Man is a classifying animal: in one sense it may be said that the whole process of speaking is nothing but distributing phenomena, of which no two are alike in every respect, into different classes on the strength of perceived similarities and dissimilarities. In the name-giving process we witness the same ineradicable and very useful tendency to see likenesses and to express similarity in the phenomena through similarity in name. Professor Hempl told me that one of his little daughters, when they had a black kitten which was called Nig (short for Nigger), immediately christened a gray kitten Grig and a brown one Brownig. Here we see the genesis of a suffix through a natural process, which has little in common with the gradual weakening of an originally independent word, as in -hood and the other instances mentioned above. In children’s speech similar instances are not unfrequent (cf. Ch. VII § [5]); Meringer L 148 mentions a child of 1.7 who had the following forms: augn, ogn, agn, for ‘augen, ohren, haare.’ How many words formed or transformed in the same way must we require in order to speak of a suffix? Shall we recognize one in Romanic leve, greve (cf. Fr. grief), which took the place of leve, grave? Here, as Schuchardt aptly remarks, it was not only the opposite signification, but also the fact that the words were frequently uttered shortly after one another, that made one word influence the other.
The classifying instinct often manifests itself in bringing words together in form which have something in common as regards signification. In this way we have smaller classes and larger classes, and sometimes it is impossible for us to say in what way the likeness in form has come about: we can only state the fact that at a given time the words in question have a more or less close resemblance. But in other cases it is easy to see which word of the group has influenced the others or some other. In the examples I am about to give, I have been more concerned to bring together words that exhibit the classifying tendency than to try to find out the impetus which directed the formation of the several groups.
In OE. we have some names of animals in -gga: frogga, stagga, docga, wicga, now frog, stag, dog, wig. Savour and flavour go together, the latter (OFr. flaur) having its v from the former. Groin, I suppose, has its diphthong from loin; the older form was grine, grynd(e). Claw, paw (earlier powe, OFr. pol). Rim, brim. Hook, nook. Gruff, rough (tough, bluff, huff—miff, tiff, whiff). Fleer, leer, jeer. Twig, sprig. Munch, crunch (lunch). Without uttering or muttering a word. The trees were lopped and topped. In old Gothonic the word for ‘eye’ has got its vowel from the word for ‘ear,’ with which it was frequently collocated: augo(n), auso(n), but in the modern languages the two words have again been separated in their phonetic development. In French I suspect that popular instinct will class the words air, terre, mer together as names of what used to be termed the ‘elements,’ in spite of the different spelling and origin of the sounds. In Russian kogot’ ‘griffe’ (claw), nogot’ ‘ongle’ (fingernail), and lokot’ ‘coude’ (elbow), three names of parts of the body, go together in flexion and accent (Boyer et Speranski, Manuel de la l. russe 33). So do in Latin culex ‘gnat’ and pulex ‘flea.’ Atrox, ferox. A great many examples have been collected by M. Bloomfield, “On Adaptation of Suffixes in Congeneric Classes of Substantives” (Am. Journal of Philol. XII, 1891), from which I take a few. A considerable number of designations of parts of the body were formed with heteroclitic declension as r-n stems (cf. above, XVIII § 2): ‘liver,’ Gr. hēpar, hēpatos, ‘udder,’ Gr. outhar, outhatos, ‘thigh,’ Lat. femur, feminis, further Aryan names for blood, wing, viscera, excrement, etc. Other designations of parts of the body were partly assimilated to this class, having also n stems in the oblique cases, though their nominative was formed in a different way. Words for ‘right’ and ‘left’ frequently influence one another and adopt the same ending, and so do opposites generally: Bloomfield explains the t in the Gothonic word corresponding to E. white, where from Sanskr. we should expect th, çveta, as due to the word for ‘black’; Goth. hweits, swarts, ON. hvítr, svartr, etc. A great many names of birds and other animals appear with the same ending, Gr. glaux ‘owl,’ kokkux ‘cuckoo,’ korax ‘crow,’ ortux ‘quail,’ aix ‘goat,’ alopex ‘fox,’ bombux ‘silkworm,’ lunx ‘lynx’ and many others, also some plant-names. Names for winter, summer, day, evening, etc., also to a great extent form groups. In a subsequent article (in IF vi. 66 ff.) Bloomfield pursues the same line of thought and explains likenesses in various words of related signification, in direct opposition to the current explanation through added root-determinatives, as due to blendings (cf. above, Ch. XVII § [6]). In Latin the inchoative value of the verbs in -esco is due to the accidentally inherent continuous character of a few verbs of the class: adolesco, senesco, cresco; but the same suffix is also found in the oldest words for ‘asking, wishing, searching,’ retained in E. ask, wish, G. forschen, which thus become a small group linked together by form and meaning alike.
