scribere,” all that he meant at first was, “I wonder at you for writing nothing to me,” where the infinitive was merely a dative case used adverbially.
The history of the infinitive makes it clear how little distinction must have been felt at the outset between the noun and the verb. Indeed, the growth of the verb was a slow process. There was a time in the history of Indo-European speech when it had not as yet risen to the consciousness of the speaker, and in the period when the noun did not possess a plural there was as yet also no verb. The attachment of the first and second personal pronouns, or of suffixes resembling them, to certain stems, was the first stage in the development of the latter. Like the Semitic verb, the Indo-European verb seems primarily to have denoted relation only, and to have been attached as an attribute to the subject. The idea of time, however, was soon put into it, and two tenses were created, the one expressing a present or continuous action, the other an aoristic or momentary one. The distinction of sense was symbolized by a distinction of pronunciation, the root-syllable of the aorist being an abbreviated form of that of the present. This abbreviation was due to a change in the position of the accent (which was shifted from the stem-syllable to the termination), and this change again was probably occasioned by the prefixing of the so-called augment to the aorist, which survived into historical times only in Sanskrit, Zend and Greek, and the origin of which is still a mystery. The weight of the first syllable in the aorist further caused the person-endings to be shortened, and so two sets of person-endings, usually termed primary and secondary, sprang into existence. By reduplicating the root-syllable of the present tense a perfect was formed; but originally no distinction was made between present and perfect, and Greek verbs like δίδωμι and ἣκω are memorials of a time when the difference between “I am come” and “I have come” was not yet felt. Reduplication was further adapted to the expression of intensity and desire (in the so-called intensive and desiderative forms). By the side of the aorist stood the imperfect, which differed from the aorist, so far as outward form was concerned, only in possessing the longer and more original stem of the present. Indeed, as Benfey first saw, the aorist itself was primitively an imperfect, and the distinction between aorist and imperfect is not older than the period when the stem-syllables of certain imperfects were shortened through the influence of the accent, and this differentiation of forms appropriated to denote a difference between the sense of the aorist and the imperfect which was beginning to be felt. After the analogy of the imperfect, a pluperfect was created out of the perfect by prefixing the augment (of which the Greek ἐμέμηκον is an illustration); though the pluperfect, too, was originally an imperfect formed from the reduplicated present.
Besides time, mood was also expressed by the primitive Indo-European verb, recourse being had to symbolization for the purpose. The imperative was represented by the bare stem, like the vocative, the accent being drawn back to the first syllable, though other modes of denoting it soon came into vogue. Possibility was symbolized by the attachment of the suffix -ya to the stem, probability by the attachment of -a and -ā, and in this way the optative and conjunctive moods first arose. The creation of a future by the help of the suffix -sya seems to belong to the same period in the history of the verb. This suffix is probably identical with that used to form a large class of adjectives and genitives (like the Greek ἵπποιο for ἱπποσιο); in this case future time will have been regarded as an attribute of the subject, no distinction being drawn, for instance, between “rising sun” and “the sun will rise.” It is possible, however, that the auxiliary verb as, “to be,” enters into the composition of the future; if so, the future will be the product of the second stage in the development of the Indo-European verb when new forms were created by means of composition. The sigmatic or first aorist is in favour of this view, as it certainly belongs to the age of Indo-European unity, and may be a compound of the verbal stem with the auxiliary as.
After the separation of the Indo-European languages, composition was largely employed in the formation of new tenses. Thus in Latin we have perfects like scrip-si and ama-vi, formed by the help of the auxiliaries as (sum) and fuo, while such forms as amaveram (amavi-eram) or amarem (ama-sem) bear their origin on their face. So, too, the future in Latin and Old Celtic (amabo, Irish carub) is based upon the substantive verb fuo, “to be,” and the English preterite in -ed goes back to a suffixed did, the reduplicated perfect of do. New tenses and moods, however, were created by the aid of suffixes as well as by the aid of composition, or rather were formed from nouns whose stems terminated in the suffixes in question. Thus in Greek we have aorists and perfects in -κα, and the characteristics of the two passive aorists, ye and the, are more probably the suffixes of nominal stems than the roots of the two verbs ya, “to go,” and dhâ, “to place,” as Bopp supposed. How late some of these new formations were may be seen in Greek, where the Homeric poems are still ignorant of the weak future passive, the optative future, and the aspirated perfect, and where the strong future passive occurs but once and the desiderative but twice. On the other hand, many of the older tenses were disused and lost. In classical Sanskrit, for instance, of the modal aorist forms the precative and benedictive almost alone remain, while the pluperfect, of which Delbrück has found traces in the Veda, has wholly disappeared.
The passive voice did not exist in the parent Indo-European speech. No need for it had arisen, since such a sentence as “I am pleased” could be as well represented by “This pleases me,” or “I please myself.” It was long before the speaker was able to imagine an action without an object, and when he did so, it was a neuter or substantival rather than a passive verb that he formed. The passive, in fact, grew out of the middle or reflexive, and, except in the two aorists, continued to be represented by the middle in Greek. So, too, in Latin the second person plural is really the middle participle with estis understood, and the whole class of deponent or reflexive verbs proves that the characteristic r which Latin shares with Celtic could have had at the outset no passive force.
Much light has been thrown on the character and construction of the primitive Indo-European sentence by comparative syntax. In contradistinction to Semitic, where the defining word follows that which is defined, the Indo-European languages place that which is defined after that which defines it; and Bergaigne has made it clear that the original order of the sentence was (1) object, (2) verb, and (3) subject. Greater complication of thought and its expression, the connexion of sentences by the aid of conjunctions, and rhetorical inversion caused that dislocation of the original order of the sentence which reaches its culminating point in the involved periods of Latin literature. Our own language still remains true, however, to the syntax of the parent Indo-European when it sets both adjective and genitive before the nouns which they define. In course of time a distinction came to be made between an attribute used as a mere qualificative and an attribute used predicatively, and this distinction was expressed by placing the predicate in opposition to the subject and accordingly after it. The opposition was of itself sufficient to indicate the logical copula or substantive verb; indeed, the word which afterwards commonly stood for the latter at first signified “existence,” and it was only through the wear and tear of time that a phrase like Deus bonus est, “God exists as good,” came to mean simply “God is good.” It is needless to observe that neither of the two articles was known to the parent Indo-European; indeed, the definite article, which is merely a decayed demonstrative pronoun, has not yet been developed in several of the languages of the Indo-European family.
We must now glance briefly at the results of a scientific investigation of English grammar and the modifications they necessitate in our conception of it. The idea that the free use of speech is tied down by the rules of the grammarian must first be given up; all that the grammarian can do is to formulate the current uses Investigation of English grammar. of his time, which are determined by habit and custom, and are accordingly in a perpetual state of flux. We must next
