The Philosophic Grammar of American Languages, as Set Forth by Wilhelm von Humboldt / With the Translation of an Unpublished Memoir by Him on the American Verb

by Daniel G. Brinton

The Othomi language makes use in such expressions not only of the pronouns but of all the affixes of the verb, and conjugates a noun together with its article, treating it as a verbal radical: qui-no-munti-maha, Thou wert the enriched. Here no-munti is “the enriched,” and all the remaining syllables are verbal inflections. Sandoval, who wrote a grammar of the language, explains no as an auxiliary verb; but with the noun he calls it an article, as it is, and he evidently misunderstood the expression. It is wholly a verbal, but as this procedure can be applied to any noun whatever, such an expression is far removed from a real, well-defined verbal form.

The same language has another peculiar form with the possessive, which can only be explained by supplying an omitted verb. Na nuhti means “my property;” but if to this is added the abbreviated pronoun used as a verbal affix, na-nuhti-gā, the words mean, “this property belongs to me,” or, “my property is it, mine.”

In the grammatically obscure consciousness of these people, the ideas of verbal and merely pronominal expression are confounded, as also in the Brazilian language, where “my father” and “I have a father” are expressed by the same word.

The advantages which these languages derive from the formation of sentences with the verb omitted are two.

They can change any noun into a verb, or at least they can treat it as such. It is true that this can also be done by a substantive verb when one is found, but as the languages in question unite the noun to the verbal flexions, their freedom is much greater.

The second advantage is, that when it is desirable to discriminate clearly between the two kinds of verbs, the one which has at base an energic attribute, the other which merely expresses the relation of predicate to subject, a thing to its qualities, this end can be much better reached by the process described than even by the substantive verb, which, by its full verbal form, always recalls the action of an energic attribute.

Many of the languages named include in these expressions particles of time, thereby obscuring the distinction referred to. But in others this is not the case. Thus in the Maya and Beto there are two conjugations, one with the pronoun without time particles, and one with them; and as in both these tongues the present of the true conjugation has a characteristic tense sign, a separate aorist of the present is formed by the other conjugation, which our cultivated tongues cannot express so conveniently.

2. When the notion of Being is expressed by a special word, but without a phonetic radical.

Although the assumption here expressed sounds at first rather enigmatical, yet one can soon see that if the notion of Being is to be conveyed without a phonetic radical, it can only be done through the sign of the person, that is, in the pronoun, with or without a tense sign. This is actually the case in two languages, the Maya and the Yaruri.

We have already seen that in the Maya there is a special pronoun which unites a predicate to the idea of person into one sentence. There is also another which by itself conveys the idea of the verb, and of which each person has the signification both of the pronoun and the substantive verb, “I” and “I am,” “thou” and “thou art,” etc. Not only is it so used in the present, but it can take the signs of the tenses. It is distinguished from the pronouns previously referred to in the first and second persons of both numbers only by a prefixed t, as follows: