nouns and verbs were admitted to full citizenship in English speech, they all had to give up in this respect their former nationality: every one of them was declined or conjugated after Germanic models. Such a thing as a language with a mixed grammatical apparatus has never come under the cognizance of linguistic students: it would be to them a monstrosity; it seems an impossibility. Now the Indo-European languages are full of the plainest and most unequivocal correspondences of grammatical structure; they show abundant traces of a common system of word-formation, of declension, of conjugation, however disguised by the corruptions and overlaid by the new developments of a later time: and these traces are, above all others, the most irrefutable evidences of the substantial unity of their linguistic tradition. We will notice but a single specimen of this kind of evidences, the most striking one, perhaps, which Indo-European grammar has to exhibit. This is the ordinary declension of the verb, in its three persons singular and plural. In drawing out the comparison, we cannot start, as before, from the English, because, as has been shown in a previous lecture (the third), the English has lost its ancient apparatus of personal endings: we must represent the whole Germanic branch by its oldest member, the Mœso-Gothic. The table is as follows:[1]
| English | 'I have' | 'thou hast' | 'he has' | 'we have' | 'ye have' | 'they have' |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mœso-Gothic | haba | habai-s | habai-th | haba-m | habai-th | haba-nd |
| Mod. Persian | -m | -d | -m | -d | -nd | |
| Celtic | -m | -d | -m | -d | -t | |
| Lithuanic | -mi | -si | -ti | -me | -te | -ti |
| Slavonic | -mi | -si | -ti | -mu | -te | -nti |
| Latin | habeo | habe-s | habe-t | habe-mus | habe-tis | habe-nt |
| Greek | -mi | -si | -ti | -mes | -te | -nti |
| Sanskrit | -mi | -si | -ti | -masi | -tha | -nti |
Fundamental and far-reaching as are the correspondences,
- ↑ Owing to the difficulty of finding a single verb which shall present the endings in all the different languages, the verb to have has been selected, and even in full in the two languages in which it occurs, the terminations alone being elsewhere written. These are not in all cases the most usual endings of conjugation, but such as are found in verbs, or in dialects, which have preserved more faithfully their primitive forms.
