Introduction to the science of language, Volume 1 (of 2)

by A. H. Sayce

Now it will be noticed that while the predicative relation is contrasted with the attributive and the genitival, the two latter assume the same form. Where the relations of grammar are denoted by position alone, no distinction is made between the attribute and the possessive. There is nothing in the outward form to tell us whether in expressions like horsetown or ōran ūtan, horse and ūtan are to be considered as adjectives or as genitives. And in point of fact there is at bottom little or no difference between them. The primitive instinct of language did not err in treating the two conceptions as essentially one and the same. A “gold cup” is exactly equivalent to a “cup of gold.” The adjective describes the attribute which defines and limits the class to which its substantive belongs; and so, too, does the genitive. Both indicate the species of a genus, limiting the signification of the substantive, and so having the same functions as those determinatives which, as we have seen, play so large a part in a Chinese or Burman dictionary. In such languages these defining words perform the same classificatory office as the classificatory suffixes of an Aryan dialect; but whereas the classificatory suffixes of an inflectional tongue are neither adjectives nor attributes, the classificatory substantives of the isolating language are really both. We are told that a school-inspector plucked some children a short time ago for saying that cannon in cannon-ball was a noun instead of an adjective; the pedantry of the act was only equal to the ignorance it displays, and illustrates how often the artificial nomenclature of grammar breaks down when confronted with the real facts of language.

So long therefore as the adjective or genitive is denoted by position only, we cannot draw any true line of distinction between them and the determinatives of the Taic idioms. They all have the same end—that of limiting and defining a noun—of referring it to some special class or investing it with some special quality. Hence it is that the genitive case so frequently assumes the form of an adjective, even in those languages in which the adjective and the genitive have been eventually distinguished from one another. In the Tibetan dialects adjectives are formed from substantives by the addition of the sign of the genitive, as ser-gyi, “golden,” from ser, “gold;” and in Hindustani the genitive takes the marks of gender according to the words to which it refers.[274] Greek adjectives like δημό-σιο-ς remind us of the old genitive δημοσιο, which has become δημοῖο in Homer, or the Sanskrit genitive śiva-sya and the pronouns ta-syâ-s and ta-sya-i, and though the suffix of δημό-σιο-ς was originally rather -tya than -sya, since a Greek sibilant between two vowels tends to disappear, the two suffixes once performed the same functions and bore the same relation to each other as the demonstratives sa and ta. The Aryan genitive stands on the same footing as the other cases of the nouns which have been traced back by M. Bergaigne to adjectives used adverbially. If we look at the Bâ-ntu languages we shall have little difficulty in understanding the reason of this close connexion between adjective and genitive. As we have seen, the agreement of words together in these languages is pointed out by the use of common prefixes, which were once independent substantives, and have come to answer somewhat to the marks of gender in Greek and Latin. The same prefixes, however, not only indicate the concord of adjective and substantive, of verb and subject, but also of nominative and genitive. Thus the Zulu would say I-SI-tya S-O-m-fazi, “the dish of the woman,” where the common prefix si declares the relation that exists between the two ideas. If we assume that the primary meaning of si was “mass,” the words I-SI-tya S-O-m-fazi would properly be read “mass-dish mass-woman.” The word si is thus the standard and connecting link by means of which the other two are brought together and compared. It had been attached to a certain group of words at a time when the conception of adjective or genitive had not yet been clearly realized, and when mere position, mere apposition, indicated by itself the association of two ideas. This close association caused it finally to lose all distinctive existence of its own, to become, in short, an “empty word” or formative, the index of a particular class like the classificatory suffixes of our own tongues. Like these suffixes, again, it came to have what would be called in Sanskrit or Greek a flectional power; it not only marked the class to which the substantive belonged, but also the fact that another word was in concord with it. Whether this were a concord of the adjective or the genitive, however, the Kafir dialects have never advanced so far as to determine.

Unlike either the Kafir with prefixes which denote at once attribute, possessive, and even predicate, or the Aryan languages with their suffixes each fulfilling a special function, the Semitic tongues distinguished between genitive and adjective by subordinating the governing word to its “genitive,” and keeping the attention fixed on the characteristics which separated species from species within a common genus. While the adjective constituted an independent word by the side of the substantive with which it was joined, the genitive was regarded merely as the latter half of a compound of which the word defined by it was the first part. In the so-called construct state, the governing noun is pronounced, as it were, in one breath with the genitive that follows it; its vowels are shortened, and its case-terminations tend to disappear. Thus in Assyrian, while śarru rabu is “great king,” śar rabi is “king of great ones,” and in Hebrew the construct dhiv’rê hâ’âm, “words of the people,” stands in marked contrast to the simple dhĕvârim, “words.”

