Again, to quote only one other authority:—“In closing, for the present, the discussion of this extensive subject, it is proposed to make a few remarks upon the so-called verb-substantive, respecting the nature and functions of which there has perhaps been more misapprehension than about any other element of language. It is well known that many grammarians have been accustomed to represent this element as forming the basis of all verbal expression, and as a necessary ingredient in every logical proposition. It would seem to follow, from this statement, that nations so unfortunate as to be without it, could neither employ verbal expression nor frame a logical proposition. How far this is the case will be seen hereafter: at present we shall make some brief remarks on this verb, and on the substitutes usually employed in dialects where it is formally wanting. It will be sufficient to produce a few prominent instances, as the multiplying of examples from all known languages would be a mere repetition of the same general phenomena.
“In the portion of the essay relating to the Coptic, it was observed: ‘What are called the auxiliary and substantive verbs in Coptic are still more remote from all essential verbal character (than the so-called verbal roots). On examination they will almost invariably be found to be articles, pronouns, particles, or abstract nouns, and to derive their supposed verbal functions entirely from their accessories, or from what they imply.’ In fact any one who examines a good Coptic grammar or dictionary will find that there is nothing formally corresponding to our am, art, is, was, &c., though there is a counterpart to Lat. fieri (sthopi) and another to poni (chi, neuter passive of che); both occasionally rendered to be, which, however, is not their radical import. The Egyptians were not, however, quite destitute of resources in this matter, but had at least half a dozen methods of rendering the Greek verb-substantive when they wished to do so. The element most commonly employed is the demonstrative pe, te, ne; used also in a slightly modified form for the definite article; pe = is, having reference to a subject in the singular masculine; te, to a singular feminine; and ne = are, to both genders in the plural. The past tense is indicated by the addition of a particle expressing remoteness. Here, then, we find as the counterpart of the verb-substantive an element totally foreign to all the received ideas of a verb; and that instead of its being deemed necessary to say in formal terms ‘Petrus est,’ ‘Maria est,’ ‘Homines sunt,’ it is quite sufficient, and perfectly intelligible, to say, ‘Petrus hic,’ ‘Maria hæc,’ ‘Homines hi.’ The above forms, according to Champollion and other investigators of ancient hieroglyphics, occur in the oldest known monumental inscriptions, showing plainly that the ideas of the ancient Egyptians as to the method of expressing the category to be, did not exactly accord with those of some modern grammarians.... Every Semitic scholar knows that personal pronouns are employed to represent the verb-substantive in all the known dialects, exactly as in Coptic, but with less variety of modification. In this construction it is not necessary that the pronoun should be of the same person as the subject of the proposition. It is optional in most dialects to say either ego ego, nos nos, for ego sum, nos sumus, or ego ille, nos illi. The phrase ‘Ye are the salt of the earth,’ is, in the Syriac version, literally ‘You they (i.e. the persons constituting) the salt of the earth.’ Nor is this employment of the personal pronoun confined to the dialects above specified, it being equally found in Basque, in Galla, in Turco-Tartarian, and various American languages.... It is true that the Malayan, Javanese, and Malagassy grammarians talk of words signifying to be; but an attentive comparison of the elements which they profess to give as such, shows clearly that they are no verbs at all, but simply pronouns or indeclinable particles, commonly indicating the time, place, or manner of the specified action or relation. It is not therefore easy to conceive how the mind of a Philippine islander, or of any other person, can supply a word totally unknown to it, and which there is not a particle of evidence to show that it was ever thought of.... A verb-substantive, such as is commonly conceived, vivifying all connected speech, and binding together the terms of every logical proposition, is much upon a footing with the phlogiston of the chemists of the last generation, regarded as a necessary pabulum of combustion, that is to say, vox et præterea nihil.... If a given subject be ‘I,’ ‘thou,’ ‘he,’ ‘this,’ ‘that,’ ‘one;’ if it be ‘here,’ ‘there,’ ‘yonder,’ ‘thus,’ ‘in,’ ‘on,’ ‘at,’ ‘by;’ if it ‘sits,’ ‘stands,’ ‘remains,’ or ‘appears,’ we need no ghost to tell us that it is, nor any grammarian or metaphysician to proclaim that recondite fact in formal terms.”[248]
Having thus briefly considered the philology of predicative words, we must next proceed to the not less important matter of the philology of predication itself. And here we shall find that the evidence is sufficiently definite. We have already seen good reason for concluding that what Grimm has called the “antediluvian” pronominal roots were the phonetic equivalents of gesture-signs—or rather, that they implied accompanying gesture-signs for the conveyance of their meaning. Now, it is on all hands allowed that these pronominal roots, or demonstrative elements, afterwards became attached to nouns and verbs as affixes or suffixes, and so in older languages constitute the machinery both of declension and conjugation. Thus, we can trace back, stage by stage, the form of predication as it occurs in the most highly developed, or inflective, languages, to that earliest stage of language in general, which I have called the indicative. In order to show this somewhat more in detail, I will begin by sketching these several stages, and then illustrate the earliest of them that still happen to survive by quoting the modes of predication which they actually present.
As we thus trace language backwards, its structure is found to undergo the following simplification. First of all, auxiliary words, suffixes, affixes, prepositions, copulas, particles, and, in short, all inflections, agglutinations, or other parts of speech which are concerned in the indication of relationship between the other component parts of a sentence, progressively dwindle and disappear. When these, which I will call relational words, are shed, language is left with what may be termed object-words (including pronominal words), attributive-words, action-words, and words expressive of states of mind or body, which, therefore, may be designated condition-words. Roughly speaking, this classification corresponds with the grammatical nouns, pronouns, adjectives, active verbs, and passive verbs; but as our regress through the history of language necessitates a total disregard of all grammatical forms, it will conduce to clearness in my exposition if we consent to use the terms suggested.
