Note 189 — Chapter XIII

As a matter of fact, and as we shall subsequently see, there is an immense body of purely philological evidence to show that verbs are really a much later product of linguistic growth than either nouns or pronouns. This is proved by their comparative paucity in many existing languages of low development (their place being taken by pronominal appositions, &c.); and also by tracing the origin of many of them to other parts of speech. (See especially Garnett’s Essays, Pritchard on the Celtic Languages, Quart. Rev., Sept. 1876; The Derivation of Words from Pronominal and Prepositional Roots, Proc. Philol. Soc. vol. ii.; and On the Nature and Analysis of the Verb, ibid., vol. iii.) Later on it will be shown that in the really primitive stages of language-growth there is no assignable distinction between any of the parts of speech. Archdeacon Farrar well remarks, “The invention of a verb requires a greater effort of abstraction than that of a noun.... We cannot accept it as even possible that from roots meaning to shine, to be bright, names were formed for sun, moon, stars, &c.... In some places, indeed, Professor Müller appears to hold the correct view, that at first ‘roots’ stood for any and every part of speech, just as the monosyllabic expressions of children do” (Chapters on Language, pp. 196, 197; see, also, some good remarks on the subject by Sir Graves Haughton, Bengali Grammar, p. 108).