Volume 1 — CHAPTER V. THE MORPHOLOGY OF SPEECH. (continued 2)

But now the question arises—granting the late growth of the definite article and its appearance only here and there in a group of allied languages—Why do some of these use it as a prefix and others as an affix? As in Greek, or Keltic, or Teutonic, the Romanic article which has been developed out of the Latin ille always precedes its noun, except in Wallachian, where “the master” must be rendered by domnul, that is, dominus ille. Professor Max Müller thinks that this position of the article was borrowed from Wallachian by the Bulgarians and Albanians;[277] M. Benlöw, on the contrary, holds that Albanian set the example both to Wallach and to Bulgarian.[278] Assuming that Albanian belongs to the Indo-European family of speech—a point, however, which has yet to be satisfactorily determined—we should still have an Aryan language reversing the usual order of Aryan speech. Thus ἔμερ is “name,” but ἔμερι, “the name;” δέ is “earth,” but δέου, “the earth;” δέῤῥε, “door,” but δέῤῥα, “the door;” νιερὶ, “man,” in the accusative, but νιερί-νε, “the man;” νιέρεζ, “men,” but νιέρεζι-τ(ε), “the men.” Whatever may be thought of Albanian, however, we have a clear case of the postposition of the Aryan article in the Scandinavian tongues, where the Swedish werld-en, for instance, signifies “the world,” luft-en, “the air,” and it is, perhaps, curious that the Scandinavians, like the Albanians, are natives of a comparatively cold and mountainous country. Mountaineers are famous for the use of their lungs, and a postfixed article is necessarily more emphatic than a prefixed one. More effort is required in laying stress on the last syllable of a word than in slurring it over and throwing the accent back.

Now M. Bergaigne has shown[279] that in the primitive Aryan sentence the qualifying word, whether adjective or genitive or adverb, came before the subject and governing word, and this agrees with what we have seen was the early conception formed by the Aryan mind of the attributive relation in contrast to that formed by the Semitic. We should therefore expect to find the article following the rule of other qualifying words, and standing before its noun in the Aryan tongues, and after its noun in the Semitic tongues. So far as the Aryan tongues are concerned, this is its general position. The German dialects which have maintained so firmly the place of the adjective and the genitive have been equally firm in maintaining the place of the definite article.[280] If Wallach influenced Bulgarian and Albanian in affixing the article, an explanation may be found in the forgetfulness shown by the Romanic idioms of the early rule of Aryan speech, as evidenced by their putting the adjective after the substantive; if, as seems more probable, Wallach and Bulgarian were influenced by Albanian, we must bear in mind that the latter language may not be Aryan at all. As for Swedish and the other Scandinavian dialects, the inverted position of the article may be ascribed to what we may call the disorganization of their syntax. While Gothic observed the old rule which made the dependent and defining word precede, it is very noticeable that already in the Icelandic Snorra Edda the genitive without a preposition occurs not only before, but also after its noun. The syntactical instinct of the language was thus disturbed, and there was therefore little to prevent a new defining word like the article from occupying an anomalous place. In the Semitic languages Aramaic alone assigns a natural position to the article, which is represented by the so-called emphatic aleph attached to a noun when not otherwise defined by being in the construct state. Now there are many reasons which would lead us to believe that Aramaic was the first of the Semitic dialects in which the article developed itself, and that this happened shortly after its separation from the dialect which subsequently branched off into Hebrew, Phœnician, and Assyrian. The article did not make its appearance in Hebrew or Arabic until the old order of the sentence had been thrown into confusion by rhetorical inversions and the periphrastic genitive formed by the demonstrative pronoun. How it came to be prefixed to its noun is illustrated by the Assyrian. Here a kind of article makes its appearance in the Persian period, which, when placed after its noun, has the force of the demonstrative “this” or “that.” Now and then, however, we find it in conjunction with another demonstrative before the noun, a construction which can easily be explained if we regard the demonstrative and the noun as having been first in apposition, and then brought so closely together that the demonstrative became an article. In Arabic, too, the demonstrative can be prefixed to a noun which is already furnished with the article, and the pronoun and noun are thus regarded as being in apposition to one another. The same is the case in Hebrew, where we occasionally meet with a construction like zeh hâ’âm, “this people,” literally “this the people,” as well as zeh Mosheh, “this Moses.”[281] The last example shows us that a proper name was considered definite enough to be put in apposition to the pronoun, even when without the article, and it is not difficult to assume that an usage which first grew up in the case of proper names, should in time have extended itself to all nouns which were considered definite. Even the adjective rabbim, “many,” is found preceding its noun.[282] The preservation of the case-endings in Hebrew and Arabic may have had something to do with the position chosen by the article; it was easy enough for a demonstrative to pass into an affixed article in Aramaic, where the case-endings seem to have perished early, but it was only possible for it to do so in languages where they were preserved by its standing before the noun. Old Egyptian agrees with Hebrew and Arabic in the general rule of placing the determining word after the word it determines; it also agrees with them in prefixing the article. But this, again, may be explained by the use of the demonstrative as an article having originated in its apposition to the substantive; while the use of ua, “one,” as an indefinite article probably assisted in the process. Of course, when a definite article had once come into existence, a difference of position served to distinguish it from the demonstrative pronouns to which it had formerly belonged.