The next thing we notice is that the distinction between object-words and attributive-words begins to grow indistinct, and eventually all but disappears: substantives and adjectives are fused in one, and whether the resulting word is to be understood as subject or predicate—as the name of the object or the name of a quality—depends upon its position in the sentence, upon the tone in which it is uttered, or, in still earlier stages, upon the gestures by which it is accompanied. Thus, as Professor Sayce remarks, “the apposition of two substantives [and, a fortiori, of two such partly or wholly undifferentiated words as we are now contemplating] is the germ out of which no less than three grammatical conceptions have developed—those of the genitive, of the predicate, and of the adjective.”[249]
While this process of fusion is being traced in the case of substantives and adjectives, it becomes at the same time observable that the definition of verbs is gradually growing more and more vague, until it is difficult, and eventually impossible, to distinguish a verb at all as a separate part of speech.
Thus we are led back by continuous stages, or through greater and greater simplifications of language-structure, to a state of things where words present what naturalists might term so generalized a type as to include, each within itself, all the functions that afterwards severally devolve upon different parts of speech. Like those animalcules which are at the same time but single cells and entire organisms, these are at the same time single words and independent sentences. Moreover, as in the one case there is life, in the other case there is meaning; but the meaning, like the life, is vague and unevolved: the sentence is an organism without organs, and is generalized only in the sense that it is protoplasmic. In view of these facts (which, be it observed, are furnished by languages still existing, as well as by the philological record of languages long since extinct) it is impossible to withhold assent from the now universal doctrine of philologists—“language diminishes the farther we look back in such a way, that we cannot forbear concluding it must once have had no existence at all.”[250]
From all the evidence which has now been presented showing that aboriginally words were sentences, it follows that aboriginally there can have been no distinction between terms and propositions. Nevertheless, although this follows deductively from the general truth in question, it is desirable that we should study in more detail the special application of the principle to the case of formal predication, seeing that, as so often previously remarked, this is the place where my opponents have taken their stand. The reader will remember that I have already disposed of their assertions with regard to the copula. It will now be my object to show that their analysis is equally erroneous where it is concerned with both the other elements of which a formal proposition consists. Not having taken the trouble to acquaint themselves with the results of linguistic research, and therefore relying only on what may be termed the accidents of language as these happen to occur in the Aryan branch of the great language-tree, these writers assume that a proposition must always and everywhere have been thrown into the precisely finished form in which it was analyzed by Aristotle. As a matter of fact, however, it is now well known that such is not the case; that the form of predication as we have it in our European languages has been the outcome of a prolonged course of evolution; and that in its most primitive stage, or in the earliest stage which happens to have been preserved in the palæontology of language, predication can scarcely be said to have been differentiated from what I have called indication. For the sake of placing this important fact beyond the reach of doubt, I will begin by quoting the statements of a few among the leading authorities upon the philology of the subject.
“Primitive man would not trouble himself much with such propositions as ‘Man is mortal,’ ‘Gold is heavy,’ which are a source of such unfailing delight to the formal logician; but if he found it necessary to employ permanent attribute-words, would naturally throw them into what is called the attributive form, by placing them in immediate proximity with the noun, whose inflections they would afterwards assume. And so the verb gradually came to assume the purely formal function of predication. The use of verbs denoting action necessitated the formation of verbs to denote ‘rest,’ ‘continuance in state,’ and when, in course of time, it became necessary in certain cases to predicate permanent as well as changing attributes, these words were naturally employed for the purpose, and such a sentence as ‘The sun continues bright’ was simply ‘The bright sun’ in another form. By degrees these verbs became so worn away in meaning, gradually coming to signify simple existence, that at last they lost all vestiges of meaning whatever, and came simply to be marks of predication. Such is the history of the verb ‘to be,’ which in popular language has entirely lost even the sense of ‘existence.’ Again, in a still more advanced state, it was found necessary to speak, not only of things, but of their attributes. Thus such a sentence as ‘Whiteness is an attribute of snow,’ has identically the same meaning as ‘Snow is white’ and ‘White snow;’ and the change of ‘white’ into ‘whiteness’ is a purely formal device to enable us to place an attribute-word as the subject of a proposition.”[251]
“Now comes a very important consideration, that not only is the order of subject and predicate to a great extent conventional, but that the very idea of the distinction between subject and predicate is purely linguistic, and has no foundation in the mind itself. In the first place, there is no necessity for a subject at all: in such a sentence as ‘It rains,’ there is no subject whatever, the it and the terminal s being merely formal signs of predication. ‘It rains: therefore I will take my umbrella,’ is a perfectly legitimate train of reasoning, but it would puzzle the cleverest logician to reduce it to any of his figures. Again, the mental proposition is not formed by thinking first of the subject, then of the copula, and then of the predicate; it is formed by thinking of the three simultaneously. When we formulate in our minds the proposition ‘All men are bipeds,’ we have two ideas, ‘all men’ and ‘an equal number of bipeds,’ or, more tersely, ‘as many men, as many bipeds,’ and we think of the two ideas simultaneously [i.e. in apposition] not one after the other, as we are forced to express them in speech. The simultaneity of conception is what is expressed by the copula in logic, and by the various forms of sentences in language. It by no means follows that logic is entirely destitute of value, but we shall not arrive at the real substratum of truth until we have eliminated that part of the science which is really nothing more than an imperfect analysis of language.”[252]