Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/289

vakti, to which usage assigned the meaning 'I here speak,' 'thou there speakest,' 'he yonder speaks,' laying in them the idea of predication or assertion, the essential characteristic which makes a verb instead of a noun, just as we put the same into the ambiguous element, love, when we say I love. Other pronominal elements, mainly of compound form, indicating plurality of subject, made in like manner the three persons of the plural; they were masi (ma-si, 'I-thou', i.e. 'we'), tasi (ta-si, 'he-thou,' i.e. 'ye'), and anti (of more doubtful genesis). A dual number of the same three persons was likewise added; but the earliest form and derivation of its endings cannot be satisfactorily made out. Thus was produced the first verbal tense, the simplest and most immediate of all derivative forms from roots. The various shapes which its endings have assumed in the later languages of the family have already more than once been referred to, in the way of illustration of the processes of linguistic growth: our th or s, in he goeth or goes, still distinctly represents the ti of the third person singular; and in am we have a solitary relic of the mi of the first. Doubtless the tense was employed at the outset as general predicative form, being neither past, present, nor future, but all of them combined, and doing duty as either, according as circumstances required, and as sense and connection explained; destitute, in short, of any temporal or modal character; but other verbal forms by degrees grew out of it, or allied themselves with it, assuming the designation of other modifications of predicative meaning, and leaving to it the office of an indicative present. The prefixion of a pronominal adverb, a or ā, the so-called "augment," pointing to a 'there' or 'then' as one of the conditions of the action signified, produced a distinctively past or preterit tense. Although only very scanty and somewhat dubious traces of such an augment-preterit (aorist or imperfect) are found in any languages of the family beside the Aryan and the Greek, it is looked upon as an original formation, once shared by them all. Again, the repetition of the root, either complete, or by "reduplication," as we term it, the repetition of its initial part, was made to indicate symboli-