Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/38

former is our one relic of the Passive voice. The Imperative in Sanscrit was, in the Singular, nama, in the Plural, namata, answering to the Old English nim and nimath. The Infinitive was nam-anaj-a (the Greek nem-enai), which we had pared down into nim-an more than a thousand years ago. The Active Par­ticiple was nama-nt, which runs through most of the daughters of the Aryan Tongue, and which kept its ground in the Scotch Lowlands until of late years, as ‘ridand’ instead of our corrupt word ‘riding.’ The San­scrit and English alike have both Strong and Weak Passive Participles; the former ending in na, the latter in ta, as stîr-na-s, strew-n.^[1]

Sanscrit, yuk-tas
Greek, zeuk-tos
Latin, junc-tus
English, yok-ed (in Lowland Scotch, yok-it).

Those who choose to write I was stopt instead of stopped, may justify their spelling by a reference to the first three forms given above. But this form, though admissible in the Passive Participle, is clearly wrong in the Active Perfect, I stopped, as we shall see farther on.^[2]

In the Aryan Speech there were a few Verbs which had lost their Presents, and which used their old Per­fects as Presents, forming for themselves new weak

1. Few Sanscrit verbs have this form, so common in English.
2. Archdeacon Hare always spelt preached as preacht. Still, it is the English th not t, that answers to the Sanscrit t.