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JOURNAL, R.A.S. (CEYLON). [Vol. VIII. 



noisy \nadi or dhuni] ; or if it flowed in a straight line, the 

 plough er or the plough [sird, river; sird, plough], or the 

 arrow ; or if it seemed to nourish the fields, the mother 

 [mdtar] ; or if it separated and protected one country from 

 another, the defender [sindku, from sidk, sedhati, to keep off] . 

 In all these names you will observe that the river is con- 

 ceived as acting. As man runs, so the river runs ; as man 

 shouts, so the river shouts ; as man ploughs, so the river 

 ploughs ; as a man guards, so the river guards. The river is 

 not called at first a plough, but the plougher ; nay, even the 

 plough itself is for- a long time conceived and called an 

 agent, not a mere instrument. The plough is the divider, 

 the tearer, the wolf, and thus shares often the same name 

 with the burrowing boar, or the tearing wolf (vriha is both 

 wolf and plough in the Veda)." The conclusion arrived at 

 by Professor Max Miiller is that grammatical gender is 

 not the cause but the result of personification. " When 

 everything that was known and named had to be conceived 

 as active, and if active, then as personal ; when a stone was 

 a cutter, a tooth a grinder or an eater, a gimlet a borer ; 

 there was no doubt considerable difficulty in dispersonify- 

 ing, in distinguishing between a measurer and the moon, in 

 neutralising words, in producing in fact neuter nouns, in 

 clearly distinguishing the tool from the hand, the hand from 

 the man ; in finding a way of speaking even of a stone as 

 something simply trodden under foot. There was no 

 difficulty in figuring, animating, or personifying. Thus we 

 see how for our purposes the problem of personification, 

 which gave so much trouble to former students of religion 

 and mythology, is completely inverted ; our problem is not 

 how language came to personify, but how it succeeded in 

 dispersonifying. " * 



Thus, then, although primitive language is " without any 



signs of gender, all ancient nouns expressed activities 



It was almost impossible to speak of things not active or 

 not personal. Every name meant something active." 



* Max Miiller, Hibbert Lectures, 1878, pp. 186-190. 



