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instance the k of adjectival terminations and g in such forms as sawaide for sawagide, and if we accept Bopp’s opinion that the root of the first personal pronoun in the Aryan languages is a, the guttural being an addition of the nature of a demonstrative, it is not even necessary to have recourse to this supposition.
Na, the pronoun of the second person, presents greater difficulties. N is however the nasal of t and as seen above the Japanese language often prefers the nasal in the case of m which is found instead of b. It is also well known that in the Yedo dialect at least, a nasal g has taken the place of the ordinary g hard. The same tendency would substitute n for t, and it is perhaps to this that such forms as nameru for taberu, to eat, are due. It also seems likely that nani, what, and tare, who, contain the same root. If this view is correct, na is identical with the Sanskrit tuam (stem tua) the Lat. tu, the Greek tu or su and the English thou.
The third personal pronoun ka is perhaps the Greek ekeinos, the initial e of which is a mere prefix, as may be seen by comparing its dialectical forms.
The Japanese reflexive pronoun shi may be compared with the Latin se, Engl. self, Ger. sich.
The root so or sa which appears in sore, sono, soko, saru (for sa aru) may be identical with the English definite article, which in its old form was a demonstrative pronoun with the same meaning as sono and had separate forms for the three genders viz. masc. se, fem. seo, neut. thaet, our modern article being a modified form of the last. What strengthens this supposition is the circumstance that just as from so as a stem are formed a number of adverbs as soko, sochi, sasuga, the English the serves as a stem from which are derived the adverbs there, thither, thence, thus.
By a similar analogy the root ko ‘this’ may be the same as the English pronoun he (as seen above a k in Japanese at the beginning of a word is commonly h in English) and its derivatives koko, kochi, will correspond to the English words here, hither.
