A reverse case, one in which the grammatically significant elements cluster, as in Latin, at the end of the word is yielded by Fox, one of the better known Algonkin languages of the Mississippi Valley. We may take the form eh-kiwi-n-a-m-oht-ati-wa-ch(i) “then they together kept (him) in flight from them.” The radical element here is kiwi-, a verb stem indicating the general notion of “indefinite movement round about, here and there.” The prefixed element eh- is hardly more than an adverbial particle indicating temporal subordination; it may be conveniently rendered as “then.” Of the seven suffixes included in this highly-wrought word, -n- seems to be merely a phonetic element serving to connect the verb stem with the following -a-;[34] -a- is a “secondary stem”[35] denoting the idea of “flight, to flee”; -m- denotes causality with reference to an animate object;[36] -o(ht)- indicates activity done for the subject (the so-called “middle” or “medio-passive” voice of Greek); -(a)ti- is a reciprocal element, “one another”; -wa-ch(i) is the third person animate plural (-wa-, plural; -chi, more properly personal) of so-called “conjunctive” forms. The word may be translated more literally (and yet only approximately as to grammatical feeling) as “then they (animate) caused some animate being to wander about in flight from one another of themselves.” Eskimo, Nootka, Yana, and other languages have similarly complex arrays of suffixed elements, though the functions performed by them and their principles of combination differ widely.
We have reserved the very curious type of affixation known as “infixing” for separate illustration. It is utterly unknown in English, unless we consider the -n- of stand (contrast stood) as an infixed element. The earlier Indo-European languages, such as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, made a fairly considerable use of infixed nasals to differentiate the present tense of a certain class of verbs from other forms (contrast Latin vinc-o “I conquer” with vic-i “I conquered”; Greek lamb-an-o “I take” with e-lab-on “I took”). There are, however, more striking examples of the process, examples in which it has assumed a more clearly defined function than in these Latin and Greek cases. It is particularly prevalent in many languages of southeastern Asia and of the Malay archipelago. Good examples from Khmer (Cambodgian) are tmeu “one who walks” and daneu “walking” (verbal noun), both derived from deu “to walk.” Further examples may be quoted from Bontoc Igorot, a Filipino language. Thus, an infixed -in- conveys the idea of the product of an accomplished action, e.g., kayu “wood,” kinayu “gathered wood.” Infixes are also freely used in the Bontoc Igorot verb. Thus, an infixed -um- is characteristic of many intransitive verbs with personal pronominal suffixes, e.g., sad- “to wait,” sumid-ak “I wait”; kineg “silent,” kuminek-ak “I am silent.” In other verbs it indicates futurity, e.g., tengao- “to celebrate a holiday,” tumengao-ak “I shall have a holiday.” The past tense is frequently indicated by an infixed -in-; if there is already an infixed -um-, the two elements combine to -in-m-, e.g., kinminek-ak “I am silent.” Obviously the infixing process has in this (and related) languages the same vitality that is possessed by the commoner prefixes and suffixes of other languages. The process is also found in a number of aboriginal American languages. The Yana plural is sometimes formed by an infixed element, e.g., k’uruwi “medicine-men,” k’uwi “medicine-man”; in Chinook an infixed -l- is used in certain verbs to indicate repeated activity, e.g., ksik’ludelk “she keeps looking at him,” iksik’lutk “she looked at him” (radical element -tk). A peculiarly interesting type of infixation is found in the Siouan languages, in which certain verbs insert the pronominal elements into the very body of the radical element, e.g., Sioux cheti “to build a fire,” chewati “I build a fire”; shuta “to miss,” shuunta-pi “we miss.”
A subsidiary but by no means unimportant grammatical process is that of internal vocalic or consonantal change. In some languages, as in English (sing, sang, sung, song; goose, geese), the former of these has become one of the major methods of indicating fundamental changes of grammatical function. At any rate, the process is alive enough to lead our children into untrodden ways. We all know of the growing youngster who speaks of having brung something, on the analogy of such forms as sung and flung. In Hebrew, as we have seen, vocalic change is of even greater significance than in English. What is true of Hebrew is of course true of all other Semitic languages. A few examples of so-called “broken” plurals from Arabic[37] will supplement the Hebrew verb forms that I have given in another connection. The noun balad “place” has the plural form bilad;[38] gild “hide” forms the plural gulud; ragil “man,” the plural rigal; shibbak “window,” the plural shababik. Very similar phenomena are illustrated by the Hamitic languages of Northern Africa, e.g., Shilh[39] izbil “hair,” plural izbel; a-slem “fish,” plural i-slim-en; sn “to know,” sen “to be knowing”; rmi “to become tired,” rumni “to be tired”; ttss[40] “to fall asleep,” ttoss “to sleep.” Strikingly similar to English and Greek alternations of the type sing—sang and leip-o “I leave,” leloip-a “I have left,” are such Somali[41] cases as al “I am,” il “I was”; i-dah-a “I say,” i-di “I said,” deh “say!”
