Let us now look to modern classical languages such as French and Italian. Most of the grammatical terminations are the same as in Latin, only changed by phonetic corruption. Thus j'aime is ego amo, tu aimes, tu amas, il aime, ille amat. There was originally a final t in French il aime, and it comes out again in such phrases as aime-t-il? Thus the French imperfect corresponds to the Latin imperfect, the Parfait défini to the Latin perfect. But what about the French future? There is no similarity between amabo and j'aimerai. Here then we have a new grammatical form, sprung up, as it were, within the recollection of men; or, at least, in the broad daylight of history. Now, did the termination rai bud forth like a blossom in spring? or did some wise people meet together to invent this new termination, and pledge themselves to use it instead of the old termination bo? Certainly not. We see first of all that in all the Romance languages the terminations of the future are identical with the auxiliary verb to have.[212] In French you find—
j'ai and je chanter-ai nous avons and nous chanterons.
tu as and tu chanter-as vous avez and vous chanterez.
il a and il chanter-a ils ont and ils chanteront.
But besides this, we actually find in Spanish and [pg 230] Provençal the apparent termination of the future used as an independent word and not yet joined to the infinitive. We find in Spanish, instead of “lo hare,” I shall do it, the more primitive form hacer lo he; i.e., facere id habeo. We find in Provençal, dir vos ai instead of je vous dirai; dir vos em instead of nous vous dirons. There can be no doubt, therefore, that the Romance future was originally a compound of the auxiliary verb to have with an infinitive; and I have to say, easily took the meaning of I shall say.
Here, then, we see clearly how grammatical forms arise. A Frenchman looks upon his futures as merely grammatical forms. He has no idea, unless he is a scholar, that the terminations of his futures are identical with the auxiliary verb avoir. The Roman had no suspicion that amabo was a compound; but it can be proved to contain an auxiliary verb as clearly as the French future. The Latin future was destroyed by means of phonetic corruption. When the final letters lost their distinct pronunciation it became impossible to keep the imperfect amabam separate from the future amabo. The future was then replaced by dialectical regeneration, for the use of habeo with an infinitive is found in Latin, in such expressions as habeo dicere, I have to say, which would imperceptibly glide into I shall say.[213] In fact, wherever we look we see that, the future is expressed by means of composition. We have in English I shall and thou wilt, which mean originally I am bound and thou intendest. In German we use werden, the Gothic vairthan, which means originally to go, to turn towards. In modern Greek we find thelō, I will, in thelō dōsei, I shall give. In Roumansch we meet [pg 231] with vegnir, to come, forming the future veng a vegnir, I shall come; whereas in French je viens de dire, I come from saying, is equivalent to “I have just said.” The French je vais dire is almost a future, though originally it is vado dicere, I go to say. The Dorsetshire, “I be gwâin to goo a-pickèn stuones,” is another case in point. Nor is there any doubt that in the Latin bo of amabo we have the old auxiliary bhû, to be, and in the Greek future in σω, the old auxiliary as, to be.[214]
We now go back another step, and ask the question which we asked many times before, How can a mere d produce so momentous a change as that from I love to I loved? As we have learnt in the meantime that English goes back to Anglo-Saxon, and is closely related to continental Saxon and Gothic, we look at once to the Gothic imperfect in order to see whether it has preserved any traces of the original compound; for, after what we have seen in the previous cases, we are no doubt prepared to find here, too, grammatical terminations mere remnants of independent words.
In Gothic there is a verb nasjan, to nourish. Its preterite is as follows:—
| Singular. | Dual. | Plural. |
| nas-i-da | nas-i-dêdu | nas-i-dêdum. |
| nas-i-dês | nas-i-dêtuts | nas-i-dêduþ. |
| nas-i-da | —— | nas-i-dedun. |
The subjunctive of the preterite: