host of new expressions for tense and mood by the extensive employment of auxiliaries, which, in their way, afford an admirable analytic substitute for the old synthetic forms. To trace out and describe in full the history of the Indo-European verb, in these and in the other branches of the family, showing the contractions and expansions which it has undergone, down even to such recent additions as the future of the Romanic tongues, and our own preterit in d (the reason and method of whose creation have been explained above, in the third lecture), would be a most interesting and instructive task; but it is one which we may not venture here to undertake.
To follow back to its very beginnings the genesis of nouns, and of the forms of nouns, is much more difficult than to explain the origin of verbal forms. Some nouns—of which the Latin vox (voc-s), 'a calling, a voice,' and rex (reg-s), 'one ruling, a king,' are as familiar examples as any within our reach—are produced directly from the roots, by the addition of a different system of inflectional endings; the idea of substantiation or impersonation of the action expressed by the root being arbitrarily laid in them by usage, as was the idea of predication in the forms of the verb. The two words we have instanced may be taken as typical examples of the two classes of derivatives coming most immediately and naturally from the root: the one indicating the action itself, the other, either adjectively or substantively, the actor; the one being of the nature of an infinitive, or abstract verbal noun, the other of a participle, or verbal adjective, easily convertible into an appellative. Even such derivatives, however, as implying a greater modification of the radical idea than is exhibited by the simplest verbal forms, appear to have been from the first mainly made by means of formative elements, suffixes of derivation, comparable with those which belong to the moods and tenses, and the secondary conjugations of the verb. Precisely what these suffixes were, in their origin and primitive substance, and what were the steps of the process by which they lost their independence, and acquired their peculiar value as modifying elements, it is not in most cases feasible to tell.