Vocalic change is of great significance also in a number of American Indian languages. In the Athabaskan group many verbs change the quality or quantity of the vowel of the radical element as it changes its tense or mode. The Navaho verb for “I put (grain) into a receptacle” is bi-hi-sh-ja, in which -ja is the radical element; the past tense, bi-hi-ja’, has a long a-vowel, followed by the “glottal stop”[42]; the future is bi-h-de-sh-ji with complete change of vowel. In other types of Navaho verbs the vocalic changes follow different lines, e.g., yah-a-ni-ye “you carry (a pack) into (a stable)”; past, yah-i-ni-yin (with long i in -yin; -n is here used to indicate nasalization); future, yah-a-di-yehl (with long e). In another Indian language, Yokuts[43], vocalic modifications affect both noun and verb forms. Thus, buchong “son” forms the plural bochang-i (contrast the objective buchong-a); enash “grandfather,” the plural inash-a; the verb engtyim “to sleep” forms the continuative ingetym-ad “to be sleeping” and the past ingetym-ash.
Consonantal change as a functional process is probably far less common than vocalic modifications, but it is not exactly rare. There is an interesting group of cases in English, certain nouns and corresponding verbs differing solely in that the final consonant is voiceless or voiced. Examples are wreath (with th as in think), but to wreathe (with th as in then); house, but to house (with s pronounced like z). That we have a distinct feeling for the interchange as a means of distinguishing the noun from the verb is indicated by the extension of the principle by many Americans to such a noun as rise (e.g., the rise of democracy)—pronounced like rice—in contrast to the verb to rise (s like z).
In the Celtic languages the initial consonants undergo several types of change according to the grammatical relation that subsists between the word itself and the preceding word. Thus, in modern Irish, a word like bo “ox” may under the appropriate circumstances, take the forms bho (pronounce wo) or mo (e.g., an bo “the ox,” as a subject, but tir na mo “land of the oxen,” as a possessive plural). In the verb the principle has as one of its most striking consequences the “aspiration” of initial consonants in the past tense. If a verb begins with t, say, it changes the t to th (now pronounced h) in forms of the past; if it begins with g, the consonant changes, in analogous forms, to gh (pronounced like a voiced spirant[44] g or like y, according to the nature of the following vowel). In modern Irish the principle of consonantal change, which began in the oldest period of the language as a secondary consequence of certain phonetic conditions, has become one of the primary grammatical processes of the language.
Perhaps as remarkable as these Irish phenomena are the consonantal interchanges of Ful, an African language of the Soudan. Here we find that all nouns belonging to the personal class form the plural by changing their initial g, j, d, b, k, ch, and p to y (or w), y, r, w, h, s and f respectively; e.g., jim-o “companion,” yim-’be “companions”; pio-o “beater,” fio-’be “beaters.” Curiously enough, nouns that belong to the class of things form their singular and plural in exactly reverse fashion, e.g., yola-re “grass-grown place,” jola-je “grass-grown places”; fitan-du “soul,” pital-i “souls.” In Nootka, to refer to but one other language in which the process is found, the t or tl[45] of many verbal suffixes becomes hl in forms denoting repetition, e.g., hita-’ato “to fall out,” hita-’ahl “to keep falling out”; mat-achisht-utl “to fly on to the water,” mat-achisht-ohl “to keep flying on to the water.” Further, the hl of certain elements changes to a peculiar h-sound in plural forms, e.g., yak-ohl “sore-faced,” yak-oh “sore-faced (people).”
