Lastly, by raising viś to veśa, we arrive at a new nominal base, and by adding to it the stem of a demonstrative pronoun s, we form the so-called nom. sing. veśa-s, οἶκο-ς, vicu-s, from which we started, meaning originally house-here, this house, the house.
In all this Professor Pott would fully agree, but where he would differ, would be when we proceed to generalize, and to lay it down as an axiom, that all inflectional forms must have had the same combinatory origin. He may be right in thus guarding against too hasty generalization, to which we are but too prone in all inductive sciences. I am well aware that there are many inflections which have not yielded, as yet, to any rational analysis, but, with that reservation, I thought, and I still think, it right to say that, until some other process of forming those inflections has been pointed out, inflection may be considered as the invariable result of combination.
It is impossible in writing, always to repeat such qualifications and reservations. They must be taken as understood. Take for instance the augment in Greek and Sanskrit. Some scholars have explained it as a negative particle, others as a demonstrative pronoun; others, again, took it as a mere symbol of differentiation. If the last explanation could be established by more general analogies, then, no doubt, we should have here an inflection, that cannot be referred to combination. Again, it would be difficult to say, what independent element was added to the pronoun sa, he, in order to make it sâ, she. This, too, may, for all we know, be a case of phonetic symbolism, and, if so, it should be treated on its own merits. The lengthening of the vowel in the subjunctive mood was formerly represented by Professor Curtius as a symbolic expression of hesitation, but he has lately recalled that explanation as untenable. I pointed out that when in Hebrew we meet with such forms as Piel and Pual, Hiphil and Hophal, we feel tempted to admit formative agencies, different from mere juxtaposition and combination. But before we admit this purely phonetic symbolism, we should bear in mind that the changes of bruder, brother, into brüder, brethren, of Ich weiss, I know, into wir wissen, we know, which seem at first sight purely phonetic, have after all been proved to be the indirect result of juxtaposition and combination, so that we ought to be extremely careful and first exhaust every possible rational explanation, before we have recourse to phonetic symbolism as an element in the production of inflection forms.
The chief object, however, of my lecture on the “Stratification of Language” was not so much to show that inflection everywhere presupposes combination, and combination juxtaposition, but rather to call attention to a fact that had not been noticed before, viz.: that there is hardly any language, which is not at the same time isolating, combinatory, and inflectional.
It had been the custom in classifying languages morphologically to represent some languages, for instance Chinese, as isolating; others, such as Turkish or Finnish, as combinatory; others, such as Sanskrit or Hebrew, as inflectional. Without contesting the value of this classification for certain purposes, I pointed out that even Chinese, the very type of the isolating class, is not free from combinatory forms, and that the more highly developed among the combinatory languages, such as Hungarian, Finnish, Tamil, etc., show the clearest traces of incipient inflection. “The difficulty is not,” as I said, “to show the transition of one stratum of speech into another, but rather to draw a sharp line between the different strata. The same, difficulty was felt in Geology, and led Sir Charles Lyell to invent such pliant names as Eocene, Meiocene, and Pleiocene, names which indicate a mere dawn, a minority, or a majority of new formations, but do not draw a fast and hard line, cutting off one stratum from the other. Natural growth and even merely mechanical accumulation and accretion, here as elsewhere, are so minute and almost imperceptible that they defy all strict scientific terminology, and force upon us the lesson that we must be satisfied with an approximate accuracy.”
Holding these opinions, and having established them by an amount of evidence which, though it might easily be increased, seemed to me sufficient, I did not think it safe to assign to the three stages in the history of the Aryan languages, the juxtapositional, the combinatory, and the inflectional, a strictly successive character, still less to admit in the growth of the Aryan languages a number of definite stages, which should be sharply separated from each other, and assume an almost chronological character. I fully admit that wherever inflectional forms in the Aryan languages have yielded to a rational analysis, we see that they are preceded chronologically by combinatory formations; nor should I deny for one moment that combinatory forms presuppose an antecedent, and therefore chronologically more ancient stage of mere juxtaposition. What I doubt is whether, as soon as combination sets in, juxtaposition ceases, and whether the first appearance of inflection puts an end to the continued working of combination.
It seems to me, even if we argue only on à priori grounds, that there must have been at least a period of transition during which both principles were at work together, and I hardly can understand what certain scholars mean if they represent the principle of inflection as a sudden psychological change which, as soon as it has taken place, makes a return to combination altogether impossible. If, instead of arguing à priori, we look the facts of language in the face, we cannot help seeing that, even after that period during which it is supposed that the United Aryan language had attained its full development, I mean at a time when Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin had become completely separated, as so many national dialects, each with its own fully developed inflectional grammar, the power of combination was by no means extinct. The free power of composition, which is so manifest in Sanskrit and Greek, testifies to the continued working of combination in strictly historical times. I see no real distinction between the transition of Néa pólis, i.e., new town, into Neápolis, and into Naples, and the most primitive combination in Chinese, and I maintain that as long as a language retains that unbounded faculty of composition, which we see in Sanskrit, in Greek, and in German, the growth of new inflectional forms from combinatory germs must be admitted as possible. Forms such as the passive aorist in Greek, ἐτέθην, or the weak preterite in Gothic nas-i-da, nas-i-dédjau, need not have been formed before the Aryan family broke up into national languages; and forms such as Italian meco, fratelmo, or the future avro, I shall have, though not exactly of the same workmanship, show at all events that analogous powers are at work even in the latest periods of linguistic growth.
