what it was we will, as we did before, begin by examining the formation of some of the languages with which we are, probably, more or less familiar. Let us note how very many more variations on the same root are to be found in some languages than in others. On the root dic, which in Latin expresses the notion of speaking, we have the variations dico, dixi, dicere, dictum, dictio, dicto, dicor, dictor, dictator, dictatrix, etc.; and yet this does not nearly exhaust the list, for we have all the changes in the different tenses of dico, dicto, dicor, etc., in the different cases of dictio, dictator. dictatrix, etc. The languages which contain these numerous variations upon one root are what are called the inflected languages, and the greater number of the changes which they make come under the head of what grammarians call inflexions. These inflexions are of no meaning in themselves, they have no existence even in themselves as words. And yet what is curious is that they are the same for a great number of different words; and they express the same relative meaning in the places where they stand whatever the word may be. If the -nis of dictionis expresses a certain idea relative to dictio, so does the -nis of lectionis express the same idea relative to lectio, the -nis of actionis the same idea relative to actio, and so forth.
Or, to take an example from a modern inflected language, if the -es of Mannes, expresses a certain idea relative to Mann, so does the same inflexion (-es or -s) in Hauses, Baums, etc., relative to Haus and Baum.
Now, how are we to explain this fact? Our grammars, it is true, take it for granted, and give it us as a thing which requires no explanation—the genitive inflexion is -nis or -es, or whatever it may be. That is all they tell us. But we cannot be content to take anything of course. An explanation, however, is not difficult, and follows, almost of course, on the exercise of a little common sense. If the -es of Mannes, Hauses, Baumes (Baums) expresses the idea ‘of,’ then, at one time or another, es, or some root from which it is derived, must have meant ‘of.’ This explains easily and naturally enough the inflexions in any inflected language. They have no meaning now, but at one time they (or their original forms—their ancestors, so to speak) had no doubt just as much meaning by themselves as our ‘of.’ And therefore the only difference between our use in England to-day, and the ancestral use in a primitive language, was that we say ‘of [the] man,’ and the ancestral language would have said ‘man-of,’ ‘house-of,’ etc. This accounts for the same genitive forms being used for so many different words.
And that the same genitive forms are not used throughout any language is no real objection to this theory. If we say dictionis, lectionis, but musæ, rosæ; if we say Mannes, Hauses, but Blume, Rose, the only reason of these varieties is that the languages from which these inflexions are derived possessed more than one word meaning ‘of,’ and that one of these words was attached to a certain series of nouns, another word to another series.
This is the explanation which mere common sense would give of the origin of inflexions in language, and further research, had we time to examine the history of language more elaborately, would show that it was fundamentally the right explanation. The only correction which we should have to make on this first and crude theory is explained a little further on. Thus we see in this third stage of language a process very closely analogous to the second. The second stage gave us the auxiliary words, which have decayed so to say, out of the class of significant words. The third stage gives us the auxiliary words joined on to the significant ones, and in their turn decaying to become mere inflexions.
I have called this growth of inflexions the third stage. It is the third great stage in the formation of language, and is the only other stage distinguishable when we are examining what is called an inflected language. And all the languages the general reader is likely to know belong to this class. But when we turn to a wider study of the various tongues in use among mankind we find that this process of forming inflexions is a very slow one, that it, in its turn, has gone through many stages. And it is, in fact, the different stages through which a language has passed on its road to the formation of inflexions which settles the class in which it is to be placed among the various tongues spoken by mankind.
We shall soon understand what are these further stages in language-formation. As far as we have been able to see at present, the inflexion presents itself as something added on to the significant word to give it a varied meaning. It is evidently therefore part of a new process through which language has to go after it has completed its original stock of sounds, namely, the formation of fresh words by joining together two others which already exist. This is a process which, no doubt, in some shape or other, began in the very earliest ages, and which is to this day going on continually. The simpler form of it is the joining together two words which are significant when they stand alone to form a third word expressing a new idea; just as we have joined ‘ant’ to ‘hill’ and formed ant-hill, which is a different idea than either ant or hill taken alone. In the words playful, joyful, again, we have the same process carried rather further. The words mean simply play-full, ‘full of play,’ joy-full, ‘full of joy.’ But we do not in reality quite think of this meaning when we use them. The termination ful has become half-meaningless by itself, and in doing so we observe it has slightly changed its original form.