This long inquiry into the causes which have made the article sometimes an affix and sometimes a prefix has introduced us to the last department of the morphology of speech—that which is known as syntax, or the arrangement of words in a sentence. Professor Earle has remarked that syntax varies inversely as accidence; wherever we have an elaborate formal grammar, there we have a corresponding poverty of syntax; wherever we have little formal grammar, as in Chinese or English, there syntax comes prominently into view. This is only another way of stating the fact that in default of such contrivances as inflections, language has recourse to rules of position in order to denote the grammatical relations of words; and though Greek shows us that a highly developed accidence may exist along with an equally developed syntax, yet it is quite true that a language which makes such large use of composition as Sanskrit, must be very poor in the matter of syntax. Composition and syntax are antagonistic to each other. The study of comparative accidence, or, as it is rather loosely called, comparative grammar, is much in advance of that of comparative syntax; indeed, it is but lately that comparative syntax has attracted the attention of philologists to any extent, Jolly, Delbrück, Bergaigne, and others being among the pioneers of this branch of linguistic science. Here, too, we must work back to that inner form which underlies the choice of the position of words in a sentence; we must find out by the comparative method what were the primary syntactical rules observed by a group of cognate tongues, what were the grammatical conceptions they indicated, and how they were modified by the several languages in the course of their subsequent history. The germs of syntax are capable of infinitely various development, although each family of speech starts with its own special point of view, its own particular principle. The Aryan began by placing the defining word before the word defined; the Semite by placing it after; just as in Burman the defining word precedes, while in Siamese or Tai it follows. Languages, which have never attained to the idea of a verb, like the Polynesian, must necessarily differ materially from those in which the verbal conjugation plays a principal part; while in the polysynthetic languages of America, syntax in the proper sense of the term can hardly be said to exist at all. Unlike formal grammar, however, syntax is comparatively changeable; Coptic has become a prefix language, whereas its parent, Old Egyptian, was an affix one, and the growth of rhetoric as well as the development of grammatical forms tend to obliterate the old landmarks and principles of syntactical arrangement.

The history of the accusative with the infinitive in Latin is a good example of this. Prof. Max Müller describes his utter amazement when he was first taught to say, Miror te ad me nihil scribere, “I am surprised that you write nothing to me,”[283] and there was plenty of reason for it. He has clearly shown that most of the Greek and Latin infinitives were originally dative cases of abstract nouns, and not locatives, as has often been maintained; the Greek δοῦναι or δοϝέναι, for instance, answering to the Vedic dâváne, “to give,” τετυπέναι to vibhráne, “to conquer” or “effect,” amare, monere, audire, to jîv-áse, “to live.” The Greek middle infinitive in -θαι is a relic of the Vedic dative of an abstract infinitive from the root dhâ, “to do” or “place,” ψευδέσ-θαι, “to do lying,” exactly answering to the Vedic vayodhai (for váyas-dhai), “to do living,” or “to live,” on the model of which analogy has created the false forms τύψεσθαι, τύψασθαι and τυψθήσεσθαι. The true character of the Latin infinitive may be discovered from the verb fieri, which goes back to an earlier fiesei, the dative of a stem in -s. Bearing in mind, then, what the infinitive originally was, we have little difficulty in understanding how it came to be used with an accusative, which was really the object after the principal verb. The sentence quoted above simply meant at first: “I am surprised at you for the writing of nothing to me,” just as te volo vivere was “I choose you for living,” or tempus est videndi lunæ, “it is the time of the moon, of seeing (it);” and the extension of the use of the accusative with the infinitive to sentences in which we can no longer trace any reflection of its original force, is only another example of the power of analogy in spreading a particular habit, the proper sense and meaning of which have been forgotten.