XIX.—§ 17. Character of Suffixes.
There seems undoubtedly to be something accidental or haphazard in most of these transferences of sounds from one word to another through which groups of phonetically and semantically similar words are created; the process works unsystematically, or rather, it consists in spasmodic efforts at regularizing something which is from the start utterly unsystematic. But where conditions are favourable, i.e. where the notional connexion is patent and the phonetic element is such that it can easily be added to many words, the group will tend constantly to grow larger within the natural boundaries given by the common resemblance in signification.
I have no doubt that the vast majority of our formatives, such as suffixes and flexional endings, have arisen in this way through transference of some part, which at first was unmeaning in itself, from one word to another in which it had originally no business, and then to another and another, taking as it were a certain colouring from the words in which it is found, and gradually acquiring a more or less independent signification or function of its own. In long words, such as were probably frequent in primitive speech, and which were to the minds of the speakers as unanalyzable as marmalade or crocodile is to Englishmen nowadays, it would be perhaps most natural to keep the beginning unchanged and to modify the final syllable or syllables to bring about conformity with some word with which it was associated; hence the prevalence of suffixes in our languages, hence also the less systematic character of these suffixes as compared with the prefixes, most of which have originated in independent words, such as adverbs. What is from the merely phonetic point of view the ‘same’ suffix, in different languages may have the greatest variety of meaning, sometimes no discernible meaning at all, and it is in many cases utterly impossible to find out why in one particular language it can be used with one stem and not with another. Anyone going through the collections in Brugmann’s great Grammar will be struck with this purely accidental character of the use of most of the suffixes—a fact which would be simply unthinkable if each of them had originally one definite, well-determined signification, but which is easy to account for on the hypothesis here adopted. And then many of them are not added to ready-made words or ‘roots,’ but form one indivisible whole with the initial part of the word; cf., for instance, the suffix -le in English squabble, struggle, wriggle, babble, mumble, bustle, etc.
XIX.—§ 18. Brugmann’s Theory of Gender.
As I have said, man is a classifying animal, and in his language tends to express outwardly class distinctions which he feels more or less vaguely. One of the most important of these class divisions, and at the same time one of the most difficult to explain, is that of the three ‘genders’ in our Aryan languages. If we are to believe Brugmann, we have here a case of what I have in this work termed secretion. In his well-known paper, “Das Nominalgeschlecht in den indogermanischen Sprachen” (in Techmer’s Zs. f. allgem. Sprachwissensch. 4. 100 ff., cf. also his reply to Roethe’s criticism, PBB 15. 522) he puts the question: How did it come about that the old Aryans attached a definite gender (or sex, geschlecht) to words meaning foot, head, house, town, Gr. pous, for instance, being masculine, kephalē feminine, oikos masculine, and polis feminine? The generally accepted explanation, according to which the imagination of mankind looked upon lifeless things as living beings, is, Brugmann says, unsatisfactory; the masculine and feminine of grammatical gender are merely unmeaning forms and have nothing to do with the ideas of masculinity and femininity; for even where there exists a natural difference of sex, language often employs only one gender. So in German we have der hase, die maus, and der weibliche hase is not felt to be self-contradictory. Again, in the history of languages we often find words which change their gender exclusively on account of their form. Thus, in German, many words in -e, such as traube, niere, wade, which were formerly masculine, have now become feminine, because the great majority of substantives in -e are feminine (erde, ehre, farbe, etc.). Nothing accordingly hinders us from supposing that grammatical gender originally had nothing at all to do with natural sex. The question, therefore, according to Brugmann, is essentially reduced to this: How did it come to pass that the suffix -a was used to designate female beings? At first it had no connexion with femininity, witness Lat. aqua ‘water’ and hundreds of other words; but among the old words with that ending there happened to be some denoting females: mama ‘mother’ and gena ‘woman’ (compare E. quean, queen). Now, in the history of some suffixes we see that, without any regard to their original etymological signification, they may adopt something of the radical meaning of the words to which they are added, and transfer that meaning to new formations. In this way mama and gena became the starting-point for analogical formations, as if the idea of female was denoted by the ending, and new words were formed, e.g. Lat. dea ‘goddess’ from deus ‘god,’ equa ‘mare’ from equus ‘horse,’ etc. The suffix -iē- or -ī- probably came to denote feminine sex by a similar process, possibly from Skr. strī ‘woman,’ which may have given a fem. *wḷqī ‘she-wolf’ to *wḷqos ‘wolf.’ The above is a summary of Brugmann’s reasoning; it may interest the reader to know that a closely similar point of view had, several years previously, been taken by a far-seeing scholar in respect to a totally different language, namely Hottentot, where, according to Bleek, CG 2. 118-22, 292-9, a class division which had originally nothing to do with sex has been employed to distinguish natural sex. I transcribe a few of Bleek’s remarks: “The apparent sex-denoting character which the classification of the nouns now has in the Hottentot language was evidently imparted to it after a division of the nouns into classes[98] had taken place. It probably arose, in the first instance, from the possibly accidental circumstance that the nouns indicating (respectively) man and woman were formed with different derivative suffixes, and consequently belonged to different classes (or genders) of nouns, and that these suffixes thus began to indicate the distinction of sex in nouns where it could be distinguished” (p. 122). “To assume, for example, that the suffix of the m. sg. (-p) had originally the meaning of ‘man,’ or the fem. sg. (-s) that of ‘woman,’ would in no way explain the peculiar division of the nouns into classes as we find it in Hottentot, and would be opposed to all that is probable regarding the etymology of these suffixes, and also to the fact that so many nouns are included in the sex-denoting classes to which the distinction of sex can only be applied by a great effort.... If the word for ‘man’ were formed with one suffix (-p), and the word indicating ‘woman’ (be it accidentally or not) by another (-s), then other nouns would be formed with the same suffixes, in analogy with these, until the majority of the nouns of each sex were formed with certain suffixes which would thus assume a sex-denoting character” (p. 298).
Brugmann’s view on Aryan gender has not been unchallenged. The weakest points in his arguments are, of course, that there are so few old naturally feminine words in -a and -i to take as starting-points for such a thoroughgoing modification of the grammatical system, and that Brugmann was unable to give any striking explanation of the concord of adjectives and pronouns with words that had not these endings, but which were nevertheless treated as masculines and feminines respectively. It would lead us too far here to give any minute account of the discussion which arose on these points;[99] one of the most valuable contributions seems to me Jacobi’s suggestion (Compositum u. Nebensatz, 1897, 115 ff.) that the origin of grammatical gender is not to be sought in the noun, but in the pronoun (he finds a parallel in the Dravidian languages)—but even he does not find a fully satisfactory explanation, and the Aryan gender distinction reaches back to so remote an antiquity, thousands of years before any literary tradition, that we shall most probably never be able to fathom all its mysteries. Of late years less attention has been given to the problem of the feminine, which presented itself to Brugmann, than to the distinction between two classes, one of which was characterized by the use of a nominative in -s, which is now looked upon as a ‘transitive-active’ case, and the other by no ending or by an ending -m, which is the same as was used as the accusative in the first class (an ‘intransitive-passive’ case), and an attempt has been made to see in the distinction something analogous to the division found in Algonkin languages between a class of ‘living’ and another of ‘lifeless’ things—though these two terms are not to be taken in the strictly scientific sense, for primitive men do not reason in the same way as we do, but ascribe or deny ‘life’ to things according to criteria which we have great difficulty in apprehending. This would mean a twofold division into one class comprising the historical masculines and feminines, and another comprising the neuters.
As to the feminine, we saw two old endings characterizing that gender, a and i. With regard to the latter, I venture to throw out the suggestion that it is connected with diminutive suffixes containing that vowel in various languages: on the whole, the sound has a natural affinity with the notion of small, slight, insignificant and weak (see Ch. XX § [8]). In some African languages we find two classes, one comprising men and big things, and the other women and small things (Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten 23), and there is nothing unnatural in the supposition that similar views may have obtained with our ancestors. This would naturally account for Skr. vṛk-ī ‘she-wolf’ (orig. little wolf, ‘wolfy’) from Skr. vṛkas, napt-ī, Lat. neptis, G. nichte, Skr. dēv-ī, ‘goddess,’ etc. But the feminine -a is to me just as enigmatic as, say, the d of the old ablative.