Immagini della pagina
PDF
ePub

homestead 1. The history of our preterite was seems to point in a like direction. Traces seem to be preserved in the Mosogothic wisan, to abide, sojourn; compared with the form wizon, to live. In these cases, the concrete sense of growing or standing or building or dwelling, has been as it were washed or worn out of the verb, and nothing left but the pale underlying texture of being.

279. I one day expressed to an intimate friend my regret that the collectors of vocabularies among savage tribes did not tell us something about the verb 'to be,' and especially I instanced the admirable word-collections of Mr. Wallace. To this conversation I owe the pleasure of being able to quote Mr. Wallace's own observations on this subject in his reply to my friend's query. He says:

As to such words as 'to be,' it is impossible to get them in any savage language till you know how to converse in it, or have some intelligent interpreter who can do so. In most of the languages such extremely general words do not exist, and the attempt to get them through an ordinary interpreter would inevitably lead to error. Even in such a comparatively high language as the Malay, it is difficult to express 'to be' in any of our senses, as the words used would express a number of other things as well, and only serve for 'to be' by a roundabout process.

From Western Australia, where the natives are forming an intermediate speech for communication with our people, and are converting morsels of English to their daily use, we have the following apposite illustrations : The words get down have been chosen as a synonym for the verb "to be," and the first question of a friendly native would be Mamman all right get down? meaning "Is father quite well?" for, strange to say, Mamman is the native word for father, whilst N-angan or Oongan stands for mother.' And a little further on, after mentioning the native fondness for grease, which they prefer to soap as an abstergent:- A neighbour

1

1 Icelandic-English Dictionary, Cleasby and Vigfusson, v. Búa.

T

of ours told me of two natives who presented themselves at her door to beg for grease, and who accounted for the dried-up condition of their legs, to which they ruefully pointed, by saying "in jail no grease get down;" the poor fellows having just been liberated from prison, where the authorities had failed to recognise unguents as a substitute for soap1.'

280. Ewald seems to think that the Hebrew substantive verb ' was developed from an ancient root meaning 'to make, prepare.'

In Sanskrit, as the substantive verb is said to have been developed from a root signifying to breathe, and accordingly this would be the original sense of the Greek σTɩ, the Latin est, the German ist, and our is. Here we catch a glimpse of the pedigree of our modern languages, and of the processes by which the most familiar instruments of speech have been prepared for their present use.

As the presentive noun fades or ripens into the symbol pronoun; as the pronoun passes into the still more subtle conjunction, so also do verbs graduate from concrete to abstract, form particular to general, from such a particular sense as stand or grow or dwell or breathe, to the large and comprehensive sense of being. Nor does the sublimation stop here.

The Symbol Verb.

281. It is not when this verb expresses simple existence that it has reached its highest state of refinement. When Coleridge said 'God has all the power that is,' he made this verb a predicate of existence. In this case the verb to be has still a concrete function, and is a presentive word: but in its state of highest abstraction it is equally in place in

1 An Australian Parsonage; or, the Settler and the Savage in Western Australia. By Mrs. Edward Millett. London: Edward Stanford, 1872.

every proposition whatever, and is the purest of symbols. We can express 'John runs' by John is running'; and every proposition is capable of being rendered into this form. The verb substantive here exhibits the highest possible form of verbal abstraction, and has become a pure symbol. It is the mere instrument of predication, and conveys by itself no idea whatever. It is the most symbolic of all the symbolic verbs, and it is symbolised to the utmost that is possible. For it contains only that which every verb must contain in order to be a verb at all, viz. the mental act of judgment.

FORMS OF THE SUBSTANTIVE- AND SYMBOL-VERB.

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small]

282. This verb has been more tenacious of its personal forms than our other verbs, and the remarks in the beginning' of this chapter about the disuse of the personal forms are less applicable here. Until the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries there was a larger variety of these forms, among which may be specified the N-forms of the third person plural, arn and weren.

The following is from one of the versified precepts of good manners which are so frequent in the literature of the fifteenth century.

Thus God pat is begynnere & former of alle thyng,

In nomber', weyght, & mesure alle pis world wrought he;
And mesure he taugħte us in alle his wise werkis,
Ensample by the extremitees pat vicious arn euer.

That is to say, Extremes are always wrong.

283. From the Strong verbs there sprang yet another symbol-verb which is now almost extinct. It is the verb worth, to be or become. In Saxon it was thus conjugated: WEORJAN, WEAR, GEWORDEN. The whole verb is still in full force in German: werden, ward, geworden. But with us it was already archaic in Chaucer's time, and it is but rarely found in his writings.

The form in which it is best known is the imperative or subjunctive-imperative: as, Wo worth the day; that is, 'Wo be to the day'; as Ezekiel xxx. 2, and in The Lady of the Lake,

Woe worth the chase, woe worth the day,

That cost thy life, my gallant grey.

We find the infinitive worthe in the Tale of Gamelyn :

Cursed mot he worthe bothe fleisch and blood,.
That ever do priour or abbot ony good!

In the following quotation from Pierce the Ploughmans Crede, 744, we have the infinitive twice, and once with the ancient termination :

Now mot ich soutere his sone setten to schole

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

TRANSLATION.-Now each cobbler may set his son to school, and every beggar's brat may learn on the book and become a writer and dwell with a lord; or iniquitously become a friar, the fiend to serve ! So of that beggar's brat, a bishop shall be made, &c.

In Shakspeare we find this verb played off against the substantive worth: 'Her worth worth yours'; that is, in Latin, Ejus meritum fiat vestrum.' Measure for Measure, v. i. 495.

284. Regarded as a product of human speech, the symbol-verb is very remarkable. The production of this particular word is to the verb-system what the leader is

to a tree. Cut it off, and the tree will try to produce another leader. If we could imagine the whole elaborate system of verbs to be utterly abolished from memory and consigned to blank oblivion, insomuch that there remained no materials for speech but nouns, pronouns, and the rest, the verb would yet grow again, as surely as a tree when it is cut down (unless it die) will sprout again. The verb would form itself again, and it would repeat its ancient career, and the topmost product of that career would be as before, the symbol-verb to be. Proof enough of this will be seen in the fact that many roots have in our stock of languages made a run for this position; and in the further fact that languages whose development has been wide of ours, as the Hebrew, have culminated in the selfsame result-the substantive-verb and out of it the symbol-verb. In the third section of the Syntax we shall have to consider this symbolverb in regard to the effects which it has wrought in the structure of language.

So much for the strong verbs and the symbol-verbs which they have produced.

285. We cannot close this section without a few words of comment. The venerable sire of Gothic philology, Jacob Grimm, has said of the strong preterites that they constitute one of the chief beauties of our family of languages, ‘eine Haupt-schönheit unsrer Sprachen.'

The question naturally arises, How did so very singular a contrivance come into existence? The question is put here, not so much for the certainty of the answer that can be given, as for the purpose of directing the student to enquiries which will supply a definite aim to his investigations. It was surmised by Grimm that the origin of this internal and vocalic change is to be sought in reduplication. He particularly instances the preterite hight, which in the ordinary Saxon

« IndietroContinua »