The agglutinative languages of Western Asia, again, traversed an altogether different road. In the Accadian of ancient Chaldea, we still find instances in the oldest inscriptions of a genitive by position, which only differs from an adjective by the meaning it bears. Thus, lugal calga is “strong king,” lugal’Uru, “king of Ur.” But a postposition soon came to be added to the second substantive in order to point out more distinctly its place in the sentence, and these postpositions seem originally to have been verbs. At all events, such is the case with one of the postpositions, lal, used for the genitive; lugal ’Uru-lal, for instance, being literally “king Ur-filling,” though the more usual postposition -na has lost all traces of its source and derivation. The latter postposition is found throughout the Ural-Altaic family, as in the Turkish evin, “of a house,” or the Votiak murten, “by a man.” It indicates the genitive in Finnish and Lapp, in Mordvin and Samoyed, in Mongol (-yin, -un), and Mantschu (-ni). It is somewhat remarkable that though the Ural-Altaic family is characterized by the use of postpositions, that is, by making the defining word follow that which it defines, the modern dialects, with a few exceptions,[275] have discarded the general rule and placed the adjective before its noun. This change of position must be ascribed to a wish for differentiation, when the employment of a special postposition for the genitival relation had familiarized the speaker with the distinction between adjective and genitive. Elsewhere the distinction was brought into relief by the help of special words or symbols to denote the genitive relation. Just as the Accadians or the Finns employed a postposition which was originally an independent word with a meaning of its own, so, too, the Semites replaced the “construct state” by the insertion of the demonstrative or relative pronoun, śarru sa rabi, for example, literally “king that (is) the great ones,” coming to signify simply “king of the great ones,” and the Chinese assigned the same office to their tchi, “place.” The analytic languages of modern Europe have followed in the same track, only employing prepositions like de, of, or von, instead of demonstrative pronouns or other words. When the conception of the genitive had once been clearly recognized, means were soon found for making it as clear in phonetic expression as it was in idea, and the ambiguous machinery of flection was superseded by a method of expression which had been familiar to the more advanced Ural-Altaic idioms from a very remote period.

The history of the genitive has shown us that the same germ may develop very differently in different families of speech. The conception of the genitival relation, when fully realized, has worn a varying aspect to Aryans and Semites, to Accadians and Kafirs. The same grammatical relation admits of being looked at from many points of view, and of being expressed in many ways. Let us now turn to another adjunct of grammar which has assumed more than one form within the same family of speech itself. A definite article is by no means a universal possession of language; on the contrary, the majority of languages want it altogether, and wherever it makes its appearance we can trace it back to the demonstrative pronoun, with which it is still identical in German. “That man” and “the man” are in fact one and the same, the only difference between them being that the demonstrative draws emphatic attention to a particular individual, while the article acts like a classificatory suffix by narrowing the boundaries of a genus and reducing it to the condition of a species. The article has thus the same ultimate function as the adjective or the genitive, and we should therefore expect to find it following the lead of the latter and occupying the same position in the sentence. This, however, is not the case. It is true that in English and German the article precedes the noun, but it does the same in Hebrew and Arabic, as also in Old Egyptian, where the adjective follows its substantive; while, on the other hand, in Scandinavian, as in Wallach, Bulgarian, and Albanian, the place of the article is after its noun. The cause of this irregularity is the fact that the article is a very late product in any speech; it does not grow out of the demonstrative until an age which has lost all recollection of the early contrivances of language and found other means than mere position for indicating the attribute of the noun. How late this is may be judged from the absence of the definite article in dialects cognate to those which possess one. Thus in the Semitic languages there is none in either Ethiopic or Assyrian, except in the very latest period of the latter tongue; among the Aryan dialects, Russian and the other Slavonic idioms (Bulgarian excepted) have no article, the Greek article being very inadequately represented by the relative pronoun ije in Old Slavonic, while Sanskrit also may be said to be without one, though the demonstrative sa sometimes takes its place, as in sa purusha like ille vir in Latin. Neither the Finnic nor the Turkish-Tatar languages have an article, Osmanli Turkish alone occasionally having recourse to the Persian mode of expressing it by a kezra (i) or hemza (ʾ) as in nawale-y-ushk, “the lamentations of love;” Hungarian, however, has been so far influenced by the neighbouring German dialects as to turn the demonstrative az or a into a genuine article, as in az atya, “the father,” a leány, “the daughter.” On the other hand, the objective case, or “casus definitus,” as Böhtlingk terms it, seems formed by a demonstrative affix not only in Turkish-Tatar, but also in Mongol and even Tibetan; in Mongol, for instance, it is marked by a suffix which is commonly pronounced -yighi.[276] This definite case very often answers exactly to the use of a definite article with the noun, and has arisen through a similar desire to give definiteness and precision to the expression. So, too, Castrén tells us that an affix -et or -t, which he believes to be the pronoun of the third person, is sometimes attached to the Ostiak accusative, and in Hindustani, where there is no definite article, its place is taken before the accusative by a dative with the suffix -ko, and in Persian by the suffix -ra, a suffix, by the way, which Schott considers to have been borrowed from the Tatar or Mongol tongues. We may judge how attributive and defining is the nature of the objective case from the Chinese, where the same empty word tchi, which, according to Dr. Edkins, was originally ti, is the affix of both the objective and the possessive cases. Passing to the New World, we find the Algonkins alone among the North American Indians prefixing the article mo or m’, originally a contracted form of the demonstrative monko, “that,” while the monosyllabic Othomis use na and ya in the same sense.

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.