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Even in India, where a different terminology had grown up in the grammatical schools of the Brahmans, a terminology in some respects more perfect than that of Alexandria and Rome, we may now hear such words as case, and gender, and active and passive, explained by European teachers to their native pupils. The fates of words are curious indeed, and when I looked the other day at some of the examination papers of the government schools in India, such questions as-" Write the genitive case of Siva," seemed to reduce whole volumes. of history into a single sentence. How did these words, genitive case, come to India? They came from England, they had come to England from Rome, to Rome from Alexandria, to Alexandria from Athens. At Athens, the term case, or ptōsis, had a philosophical meaning; at Rome, casus was merely a literal translation; the original meaning of fall was lost, and the word dwindled down to a mere technical term. At Athens, the philosophy of language was a counterpart of the philosophy of the mind. The terminology of formal logic and formal grammar was the same. The logic of the Stoics was divided into two parts,1 called rhetoric and dialectic, and the latter treated, first, "On that which signifies, or language; " secondly, "On that which is signified, or things." In their philosophical language ptosis, which the Romans translated by casus, really meant fall; that is to say, the inclination or relation of one idea to another, the falling or resting of one word on another. Long and angry discussions were carried on as to whether the name of ptosis, or fall, was applicable to the nominative; and every true Stoic

1 Lersch, ii. 25. Περὶ σημαινόντων, or περὶ φώνης ; and περὶ σημαινομένων, οι περὶ πραγμάτων.

would have scouted the expression of casus rectus, because the subject or the nominative, as they argued, did not fall or rest on anything else, but stood erect, the other words of a sentence leaning or depending on it. All this is lost to us when we speak of cases.

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And how are the dark scholars in the government schools of India to guess the meaning of genitive? The Latin genitivus is a mere blunder, for the Greek word genikē could never mean genitivus. Genitivus, if it is meant to express the case of origin or birth, would in Greek have been called gennētikē, not genike. Nor does the genitive express the relation of son to father. For though we may say, "the son of the father," we may likewise say," the father of the son." Genike, in Greek, had a much wider, a much more philosophical meaning. It meant casus generalis, the general case, or rather the case which expresses the genus or kind. This is the real power of the genitive. If I If I say, 66 bird of the water," "of the water" defines the genus to which a certain bird belongs; it refers it to the genus of water-birds. "Man of the mountains," means a mountaineer. In phrases such as "son of the father, or "father of the son," the genitives have the same. effect. They predicate something of the son or of the father; and if we distinguished between the sons of the father, and the sons of the mother, the genitives would mark the class or genus to which the sons respectively belonged. They would answer the same purpose as the adjectives, paternal and maternal. It can be proved etymologically that the termination of the genitive is, in most cases, identical with those derivative

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1 Beiträge zur Geschichte der Grammatik, von Dr. K. E. A. Schmidt. Halle, 1859. Uber den Begriff der yεviкǹ πтwσi, s. 320.

suffixes by which substantives are changed into adjectives.1

It is hardly necessary to trace the history of what I call the empirical study, or the grammatical analysis of language, beyond Rome. With Dionysius Thrax the

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1 In the Tibetan languages the rule is, Adjectives are formed from substantives by the addition of the genitive sign," which might be inverted into, "The genitive is formed from the nominative by the addition of the adjective sign." For instance, shing, wood; shing gi, of wood, or wooden: ser, gold; ser-gyi, of gold, or golden: mi, man; mi-yi, of man, or human. The same in Garo, where the sign of the genitive is ni, we have; mánde-ní jak, the hand of man, or the human hand; ambal-ni ketháli, a wooden knife, or a knife of wood. In Hindustání the genitive is so clearly an adjective, that it actually takes the marks of gender according to the words to which it refers. But how is it in Sanskrit and Greek? In Sanskrit we may form adjectives by the addition of tya. (Turanian Languages, p. 41, seq.; Essay on Bengálí, p. 333.) For instance, dakshinâ, south; dakshinâ-tya, southern. This tya is clearly a demonstrative pronoun, the same as the Sanskrit syas, syâ, tyad, this or that. Tya is a pronominal base, and therefore such adjectives as dakshinâ-tya, southern, or âp-tya, aquatic, from âp, water, must have been conceived originally as "water-there," or "south-there." Followed by the terminations of the nominative singular, which was again an original pronoun, âptyas would mean âp-tya-s, i. e., water-there-he. Now, it makes little difference whether I say an aquatic bird or a bird of the water. In Sanskrit the genitive of water would be, if we take udaka, udaka-sya. This sya is the same pronominal base as the adjective termination tya, only that the former takes no sign for the gender, like the adjective. The genitive udakasya is therefore the same as an adjective without gender. Now let us look to Greek. We there form adjectives by otos, which is the same as the Sanskrit tya or sya. For instance, from duos, people, the Greeks formed onμócios, belonging to the people. Here oç, a, ov, mark the gender. Leave the gender out, and you get onμoowo. Now, there is a rule in Greek that an between two vowels, in grammatical terminations, is elided. Thus the genitive of γένος is not γένεσος, but γένεος, or γένους ; hence δημόσιο would necessarily become duoto. And what is doo but the regular Homeric genitive of δῆμος, which in later Greek was replaced by δήμου Thus we see that the same principles which governed the formation of adjectives and genitives in Tibetan, in Garo, and Hindustání, were at work in the primitive stages of Sanskrit and Greek; and we perceive how accurately the real power of the genitive was determined by the ancient Greek grammarians, who called it the general or predicative case, whereas the Romans spoiled the term by wrongly translating it into genitivus.

framework of grammar was finished. Later writers have improved and completed it, but they have added nothing really new and original. We can follow the stream of grammatical science from Dionysius Thrax to our own time in an almost uninterrupted chain of Greek and Roman writers. We find Quintilian in the first century; Scaurus, Apollonius Dyscolus, and his son, Herodianus, in the second; Probus and Donatus in the fourth. After Constantine had moved the seat of government from Rome, grammatical science received a new home in the academy of Constantinople. There were no less than twenty Greek and Latin grammarians who held professorships at Constantinople. Under Justinian, in the sixth century, the name of Priscianus gave a new lustre to grammatical studies, and his work remained an authority during the Middle Ages to nearly our own times. We ourselves have been taught grammar according to the plan which was followed by Dionysius at Rome, by Priscianus at Constantinople, by Alcuin at York; and whatever may be said of the improvements introduced into our system of education, the Greek and Latin grammars used at our public schools are mainly founded on the first empirical analysis of language, prepared by the philosophers of Athens, applied by the scholars of Alexandria, and transferred to the practical purpose of teaching a foreign tongue by the Greek professors at Rome.

LECTURE IV.

THE CLASSIFICATORY STAGE.

WE traced, in our last lecture, the origin and progress of the empirical study of languages from the time of Plato and Aristotle to our own school-boy days. We saw at what time, and under what circumstances, the first grammatical analysis of language took place; how its component parts, the parts of speech, were named, and how, with the aid of a terminology, half philosophical and half empirical, a system of teaching languages was established, which, whatever we may think of its intrinsic value, has certainly answered that purpose for which it was chiefly intended.

Considering the process by which this system of grammatical science was elaborated, it could not be expected to give us an insight into the nature of language. The division into nouns and verbs, articles and conjunctions, the schemes of declension and conjugation, were a merely artificial network thrown over the living body of language. We must not look in the grammar of Dionysius Thrax for a correct and wellarticulated skeleton of human speech. It is curious, however, to observe the striking coincidences between the grammatical terminology of the Greeks and the Hindús, which would seem to prove that there must be some true and natural foundation for the much

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