Nothing is more natural than the prevalence of reduplication, in other words, the repetition of all or part of the radical element. The process is generally employed, with self-evident symbolism, to indicate such concepts as distribution, plurality, repetition, customary activity, increase of size, added intensity, continuance. Even in English it is not unknown, though it is not generally accounted one of the typical formative devices of our language. Such words as goody-goody and to pooh-pooh have become accepted as part of our normal vocabulary, but the method of duplication may on occasion be used more freely than is indicated by such stereotyped examples. Such locutions as a big big man or Let it cool till it’s thick thick are far more common, especially in the speech of women and children, than our linguistic text-books would lead one to suppose. In a class by themselves are the really enormous number of words, many of them sound-imitative or contemptuous in psychological tone, that consist of duplications with either change of the vowel or change of the initial consonant—words of the type sing-song, riff-raff, wishy-washy, harum-skarum, roly-poly. Words of this type are all but universal. Such examples as the Russian Chudo-Yudo (a dragon), the Chinese ping-pang “rattling of rain on the roof,”[46] the Tibetan kyang-kyong “lazy,” and the Manchu porpon parpan “blear-eyed” are curiously reminiscent, both in form and in psychology, of words nearer home. But it can hardly be said that the duplicative process is of a distinctively grammatical significance in English. We must turn to other languages for illustration. Such cases as Hottentot go-go “to look at carefully” (from go “to see”), Somali fen-fen “to gnaw at on all sides” (from fen “to gnaw at”), Chinook iwi iwi “to look about carefully, to examine” (from iwi “to appear”), or Tsimshian am’am “several (are) good” (from am “good”) do not depart from the natural and fundamental range of significance of the process. A more abstract function is illustrated in Ewe,[47] in which both infinitives and verbal adjectives are formed from verbs by duplication; e.g., yi “to go,” yiyi “to go, act of going”; wo “to do,” wowo[48] “done”; mawomawo “not to do” (with both duplicated verb stem and duplicated negative particle). Causative duplications are characteristic of Hottentot, e.g., gam-gam[49] “to cause to tell” (from gam “to tell”). Or the process may be used to derive verbs from nouns, as in Hottentot khoe-khoe “to talk Hottentot” (from khoe-b “man, Hottentot”), or as in Kwakiutl metmat “to eat clams” (radical element met- “clam”).
The most characteristic examples of reduplication are such as repeat only part of the radical element. It would be possible to demonstrate the existence of a vast number of formal types of such partial duplication, according to whether the process makes use of one or more of the radical consonants, preserves or weakens or alters the radical vowel, or affects the beginning, the middle, or the end of the radical element. The functions are even more exuberantly developed than with simple duplication, though the basic notion, at least in origin, is nearly always one of repetition or continuance. Examples illustrating this fundamental function can be quoted from all parts of the globe. Initially reduplicating are, for instance, Shilh ggen “to be sleeping” (from gen “to sleep”); Ful pepeu-’do “liar” (i.e., “one who always lies”), plural fefeu-’be (from fewa “to lie”); Bontoc Igorot anak “child,” ananak “children”; kamu-ek “I hasten,” kakamu-ek “I hasten more”; Tsimshian gyad “person,” gyigyad “people”; Nass gyibayuk “to fly,” gyigyibayuk “one who is flying.” Psychologically comparable, but with the reduplication at the end, are Somali ur “body,” plural urar; Hausa suna “name,” plural sunana-ki; Washo[50] gusu “buffalo,” gususu “buffaloes”; Takelma[51] himi-d- “to talk to,” himim-d- “to be accustomed to talk to.” Even more commonly than simple duplication, this partial duplication of the radical element has taken on in many languages functions that seem in no way related to the idea of increase. The best known examples are probably the initial reduplication of our older Indo-European languages, which helps to form the perfect tense of many verbs (e.g., Sanskrit dadarsha “I have seen,” Greek leloipa “I have left,” Latin tetigi “I have touched,” Gothic lelot “I have let”). In Nootka reduplication of the radical element is often employed in association with certain suffixes; e.g., hluch- “woman” forms hluhluch-’ituhl “to dream of a woman,” hluhluch-k’ok “resembling a woman.” Psychologically similar to the Greek and Latin examples are many Takelma cases of verbs that exhibit two forms of the stem, one employed in the present or past, the other in the future and in certain modes and verbal derivatives. The former has final reduplication, which is absent in the latter; e.g., al-yebeb-i’n “I show (or showed) to him,” al-yeb-in “I shall show him.”
We come now to the subtlest of all grammatical processes, variations in [accent], whether of stress or pitch. The chief difficulty in isolating accent as a functional process is that it is so often combined with alternations in vocalic quantity or quality or complicated by the presence of affixed elements that its grammatical value appears as a secondary rather than as a primary feature. In Greek, for instance, it is characteristic of true verbal forms that they throw the accent back as far as the general accentual rules will permit, while nouns may be more freely accented. There is thus a striking accentual difference between a verbal form like eluthemen “we were released,” accented on the second syllable of the word, and its participial derivative lutheis “released,” accented on the last. The presence of the characteristic verbal elements e- and -men in the first case and of the nominal -s in the second tends to obscure the inherent value of the accentual alternation. This value comes out very neatly in such English doublets as to refund and a refund, to extract and an extract, to come down and a come down, to lack luster and lack-luster eyes, in which the difference between the verb and the noun is entirely a matter of changing stress. In the Athabaskan languages there are not infrequently significant alternations of accent, as in Navaho ta-di-gis “you wash yourself” (accented on the second syllable), ta-di-gis “he washes himself” (accented on the first).[52]