Let us remember, however, that at the time when an Aryan syntax was first forming itself, there was as yet no distinction between noun and verb. The accusative and genitive relations of after days did not yet exist; they were still merged together in a common attributive or defining relation, and the growth of the verb was necessary before a genitive could be set apart to define the substantive, and an accusative or object to define the verb. Reminiscences of this primitive state of things have survived into the later forms of speech. When Plautus says, “Quid tibi hanc tactio est,” he is using tactio as he would tango, and while in the Rig-Veda nouns in -tar govern an accusative like transitive verbs, we actually find a verb undergoing comparison in bhavatitarâm, “he is more so.” In fact, genitive and accusative alike are what Mr. Sweet calls “attribute-words,” the one being the attribute of the noun, the other of the verb, and before there was any distinction between verb and noun there could be no distinction between them also. The modern Englishman may well ask whether there is any difference between “the performing this,” and “the performing of this;” or between “doing a thing,” and “doing badly.” The Latin supines and gerunds, which are petrified cases of nouns, are followed by what are termed “the cases of their verbs,” and the so-called indeclinable participles of Sanskrit, which are really instrumentals of nouns in -tu, equally take the accusative after them. In Greek εὐτυχώς ἔχειν has the same meaning as εὐτυχίαν ἔχειν, and the Greek and Sanskrit use of an accusative with the verb “to be,” shows us how artificial are our distinctions between transitive and intransitive verbs. The adverbial sense of the accusative comes out plainly in the Homeric ἀκήν ἔσαν, and is one more proof of the fact that the accusative, like the genitive, must be classed along with the adjective and the adverb as a qualifying word that defines and limits the words to which it is attached. Custom and grammatical development have alone determined how such qualifying words should be severally used.

The languages of our family of speech are in fair agreement as to the employment of the accusative and the genitive; there are other syntactical contrivances, however, where such an agreement is not to be found. The “ablative absolute” of Latin, for instance, is replaced by a genitive absolute in Greek, by a dative in Lithuanian, by a locative, sometimes also a genitive, and very rarely an ablative, in Sanskrit. In old English we have apparently a dative (as in Anglo-Saxon), as when Wycliffe writes, “they have stolen him, us sleping,” whereas, as Mr. Peile observes,[284] we should now say, “we sleeping,” using the nominative as occasionally in Greek. As a matter of fact, this so-called “casus absolutus,” this case “freed” from all government, and standing outside the sentence to the perpetual astonishment of the grammarians, is really a qualificatory word, dependent like the adverb upon the verb, and denoting the circumstances, or instrument, or mode of an action. Instead of the construction used by Wycliffe, we might just as well have had, “they have stolen him during our sleep.”

Perhaps the first thing that strikes us when we first learn the classical languages, and more especially Latin, is the freedom with which words are dropped pêle-mêle, as it were, into a sentence. This power of transposing words stands in marked contrast with the comparatively fixed order of words in a modern European language. When Tennyson says, “Thee nor carketh care nor slander,” we feel that he has gone to the extreme length of what is possible even in poetry, and the arrangement of a German sentence, in spite of its inflections, is determined by somewhat severe rules. We must remember, however, that the apparent freedom of the classical languages is due in great measure to the artificial style of literary men who took advantage of the inflectional character of the dialects they spoke to invert the position of words for rhetorical purposes, and that such inversions were not usual in the language of everyday life. We cannot judge a language properly from the works of its literary men, and this is particularly the case with Latin, where the language of literature was divided by a great gulf from the language of the streets. But even in Latin we find the verb gravitating towards the end of the sentence; this is its predominant position, for instance, throughout the second book of the “Gallic War” of Cæsar, who represents the spoken language of his time much more closely than most of the other authors of Rome. Now, M. Bergaigne, in the very able series of articles already referred to,[285] has lately tried to show that this was not always the position of the Aryan verb. He begins by distinguishing between phænomena, or qualities and acts, and objects which are recognized either as bearing these qualities, or as the ends and instruments of the acts. His phænomena, therefore, will answer to our qualificatory words, and a sentence in which they occupy the principal place will be a predicative one, just as sentences in which an object is brought into prominence will be “sentences of dependence.” The substantive verb is but a late creation; even in Latin a sentence like “majorum benefacta perlecta” is perfectly intelligible though “sunt” is omitted; and such a phrase as Deus est sanctus meant at first “God exists as a holy being,” the adjective being a predicative attribute or “phænomenon” in apposition to Deus. It was only by degrees that the sense of “existence” disappeared from the verb, and it became a simple copula. More than once we have referred to the primary rule of Aryan syntax, according to which the qualifying word is placed before the word qualified; this is a rule which is borne witness to by almost every compound, by the verb which affixes the personal pronouns to its stem; nay, even by our own English, which still makes the adjective precede its noun. Where the rule seems to be violated, an explanation is generally forthcoming. Latin and Greek compounds like versipellis or φιλάδελφος, really signify “who has the skin changed,” “one who has a brother beloved,” the first part of the German tauge-nichts, our dare-devil, is an imperative, and the second element in the Sanskrit dṛishṭa-pûrvva, “seen before,” is a pronoun. Whether Bergaigne is right in following Grimm’s explanation of compounds like φερέ-ϝοικος, παυσί-νοσος, as containing imperatives, is an open question, though in the Rig-Veda the imperative and conjunctive are certainly inverted and set before their case; it is more probable that we are here dealing with instances of false analogy, δαμάσιππος, “she who tames horses,” having been made equivalent to ἱππόδαμος “horse-tamer,” and so made the model of a new formation. As for the hippopotamus, or “river-horse,” the animal came from Egypt, and so, too, did the manner of compounding its name. Proper names like Ἀγαθός δαίμων, or Neapolis, are scarcely in point; in them, moreover, the attribute and subject are in apposition. The curious use of the article in Greek with two nouns, one of which is a genitive, is based upon a different reason. When the article had once established itself in speech, ὁ τοῦ χοροῦ διδάσκαλος exactly answered to ὁ χοροδιδάσκαλος, “the choir-master,” and the second noun being drawn back to the place of its article, we get ὁ διδάσκαλος τοῦ χοροῦ and ὁ διδάσκαλος ὁ τοῦ χοροῦ, an order which is observed in modern Albanian. Turning to Latin, we find that the adjective when placed after the substantive implies a sentence of predication, res militaris being “a thing which is military,” navis longa, “a ship which is long.” It is only proper names compounded with Forum and Portus, like Forum Julii, which reverse the order of words as we have it in juris-consultor, and in these proper names the stress is on the second part of the compound. The altered position of the adjective in the Romance languages is probably due to the influence of the periphrastic genitive with the preposition de; at all events the older constructions place the adjective before its noun.