Holding these opinions, which, as far as I know, have never been controverted, I ought perhaps, when I came to publish the preceding Lecture, to have defended my position against the powerful arguments advanced in the meantime by my old friend, Professor G. Curtius, in support of a diametrically opposite opinion in his classical essay, “On the Chronology of the Indo-Germanic Languages,” published in 1867, new edition, 1873. While I had endeavored to show that juxtaposition, combination, and inflection, though following each other in succession, do not represent chronological periods, but represent phases, strongly developed, it is true, in certain languages, but extending their influence far beyond the limits commonly assigned to them, Professor Curtius tried to establish the chronological character not only of these three, but of four other phases or periods in the history of Aryan speech. Confining himself to what he considers the undivided Aryan language to have been, before it was broken up into national dialects, such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, he proceeds to subdivide the antecedent period of its growth into seven definite stages, each marked by a definite character, and each representing a sum of years in the chronology of the Aryan language. As I had found it difficult to treat Chinese as entirely juxtapositional, or Turkish as entirely combinatory, or Sanskrit as entirely inflectional, it was perhaps not to be wondered at that not even the persuasive pleading of my learned friend could convince me of the truth of the more minute chronological division proposed by him in his learned essay. But it would hardly have been fair if, on the present occasion, I had reprinted my “Rede Lecture” without explaining why I had altered nothing in my theory of linguistic growth, why I retained these three phases and no more, and why I treated even these, not as chronological periods, in the strict sense of the word, but as preponderating tendencies, giving an individual character to certain classes of language, without being totally absent in others. Professor Curtius is one of the few scholars with whom it is pleasant to differ. He has shown again and again that what he cares for is truth, not victory, and when he has defended his position against attacks not always courteous, he has invariably done so, not with hard words, but with hard arguments. I therefore feel no hesitation in stating plainly to him where his theories seem to me either not fully supported, or even contradicted by the facts of language, and I trust that this free exchange of ideas, though in public, will be as pleasant as our conversations in private used to be, now more than thirty years ago.
Let us begin with the First Period, which Professor Curtius calls the Root-Period. There must have been, as I tried to explain before, a period for the Aryan languages, during which they stood on a level with Chinese, using nothing but roots, or radical words, without having reduced any of them to a purely formal character, without having gone through the process of changing what Chinese grammarians call full words into empty words. I have always held, that to speak of roots as mere abstractions, as the result of grammatical theory, is self-contradictory. Roots which never had any real or historical existence may have been invented both in modern and ancient collections or Dhâtupâṭhas; but that is simply the fault of our etymological analysis, and in no way affects the fact, that the Aryan, like all other languages we know, began with roots. We may doubt the legitimacy of certain chemical elements, but not the reality of chemical elements in general. Language, in the sense in which we use the word, begins with roots, which are not only the ultimate facts for the Science of Language, but real facts in the history of human speech. To deny their historical reality would be tantamount to denying cause and effect.
Logically, no doubt, it is possible to distinguish between a root as a mere postulate, and a root used as an actual word. That distinction has been carefully elaborated by Indian grammarians and philosophers, but it does in no way concern us in purely historical researches. What I mean by a root used in real language is this: when we analyze a cluster of Sanskrit words, such as yodha-s, a fighter, yodhaka-s, a fighter, yoddhâ, a fighter, yodhana-m, fighting, yuddhi-s, a fight, yuyutsu-s, wishing to fight, â-yudha-m, a weapon, we easily see that they presuppose an element yudh, to fight, and that they are all derived from that element by well-known grammatical suffixes. Now is this yudh, which we call the root of all these words, a mere abstraction? Far from it. We find it as yudh used in the Veda either as a nominal or as a verbal base, according to suffixes by which it is followed. Thus yudh by itself would be a fighter, only that dh when final, has to be changed into t. We have goshu-yúdh-am, an accusative, the fighter among cows. In the plural we have yúdh-as, fighters; in the locative yudh-i, in the fight; in the instrumental, yudh-â, with the weapon. That is to say, we find that as a nominal base, yudh, without any determinative suffixes, may express fighting, the place of fighting, the instrument of fighting, and a fighter. If our grammatical analysis is right, we should have yudh as a nominal base in yúdh-ya-ti, lit. he goes to fighting, yudh-yá-te, pass.; (a)-yut-smahi, aor., either we were to fight, or we were fighters; yú-yut-sa-ti, he is to fight-fight; yudh-ya-s, to be fought (p. 94), etc. As a verbal base we find yudh, for instance, or yu-yudh-e, I have fought; in a-yud-dha, for a-yudh-ta, he fought. In the other Aryan languages this root has left hardly any traces; yet the Greek ὑσμῖν, and ὑσμίνη would be impossible without the root yudh.