ON ETHNOLOGY. 
333 
jected to the influence of the historical progress of the Indian language. 
Sometimes the feminine is also expressed by composition, just as we say, 
a she-goat, a French-woman, while in French and German the feminine 
is expressed by the mere change of the final letter. Thus the Ben¬ 
gali s.Hy, saattfM, a hare; strijnsani, a female lyirc; mre;, an Knglishman; 
inrejh’ mSye, an English woman; miye being the Sanscrit word tnrfyd, which 
means illusion, deception, or according to the notions of India, ivoraan, and 
in a philosophical sense the female magic power, or the whole apparent 
world, which exists as long as the eternal soul looks upon it as existent, but 
vanishes as soon as the great Self returns to itself and gels free from the 
passion of worldly existence. 
As to the single cases of declension, Dr. Stevenson further remarks, tliat 
there are several striking analogies running through most of tliese languages 
in the letters that characterise the principal cases. Thus the letter n is a 
very general characteristic of the genitive singular. It enters into the Guje- 
rathi common genitive no, m, num; the ancient Marathi genitive cheni, now 
usually contracted into c/d and into the Tamil rn; in all of which it runs 
through :dl the dccleniiians. It is found also in the m of the first of the 
throe declensions in TeJiigii, and in the ana and ina of the first and fourth 
of the four Catiarese decivnsions. It is siogular, Dr. Stevenson remarks, 
that in the Turkish the termination of the genitive mg should afford so near 
a parallel to the above, and that we should have the remains of such a geni¬ 
tive in mine and thine, and the Germans in mein, dein, tein. 
Although upon this point the Bengali is left quite iinmeniioned, because 
its genitive in r is of too clear a Sanscrit origin, yet I must say a few 
words upon the n, as the sign of tlic genitive case in the languages quoted 
by Dr. Stevenson. Gothic forms like rneina, Ihcina, seina, are certainly 
puzzling at first Higlii, not however so much as tor it to be necessary to 
assign a I'urkisli origin to them. It can easily be seen that the genitive 
has often, as far as the sense is concerned, the function of an adjective, 
so that phrases like “the work of tlie day,” “the tribes of the moun¬ 
tains,” may be expressed by “ the daily work,” “ the mountainous 
tribes." It is also generally admitted that some genitive formations in 
ilie Indo-Germanic languages have prcHcrved a close affinity to the forma¬ 
tions of adjectives, with the only difference that the latter have differ¬ 
ent termin.atiuns for gender, number and cases, and could therefore be 
declined .again like substantives. In some Indian dialects, as for instance 
the Hindi, we find oven genitives with different terminations for the 
different genders. I do not say however that either the adjective has 
been derived from the genitive, or the genitive from the adjective, but I 
only maintain that the principle ol tlicir formation has been the same. Now 
it is known that the suffix na is of very frequent occurrence for the deriva¬ 
tion of adjectives, and 1 have therefore little doubt that forms like the 
Gothic niciwa (bearing some analogy to the Zend i/mtwi) ought to be consi- 
dererl as adjectival formations; just as in Greek and Latin, epdr, «rds for eyov, 
4fov, meus and tuns for tnei and tui. We may observe in Sanscrit also how 
the nasal sound « extends its influence in forming new bases to which the 
regular terminations of the cases are added, a fact which, particularly in 
reference to verbal formations, h.ss been profoundly illustrated by Professor 
Lepsius. I feel therefore inclined to consider the nasal sound in all the 
insunces quoted by Dr. Stevenson as an augment of the inflectional base, 
while the final vowel in some of his quotations may have tire power of the 
genitive termination. 