The rule followed by genitives and adjectives must have been followed by verbs, which are merely attributes of their subjects, and the formation of the verb by affixing the personal pronouns to the attribute or verbal stem confirms this conclusion. In the primitive sentence the object would have come first, then the attribute or verb, and lastly the subject; and the Latin credo, which has the same origin as the Sanskrit śrad-dadhâmi, “heart-placing-I,” is a good illustration of it. But a want came to be felt of distinguishing between the attribute as a mere qualificative and the attribute as a predicate, and so while the old order remained the type of a qualificative sentence, it was reversed in predicative sentences; the subject was put at the beginning and the verb at the end. This process was assisted by the division of the sentence into two halves, one-half consisting of the subject with its dependent words, and the other half of the verb and object; and if we suppose that each half was represented by a single compound, we can easily see how ready to hand the process would have been. Indeed, the verb seems to fix itself at the end of the sentence almost naturally, since the deaf-mute when taught to communicate with others, invariably sets the verb in this position, the subject and object to which his thought is chiefly directed being the first to occur to his mind. It is this position of the verbal attribute which has established itself in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Anglo-Saxon; which still is the rule in German in dependent sentences, and has only been changed in English and the Scandinavian and Romanic dialects through the analogy of the substantive verb and the extended use of prepositions. A preparation for the new arrangement of the sentence, however, which places the object last, was already made by the infinitive. On the one hand, the infinitive could govern a case, and so was correctly preceded by the governed word; on the other hand, it was itself a case dependent on the principal verb. But its nominal character was more and more obliterated by its employment with verbs like posse or velle, can or will; “he has the ability for doing,” gradually came to be “he can do.” Hence in Homer, as in Old Latin and Old German, the infinitive is mostly found at the end of the sentence, originally, it is true, accompanied by its cases, but afterwards standing alone to qualify the verb, and separated by the latter from the cases with which it was construed. But with all this confusion of the old order, such cases as the ablative or instrumental still maintained their proper position before the word they qualified, and when crystallized into adverbs continued to stand preferably immediately before the verb. Many of these adverbs afterwards became prepositions, the government of the noun passing from the verb to the adverb that accompanied it; other prepositions, like the Latin gratiâ or the Greek χάριν, originated in substantives construed with genitives; and hence the preposition was first of all a postposition, following and not preceding its case. Even now nach stands after its case in German, and we speak of thereon and thereof, homeward and leeward, to say nothing of God-wards and you-wards, or of what is told us of Chaucer’s Shipman,[286] that “fful manye a drauȝt of wyne hadde he i-drawe ffrom Burdeaux ward,” while the Latin mecum, nobiscum, and the like, survived to the last days of the language. So, too, in Anglo-Saxon the preposition sometimes runs counter to its name by coming after its case, as hî wyrcað þone cyle hine on, “they produce cold him on,”[287] but this construction is fully explained when we find the preposition occupying the same place in an adverbial sense, as in the Saxon Chronicle (1016): se here him fleâh beforan, “the army him fled before.”

