of the 

 Hebrew, to which in some respects the Keltic bears a strong- 

 resemblance, the preterite be taken as the stem-form of the verb, 

 and if we pronounce the final r with a slight vocalisation after it, 

 as was the practice with some languages of old, we have the word 

 dhubair-e, to " say " — a very close approximation to the Latin 

 infinitive form jub ere. Therefore I conclude that jubere may 

 be a Keltic word, and, if it is so, that it belongs to the I.-K. branch 

 of the Keltic, for the Kymric has nothing like dhubair, nor do 

 I know any other European language which has. Now jubere 

 is only one of many words both in the classical and the modern 

 languages which can be traced to the same source as the K. verb 

 dabair, and, as I wish to make this paper a linguistic study, I 

 will go at once to that source and step by step unfold the connection 

 of these words with jubere and with each other. 



III. The original root of all is dab, dab h, which is a weaker 

 form of gab, gabh. The interchange of the medial consonants 

 d and g (and their aspirates dh said gh) is common throughout the 

 K. languages, and is well established between other members of 

 the Aryan family ; there is also, although less common, the inter- 

 change of the other medial b with g, for the S. go, gau, a "bull, 

 a cow " is the L. bos. Children, whose vocal organs are as yet 

 imperfect and weak, constantly substitute d for g as being easier 

 to pronounce ; they say dood for good. So any word-form which 

 has the initial g must be older than any corresponding form with 

 d, for it is a principle in language that hard guttural letters have 

 a tendency to change into dentals or labials and then into still 

 softer liquids and semivowels. And, as the first home of the 

 human race was up among the mountain tablelands of High Asia, 

 we may naturally suppose that the root words of the primitive 

 and unbroken speech of mankind were moulded by the environment, 

 and consisted largely of hard consonants with a few vowels, 

 probably only a, i, u. Then, when mankind had become broken 

 up into nations and tribes, those of them that settled on the plains, 

 and specially in warm climates, must have felt the influence of 

 their environment, leading them to adopt the consonants that 

 were easiest to utter and the softest modifications of the vowels, 

 and to ordain that no two consonants should come together 

 without an intervening vowel, and that every syllable should 