But far more important in the history of language is the joining of the meaningless or auxiliary words on to other words of the first, the significant class, whereby in the course of time the inflexions of language have been formed. Although we always put the meaningless qualifying word before the chief word, and say ‘on the rock,’ or ‘under the rock,’ it is more natural to man, as is shown by all languages, to put the principal idea first, and say ‘rock on,’ ‘rock under,’ the idea rock being of course the chief idea, the part of the rock, or position in relation to the rock, coming after. So the first step towards forming grammar was the getting a number of meaningless words, and joining them on to the substantive, ‘rock,’ ‘rock-by,’ ‘rock-in,’ ‘rock-to,’ etc. So with the verb. The essential idea in the verb is the action itself, the next idea is the time or person in which the action takes place; and the natural thing for man to do is to make the words follow that order. The joining process would give us from love, the idea of loving, ‘love-I,’ ‘love-thou,’ ‘love-he,’ etc.; and for the imperfect ‘love-was-I,’ ‘love-was-thou,’ ‘love-was-he,’ ‘love-was-we,’ ‘love-was-ye,’ ‘love-was-they;’ for perfect ‘love-have-I,’ ‘love-have-thou,’ ‘love-have-he,’ etc. Of course, these are merely illustrations, but they make the mode of this early joining process clearer than if we had chosen a language where that process is actually found in its purity, and then translated the forms into their English equivalents.
We have now arrived at a stage in the formation of language where both meaning and meaningless words have been introduced, and where words have been made up out of combinations of the two. We see at once that with regard to meaningless words the use of them would naturally be fixed very much by tradition and custom; and whereas there might be a great many words standing for ant and hill, and therefore a great many ways of saying ant-hill, for the meaningless words, such as under and on, there would probably be only a few words. The reason of this is very plain. While all the separate synonyms for hill expressed different ways in which it struck the mind, either as being high, or large, or steep, or what not, for under and on, being meaningless words not producing any picture in the mind, only one word apiece or one or two words could very well be in use. So long as under and on were significant words, meaning, perhaps, as we imagined, head of, or foot of, there would be plenty of synonyms for them; but only one or two out of all these would be handed down in their meaningless forms. And it is this very fact which, as we have seen, accounts for all the grammars of all languages, every one of those grammatical terminations which we know so well in Latin and Greek, and German, having been originally nothing else than meaningless words added on to modify the words which still retained their meaning. We saw before that it was much more natural for people to say ‘rock-on’ or ‘hand-in’ than ‘on the rock’ or ‘in the hand’—because rock and hand were the most important ideas and came first into the mind, while on, in, etc., were only subsidiary ideas depending upon the important ones. If we stop at rock or hand without adding on and in, we have still got something definite upon which our thoughts can rest, but we could not possibly stop at on and in alone, and have any idea in our minds at all. It is plain enough therefore that, though we say ‘on the rock,’ we must have the idea of all the three words in our mind before we begin the phrase, and therefore that our words do not follow the natural order of our ideas; whereas rock-on, hand-in, show the ideas just in the way they come into the mind.
It is a fact, then, that all case-endings arose from adding on meaningless words to the end of the word, the noun or pronoun—Mann, des mann-es, dem Mann-e; hom-o, hom-inis, hom-ini: the addition to the root in every case was once a distinct word of the auxiliary kind, or derived from such a word. The meanings of case-endings such as these cannot, it is true, be discovered now, for they came into existence long before such languages as German or Latin were spoken, and their meanings were lost sight of in ages which passed before history. But that time when the terminations which are meaningless now had a meaning, and the period of transition between this state and the state of a language which is full of grammatical changes inexplicable to those who use them, form distinct epochs in the history of every language. And it is just the same with verb-endings as with the case endings—ich bin, du bist, really express the ‘I’ and ‘thou’ twice over, as the pronouns exist though hidden and lost sight of in the -n and -st of the verb. In the case of verbs, indeed, we may without going far give some idea of how these endings can be detected. We may say at once that Sanskrit, Persian, Armenian, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, German, English, Norse, Gaelic, Welsh, Lithuanian, Russian, and other Slavonic languages are all connected together in various degrees of relationship, all descended from one common ancestor, some being close cousins, and some very distant. Now in Sanskrit ‘I am’ is thus declined:—