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LECTURE XVI.

GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS.

II.

THE general principle which the philological facts stated in the last lecture serve to illustrate, is, that in fully inflected languages like the Latin, the grammatical relations, as well as many other conditions of words, are indicated by their form; in languages with few inflections, like English, by their positions in the period, and by the aid of certain small words called auxiliaries and particles, themselves insignificant, but serving to point out the connection between other words. In the proposition which was taken as an example, sheep fear man, oves timent hominem, the English words were each employed in the simplest form in which they exist in the language, without any variation for case, number, or person, whereas in the corresponding Latin phrase, every word was varied from the radical, or inflected, according to its grammatical relations to other words in the period. Hence, it will be seen that for determining the relations between the constituents of a Latin period, the attention is first drawn to the inflected syllables of the words, and only secondarily to their import. These syllables may be called the mechanical part of grammar, because, though they probably once had an intelligible significance in themselves, yet that had been lost before Roman literature had a being, and so far back as we can trace the language, they were always, as they now are, mere signs of external relations and accidental conditions of the words to which they are applied. When the first inflected word in a Latin sentence is uttered, its relations to the entire proposition are approximately known by its ending, its ear-mark; and the mind of the listener is next occupied in sorting out of the words that follow, another, whose termination tallies with that of the first; the process is re

peated with the second, and so on to the end of the period, the sense being often absolutely suspended until you arrive at the key-word, which may be the last in the whole sentence. We may illustrate the mental process thus gone through, by imagining the words composing an English sentence to be numbered one, two, three, and so on, but to be pronounced or written promiscuously, without any regard to the English rules of position and succession. Let it be agreed that the nominative, or subject of the verb, shall be marked one, the verb two, and the objective case, or object of the verb, three. Thus, William 1, struck 2, Peter 3. It is evident that if we once become perfectly familiar with the application of the numbers, so that one instantly suggests to us the grammatical notion of the subject or nominative, two that of the verb, and three that of the object or objective, the numeral being in every case the sign of the grammatical category, the position of the words becomes unimportant, and it is indifferent whether I say William 1, struck 2, Peter 3, or Peter 3, struck 2, William 1. The subject, the verb, and the object remain the same in both forms, and the meaning of course must be the same. English-speaking persons, in practising such lessons, would at first, no doubt, mentally rearrange the period, by placing the words in the order of their numbers, according to the law of English syntax, just as we do in construing or beginning to read a foreign language with a syntactical system different from our own. This, in long sentences, would be very inconvenient, because the words and their numbers must be retained in the memory until the sentence is completely spoken or read through, and then arranged afterwards; but practice of this sort would be found a useful grammatical exercise, and at the same time would facilitate the comprehension of the syntactical principles of languages, where the meaning of the period is not determined by position. This method of illustrating the principles of syntactical arrangement may seem fanciful, but nevertheless numbers have been employed by very high English authority, in actual literary composition, as a means of marking grammatical relation. Sir Philip Sidney, in the third book of the Arcadia, introduces a sonnet "with some art curiously written," in which the words are arranged chiefly according to metrical convenience; but their relations indicated by numbers printed over each word. There is, however, a difference

between his system of numeration and that which I have used in the example just given. He applies the same number to all the words composing each separate member of the period, because, in a long proposition containing many members, the numbers would be difficult to retain, if running on consecutively. Thus, the nominative, the verb, the objective, and the adverbial phrase of qualification, composing the first member, are all marked one; the same elements of the second member all marked two, and so of the rest. The sonnet is as follows:

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Vertue, beautie, and speech, did strike, wound, charme,

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His works, shews, suits, with wit, grace, and vows' might.

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Held, pierc't, posses't, my judgment, sense and will,

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Till wrong, contempt, deceit, did grow, steale, creepe,

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Then griefe, unkindnesse, proofe, tooke, kindled, thought,

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Doth him, his face, his words, leave, shun, refraine.

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For no thing, time, nor place, can loose, quench, ease,

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The first four verses transposed according to the rules of English syntax would read thus:

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A like example occurs in some complimentary verses addressed by Edward Ingham to the celebrated John Smith, and printed in Smith's History of Virginia:

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Truth, travayle, and neglect, pure, painefull, most unkinde,

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Doth prove, consume, dismay, the soule, the corps,* the minde.

Again, we may suppose, that instead of numbering the words according to their order in English syntax, the subject, verb, and object are respectively distinguished by the letters of the alphabet, a, b, c. It is evident that in this case also, the position of the words might be varied at pleasure without affecting the Or, to come at once to the actual fact, as it exists in many languages, let us agree that the nominative case of all nouns of the masculine gender shall end in the syllable -us,

sense.

* Southey, who was very well read in early English literature, appears to have overlooked the fact that corps was, not unfrequently, used for body of a living person in the seventeenth century. In a note on p. 407 of the Chronicle of the Cid, upon the word "Carrion," he says: "In the translation of Richeome's Pilgrim of Loreto by G. W., printed at Paris, 1630, a similar word is employed, but not designedly, *** the translator living in a foreign country, and speaking a foreign language, had forgotten the nicer distinctions of his own." Women and maids," he says, "shall particularly examine themselves about the vanity of their apparell, * * * of their too much care of their corps," &c.

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Spenser uses this word for living body:

"A comely corpse with beautie faire endowed."

Hymne in Honour of Beautie, p. 135.

Fuller, in Andronicus, or the Unfortunate Politician, iii., 18, uses corps, a dead body, as a plural: * "As for the corps of Alexius * * they were most unworthily handled," &c. And again, in his Church History of England, Book X., Sec. I., § 12, speaking of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth he says: "Her corps were solemnly interred under a fair tomb," &c. But at the conclusion of Book XI., §§ 42, 45, 48, 49, and 50, he emlpoys corpse in the singular, according to the present orthography and syntax. Are we to charge the printers with the error, or to credit them with the correction?

which will then be equivalent to one in the numeral notation; the third person singular of the past tense of active verbs shall end in the syllable -it, which will correspond to number two; and the objective shall terminate in the syllable -um, answering to three. This would in fact be the Latin system, except that there is a greater variety of Latin endings than those I have mentioned. The terminations here answer the same purpose as the numbers, and it is plain that the order of the words in the period becomes grammatically indifferent:

Gulielmus percussit Petrum,
Gulielmus Petrum percussit,
Petrum percussit Gulielmus,
Petrum Gulielmus percuss it,
Percussit Gulielmus Petrum,
Percussit Petrum Gulielmus,

all being equally clear, and all meaning the same thing. While therefore this simple phrase admits of but one arrangement in English, the Latin syntax allows half a dozen, all equally unequivocal in meaning.

Every Latin verb has numerous terminations, each of which indicates whether the action expressed by it is past, present, or future, whether its subject is singular or plural, and whether it is in the first, second, or third person. Every noun has several terminations, each of which determines its case, nominative, genitive, (possessive,) and dative, accusative or ablative, (objective,) and the like, its number, and generally also its gender. Every adjective has many endings, each of which denotes the same accidents as those of the noun. In many instances, the endings of the noun and adjective indicative of case, number, and gender, are the same in both classes of words; in others, they are different, but whether like or unlike, they, and those of the verb also, correspond to each other, so that when the forms are once thoroughly mastered, it is in general easy to decide, by the terminations alone, without reference to position, to what noun a particular adjective belongs, and what are the relations between the noun and the verb. Hence, in English, the form determines little, the position much; in Latin, the relative importance of the two conditions is reversed, and, comparatively speaking, order is

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