ideas which the sentence presents. We have already had occasion to remark (in the seventh lecture) that somewhat the same thing may be said of many English words; we took love as an instance of one which is now either verb or noun, having lost by phonetic abbreviation the formative elements which once distinguished it as the one and as the other. It is a very customary thing with us, too, to take a word which is properly one part of speech, and convert it into various others without changing its shape: for example, better is primarily an adjective, as in "a better man than I;" but we employ it in connections which make of it an adverb, as in "he loves party better than country;" or a noun, as when we speak of yielding to our betters, or getting the better of a bad habit; or, finally, a verb, as in "they better their condition." Such analogies, however, do not explain the form and the variety of application of the words composing the Chinese and its kindred languages. Of the former possession of formative elements these words show no signs, either phonetic or significant; they have never been made distinct parts of speech in the sense in which ours have been and are so. How different is the state of monosyllabism which precedes inflection from that which follows it in consequence of the wearing off of inflective elements, may be in some measure seen by comparing a Chinese sentence with its English equivalent. The Chinese runs, as nearly as we can represent it, thus: "King speak: Sage! not far thousand mile and come; also will have use gain me realm, hey?" which means, 'the king spoke: O sage! since thou dost not count a thousand miles far to come (that is, hast taken the pains to come hither from a great distance), wilt thou not, too, have brought some thing for the weal of my realm?'[1]
While all the languages of the region we have described thus agree in type, in morphological character, they show a great and astonishing diversity of material; only scanty correspondences of form and meaning are found in their vocabularies; and hence, the nature and degree of their mutual
- ↑ This example is taken from Schleicher's Languages of Europe in Systematic Review (Bonn, 1850), p. 51.