So long as sentences remained simple and unconnected, there was but little reason for serious changes to occur in the order of their words. But it was quite different when an attempt began to be made to connect them together, to compose sentences that were dependent or subordinate. When a sentence became an object or attribute of another, the arrangement that had hitherto held good was necessarily thrown into confusion. Not only might an idea be an attribute of an attribute, but that again might be the attribute of another attribute. This intimate connection and fusion of sentences seems peculiarly suited to the genius of Aryan speech; where a whole sentence could be expressed by a single long compound, it was easy enough to make it dependent on something else. The Semitic tongues, which held composition in abhorrence, were equally averse to an intimate connection of sentences; neither process was very compatible with the habit of thought which placed the qualifying word second instead of first, and we are left to gather the relation of a subordinate sentence to a principal one merely from their juxtaposition, or the monotonous repetition of the simple conjunction “and.” Indeed, the Semitic languages have not risen far above the condition of the deaf-mute or the Polynesian, who have no dependent sentences, each sentence standing complete and entire by itself.[288] If the Dayak wishes to express even so simple a notion as “I thought that he was rich,” he is obliged to say, iṅgärä-ku iä tatau, “my thought; he rich.” What a contrast to the Greek language with its manifold particles, its subtle analysis of thought, its delicate expression of every shade of connection between ideas! Such, however, had not always been the condition even of the Greek language, or at all events of the language from which it had sprung. If, for instance, we examine the history of the relative sentence, we shall find it growing by slow degrees out of simple subordination. First of all it was merely set side by side with the principal clause, as in Hebrew and Assyrian poetry, or such English phrases as “This is the man I saw.” Next, the object of the antecedent clause was represented in the consequent by a demonstrative pronoun for the sake of clearness and emphasis; and so we may say: “This is the man, that (man) I saw.” Then in time the demonstrative came to be used in all cases alike, and not only where peculiar stress had to be laid; it ceased to be any longer a pure demonstrative, and became a relative applied by analogy to instances in which the demonstrative could hardly have been employed.[289]

We have now passed in review all that is included under the morphology of speech. The morphology of speech is the reverse side of its physiology, dealing with the spirit and inner life of the sentence just as the physiology of speech deals with the outward frame. If words are posterior to the sentence, if they are in fact but so many crystallized and abbreviated sentences, that part of the science of language which treats of their meanings ought strictly to follow a chapter on morphology. That which is most scientific, however, is not always the most practically convenient, and such is the case with our present subject. But we must not forget that the signification of a word is really determined by its relation to the other words with which it is combined, and if this does not seem to be the case with the isolated words we find in the dictionary, it is only because these isolated words are petrified sentences whose meaning has long ago been established, partly by reference to other sentences, partly by a determination of the relations between the parts of which they are composed. The mutual relations of the elements of a sentence, as well as of fully formed sentences, constitute grammar in its widest sense; they constitute also the morphology of language. A fact of grammar is a compound of two things—the conception of a relation between one idea and another, and the embodiment of this conception in phonetic utterance. Both parts of the compound are continually developing, and becoming at once simpler and clearer, and the duty of the linguistic morphologist is to trace the history of this development, and follow it back to its earliest source. We have to discover the different mental points of view from which the structure of the sentence was regarded by the different races of mankind, to investigate and compare the various contrivances and processes through which these points of view eventually found their fullest expression, to classify the modes of denoting the relations of grammar at the disposal of language, to examine the nature of composition and of stems in the groups of speech of which they are characteristic, to analyze the conceptions of grammar and determine the elements and germs out of which they have sprung, and finally, to ascertain the true origin and meaning of the so-called rules of syntax, and keep record of the changes that take place in the arrangement of words. The mind of man has indeed been cast everywhere in the same mould, but the scenes amid which its infancy was cradled, the conditions under which it grew up, have differed materially and produced a corresponding difference in the expression of its thoughts in language. Two rivers may start from the same spring, but one may flow, clear and limpid through granite mountain ranges and silent forests into a tropical sea—the other may run a turbid and discoloured course through low marsh-lands, by steaming mills and crowded wharves into a northern ocean. It is only when we have thoroughly explored the morphology of each group of kindred tongues, have seen how their inner form has gradually expanded like the flower out of the seed, that we can venture to bring our results together, to compare the morphology of one group of languages with that of another, and learn wherein they differ and wherein they agree.