The Philosophic Grammar of American Languages, as Set Forth by Wilhelm von Humboldt / With the Translation of an Unpublished Memoir by Him on the American Verb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

Case 3d.

The languages of this class approach in their conjugations those of the more cultivated tongues, in which each verbal inflection has a fixed and independent form. Both the person, the tense and the mode signs are united to the stem, in such a manner that none of the three can be said to be either less or more loosely attached than the others.

All the conjugations about to be discussed lack, however, that fixity of form which grammatically satisfies the mind.

The elements are placed definitely and regularly one by the other, but are not incorporated into each other, and are therefore readily recognizable.

They are found, moreover, outside of the verb elsewhere in the language either without any change or with slight differences of sound; the personal signs as pronouns, the other affixes as particles.

The composition of the verb is separable, and may receive into itself other parts of speech.

No American language is free from these drawbacks to perfection of form in the conjugations. In some all three are found; in most the first and last. In really grammatically developed tongues, as in the Sanscrit, Greek, Latin and German, none of these imperfections exists. The verb includes in itself no part of its object, the affixes modifying the stem have lost all independent life, and the analysis of the formal elements becomes a difficult philological task, which often fails and only rarely can be fully proved.

I shall discriminate in regard to the conjugations about to be considered that which is an approach toward a fixed form from the intentional separation of the form to insert a governed word.

1. Approach toward a Fixed Form.

In the Mixteca language, the personal sign is the unchanged possessive pronoun. If the verb is governed by a noun in the third person, the possessive is dropped. It is left to the speaker to choose whether he designates the person, either by prefixing the personal pronoun or suffixing the possessive. The tense signs are prefixed syllables, but the perfect and future signs are altogether different from those of the present, and materially alter the verbal stem.