204 REV. J. IVERACH MUNRO^ M.A._, ON THE WITNESS OF 



ancient stage, for, not to speak of ^^Tl, hv\ the Hebrew verb has 

 preserved proofs of its origin which do not exist elsewhere, and 

 which have ruled the language in all that remains of the 

 literature. 



A concrete example will perhaps be the most interesting 

 method of exposition, and will afford the opportunity of 

 indicating various points of similarity and contrast 

 in the development of the languages. Take the second 

 part of the first verse of the fourth chapter of Genesis : 



nin^-nis^ •'n'^:g "^^^^^1 '^7^^ ivat-tekdh 'eth- 



qa-yin ivat-t'd-mer qci-ni-thi 'ish ' eth-Jehoxah literally — "And 

 she bare Cain, and said I have gotten a man, even Jehovah." 

 The proper name "j^p, qa-yin, Cain, here, is in the old passive 



form of the verbal noun, \\z. two consonants with the diphthong 

 ai between, marking the passive. Not only so, the narrator 

 distinctly traces the verb •'n"'2p, qa-ni-tlii, " I have gotten," 

 back to its biliteral form qn, and gives '[p, qayin, the passive 



meaning " gotten." This takes us back to the time preceding 

 the division of lano'uages, when the verbal noun was fluid, and 

 the pronoun, another verbal noun, could precede or follow it. 



In this instance, the perfect of the verb, the pronoun in the 

 form of thi, follows the verbal noun. In the imperfect the 

 pronoun would come first in the form of 'e. In the develop- 

 ment of the Indo-European verb the pronominal part always 

 came last, for example, \va), " I loose," \v, the verbal noun, co 

 expressing the pronoun. There is also another fact to be 

 noticed, namely, that the Indo-European verb has always a 

 reference to time, present, past, or future, the Semitic only to 

 action, finished or unfinished. By putting the verbal noun 

 first, the completion of the action was emphasized by the Semite ; 

 by putting it second, its incompletion was shown. 



We may note also that because the Semites prefixed as well 

 as affixed the pronouns to their verbs, they virtually made it 

 impossible for them to employ prepositions, etc., to modify the 

 meaning of the stem, but apart from this there was nothing 

 inherently different from Indo-European. Hence its expansion 

 took the form of triliteralism. Let me indicate how : Xew 

 words had to be formed to express new ideas, but just as in Old 

 Edinburgh, because the city walls prevented expansion in 

 horizontal directions, that expansion took place vertically, so in 

 Semitic the pronominal suffix shut off syllabic additions to the 

 end of the verbal noun, and pronominal prefixes in like manner 



