Now there is not an idea more difficult of distinct comprehension and definition, even to the most highly educated, than that which is denoted by the term existence. In truth the verb to be may well be called le rerbe absinth by De Sacy; but an abstract term, however essential to a system of metaphysics, is among the very last that 13 called for under the wants of uncivilised society. The savage has his various terms for the several concrete forms of existence, but has no occasion for a general term; and in fact those who attempt to translate the language of a nation far advanced in civilisation into the language of a rude tribe, find an insuperable difficulty in words of this class. But on this point we may be satisfied with the evidence of one, whose extensive acquaintance with the moat outlying language made him the best of witnesses, especially as his feelings were directly opposed to the doctrine of the verb here advanced, so that he could not be suspected of any too favourable bias. In vol. iv., p. 70, of the Proceedings of the Philological Society, Mr. Garnett writes :—" We may venture to affirm that there is not such a thing as a true verb substantive in any one member of the great Polynesian family." Again, in p. 236, he expresses his belief that "a verb-substantive, such as is commonly conceived, vivifying all connected speech, and binding together the terms of every logical composition, is much upon a foot ing with the phlogiston of the chemists of the last generation." Do Sacy also, though he lays down the doctrine that the verb to be is the only essential verb, was aware that in many languages the connec tion of the subject and predicate was denoted without the interposition of any verb; and, indeed, that in the Arabic itself a verb was no way essential for the purpose. In our own family of languages it is the fashion to give a sort of precedence to the Sanscrit as tho most perfect specimen ; and here again the expression of a logical proposition altogether dispenses with a copula. Now, when we put together the several considerations that tho logical form of language is not that which adapts itself to the wants of early society ; that the substantive verb so-called is not even requisite for the expressiou of logical ideas that the Idea of being in the abstract is beyond the comprehension of a savage; and that In point of fact a largo number of existing languages do not possess such a verb, surely it is highly unphilosopbical to con struct a theory of language on such a basis. But there stiU remains a difficulty to be disentangled. It has been truly laid down that the moat irregular verbe of a language are the oldest ; and it may be safely affirmed that of all verbs the most irregular Is that which signifies " to be," as is seen. in be, is, was, of our tongue, ease, sum, fui, of Latin. The solution of the difficulty is found in the fact that ease had for its oldest meaning " to eat," and not " to be," The idea of eating is of course ever before the mind of the savage, simply becauso the fear of starvation is too constant a condition of his life, and may well claim an early place in his vocabulary. Nor is it difficult to see hew from " to eat" comas the idea of " to live," or to deduce from the latter notion that of existence in general. Thus tho authoress of ' A Resi dence at Sierra Leone' in Murray's Colonial Library, found the natives wholly unable to follow the use of our substantive verb, and was com pelled at last to substitute lire for be, before she could make herself Intelligible. "Go fetch big tea-cup, he lire in pantry," was the kind of Language she found it neceasary to employ ; and the servant in announ cing dinner would say :—" Dinner lire on table." To reject the logical view of early language involves, of course, the rejection of the usual definition of the nominative, as the subject of the proposition. If the original verbs were limited to those which express action, a necessary consequence would be, that the nominative denotes the agent. This consequence may be readily admitted, and the more so, as it meets what seems to be a grave difficulty. A linguistic paper by Carl Bock, published in 12mo. at Berlin, in the year 1845, under the title ' Analysis Verbi,' drew attention to the fact, that in some lan guages the personal suffixes exhibited the form of genitives ; and Mr. Garnett's paper, already quoted, produces other examples of the same apparent anomaly. But the moment that the idea of an agent or cause attaches itself to the term nominative, the difficulty vanishes, since the leading meaning of the genitive is the source " whence," as calor sells " the heat from the sun." And if it be objected to the theory, that the nominative is also used in connection with the passive, the simple answer is, that the passive was in origin a reflective, or, as our Greek grammarians prefer to say, a middle voice, so that the first translation of serous occiditur is " the slave kills himself ;" and further it may be noticed, that when the Latin, using the passive, wishes to define the agent, it gives us serves a domino occiditur, which, compared with the equivalent phrase dominus serrum occidit, teaches us that dominus in the one, and a domino in the other, express the same idea, the very point for which we are contending.
