[3.] Theokritos, xvii. 9.
[4.] In my essay On the Relation of Bengali to the Aryan and Aboriginal Languages of India, published in 1848, I tried to explain these plural suffixes, such as dig, gaṇa, jâti, varga, dala. I had translated the last word by band, supposing from Wilson’s Dictionary, and from the Śabda-kalpa-druma that dala could be used in the sense of band or multitude. I doubt, however, whether dala is ever used in Sanskrit in that sense, and I feel certain that it was not used in that sense with sufficient frequency to account for its adoption in Bengali. Dr. Friedrich Müller, in his useful abstracts of some of the grammars discovered by the Novara in her journey round the earth (1857–59), has likewise referred dal to the Sanskrit dala, but he renders what I had in English rendered by band, by the German word Band. This can only be an accident. I meant band in the sense of a band of robbers, which in German would be Bande. He seems to have misunderstood me, and to have taken band for the German Band, which means a ribbon. Might dala in Bengali be the Dravidian taḷa or daḷa, a host, a crowd, which Dr. Caldwell (p. 197) mentions as a possible etymon of the pluralizing suffix in the Dravidian languages? Bengali certainly took the idea of forming its plurals by composition with words expressive of plurality from its Dravidian neighbor, and it is not impossible that in some cases it might have transferred the very word daḷa, crowd. This daḷa and taḷa appears in Tamil as kala and gala, and as Sanskrit k may in Sinhalese be represented by v (loka = lova), I thought that the plural termination used in Sinhalese after inanimate nouns might possibly be a corruption of the Tamil kala. Mr. Childers, however, in his able “Essay on the formation of the Plural of Neuter Nouns in Sinhalese” (J. R. A. S., 1874, p. 40), thinks that the Sinhalese vala is a corruption of the Sanskrit vana, forest, an opinion which seems likewise to be held by Mr. D’Alwis (l.c. p. 48). As a case in point, in support of mv own opinion, Mr. Childers mentioned to me the Sinhalese malvaru, Sanskrit mâlâ-kâra, a wreath-maker, a gardener. In Persian both ân and hâ are remnants of decayed plural terminations, not collective words added to the base.
[5.] Stanislas Julien, Exercises Pratiques, p. 14.
[6.] Endlicher, Chinesische Grammatik, § 122. Wade, Progressive Course on the Parts of Speech, p. 102. A different division of words adopted by Chinese grammarians is that into dead and live words, ssè-tsé and sing-tsé, the former comprising nouns, the latter verbs. The same classes are sometimes called tsing-tsé and ho-tsé, unmoved and moved words. This shows how purposeless it would be to try to find out whether language began with noun or verb. In the earliest phase of speech the same word was both noun and verb, according to the use that was made of it, and it is so still to a great extent in Chinese. See Endlicher, Chinesische Grammatik, § 219.
[7.] Agglutinative seems an unnecessarily uncouth word, and as implying a something which glues two words together, a kind of Bindevocal, it is objectionable as a technical term. Combinatory is technically more correct, and less strange than agglutinative.
[8.] Professor Pott, in his article entitled “Max Müller und die Kennzeichen der Sprachverwandtschaft,” published in 1855, in the Journal of the German Oriental Society, vol. ix. p. 412, says, in confutation of Bunsen’s view of a real historical progress of language from the lowest to the highest stage: “So cautious an inquirer as W. von Humboldt declines expressly, in the last chapter of his work on the Diversity of the Structure of Human Language (p. 414), any conclusions as to a real historical progress from one stage of language to another, or at least does not commit himself to any definite opinion. This is surely something very different from that gradual progress, and it would be a question whether, by admitting such an historical progress from stage to stage, we should not commit an absurdity hardly less palpable than by trying to raise infusoria into horses or still further into men. [What was an absurdity in 1855 does not seem to be so in 1875.] Mr. Bunsen, it is true, does not hesitate to call the monosyllabic idiom of the Chinese an inorganic formation. But how can we get from an inorganic to an organic language? In nature such a thing would be impossible. No stone becomes a plant, no plant a tree, by however wonderful a metamorphosis, except, in a different sense, by the process of nutrition, i.e., by regeneration. The former question, which Mr. Bunsen answers in the affirmative, is disposed of by him with the short dictum: ‘The question whether a language can be supposed to begin with inflections, appears to us simply an absurdity;’ but unfortunately he does not condescend, by a clear illustration, to make that absurdity palpable. Why, in inflectional languages, should the grammatical form always have added itself to the matter subsequently and ab extra? Why should it not partially from the beginning have been created with it and in it, as having a meaning with something else, but not having antecedently a meaning of its own?”
[9.] Cf. D. G. Brinton, The Myths of the New World, p. 6, note.
[10.] Julien, Exercises Pratiques, p. 120. Endlicher, Chineseische Grammatik, § 161. See, also, Nöldeke, Orient und Occident, vol. i. p. 759. Grammar of the Bornu Language (London, 1853), p. 55: “In the Treaty the genitive is supplied by the relative pronoun agu, singularly corroborative of the Rev. R. Garnett’s theory of the genitive case.”
[11.] “Time changes the meaning of words as it does their sound. Thus, many old words are retained in compounds, but have lost their original signification. E.g., ’k·eu, mouth, has been replaced in colloquial usage by ’tsui, but it is still employed extensively in compound terms and in derived senses. Thus, k·wai‘ ’k·eu a rapid talker, .men ’k·eu, door, ,kwan ’k·eu, custom house. So also muh, the original word for eye, has given place to ’yen, tsing, or ’yen alone. It is, however, employed with other words in derived senses. E.g., muh hia·, at present; muh luh, table of contents.
“The primitive word for head, ’sheu, has been replaced by .t‘eu, but is retained with various words in combination. E.g., tseh ’sheu, robber chief.”