But if in one of the simplest sentences of the primeval language, the nominative denoted the agent or quarter " whence " the action proceeded, so, on the other hand, the accusative must have denoted the " whither ;" and this result thoroughly accords with the habit of language. Thus Varro expressly defines the Latin accusative as answering to the question quo, " whither." It agrees too with the use of the accusative in such a phrase as Romam eo, " I am going to Rome," and with the Spanish practice of inserting the preposition a, " to," before the object of a sentence. And as it has been shown that the ideas of feeling required a wholly different construction from verbs of action, so here again the former class in the oldest varieties of language exhibit an antipathy to an accusative and indeed very generally demand a genitive to denote the object of the feeling, or as we should rather, express it, the cause or source of the feeling. Thus arose such constructions as : me tui pudet, rnemini virorurn, " renit mihi Platonis in mentcm ;" and if we go back to the earliest Latin, " gam non veretur vizi " (A fran.), " fast Id it mei" (Plant.), " Justi timne prim wirer 6elline laborum f" (Virg.) And we find parallel examples in English, as it used to be spoken, as" Thou dislik'st of virtue." (Shakapere, "All's Well that Ends 'Well," ii. 3.) One decided example of a verb formed by imitation of natural sound must suffice in a short sketch such as the present. When a stone tied to a string is whirled violently round, or when we enter a room where machinery with its many wheels is in rapid movement, the ear catches very distinctly the sound which we may represent by whirr. Now wirr-en, is the German " to twist," vi-rer, in French," to turn ;" while we apply the term wear to the turning of a ship, and veer to the turning of a weathercock. The same root is seen in the English secondary or derived words, whirl, whorl, world, warp, worm, writhe, wreath, wrench, wrest, wrist, wring, wriggle, wrap, wry. The Latin language exhibits the same base in vcr-t-ere, turn," ver-u," a spit," vermis," a worm," rerminari, which signifies indifferently " to breed worms " and " to writhe with pain," meanings which, however different in appli cation, have in common the idea of turning. The adjective vanes, " with crooked legs," and rarities, " varicose veins " have the same origin. But the sound passes at times into a something which we may express by the softer and more musical wel, and then we have it in the sense of the Greek Fa-uraw, FELAw, Feauw, the Latin vol-v-ere, val-gus, " with crooked legs," and as might easily be shown, if more room were at our disposal, ro/gus and volgare. In our own language we have wheel, wall-ow, welter, while the Germans have both the simple verb wall-en, roll," and the derived wal-yen, and walz-en. The list might be still further increased, if we called to mind that many words which now begin with r have lost a preceding er, as rota, rotundus, in Latin, equivalent to vertu, vortundus, and in English, roll, ring, sb. ringlet. The Latin othis has also lost an initial v, just as the Danish arm,' worm,' has lost a w.
Before passing from the question of original roots and their signifi cation, it seems duo to the name of the German scholar, Bopp, to record that in his view (` Vergleichende Grammatik,' 105) the main principle of word-formation in the Indo-European class of languages consists in the union of verbal and pronominal roots, which, to borrow his image, represent as it were the body and soul of language. It does not appear that many philologers have followed him in this doctrine. But the un somidness of it seems almost to force itself on the mind in the very term " pronominal." In fact pronouns are scarcely of a character to have been part of any language in its earliest stages, simply because they are, as their name tells us, but substitutes for other words ; and assuredly a language might have attained to a very valuable consistency without the possession of a mingle pronominal word, Reasons will presently be given for referring a large majority of our third person pronouns to one single verb ; and the pronouns of the first and second persons seem also entitled to claim a close connection with some of the numerals, of which more presently. In the meanwhile the readers of Bopp's great work may be asked to notice the tendency in that writer to refer the presence of an inconvenient vowel in word.formation to the presence of some pronominal base—now i, now a, now ya, &c., without much consideration of any meaning the too convenient pronouns bring with them to the word in which he finds them.