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sound A. N. sund, of the sea, from swimman

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Although, as I said before, the number of these equivocal words will increase with the progress of phonetic corruption, yet they exist likewise in what we are accustomed to call ancient languages. There is not one of these languages so ancient as not to disclose to the eye of an accurate observer a distant past. In Latin, in Greek, and even in Sanskrit, phonetic corruption has been at work, smoothing the primitive asperity of language, and now and then producing exactly the same effects which we have just been watching in French and English. Thus, Latin est is not only the Sanskrit asti, the Greek esti, but it likewise stands for Latin edit, he eats. Now, as in German ist has equally these two meanings, though they are kept distinct by a difference of spelling, elaborate attempts have been made to prove that the auxiliary verb was derived from a verb which originally meant to eat, eating being supposed to have been the most natural assertion of our existence.

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The Greek iós means both arrow and poison; and here again attempts were made to derive either arrow from poison, or poison from arrow. Though these two words occur in the most ancient Greek, they are nevertheless each of them secondary modifications

1 Large numbers of similar words in Mätzner, Englische Grammatik, i. p. 187; Koch, Historische Grammatik der Englischen Sprache, i. p 223. 2 The coincidence of rógov, a bow, and Tožikov, poison for smearing arrows (hence intoxication), is curious.

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of two originally distinct words. This can be seen by reference to Sanskrit, where arrow is ishu, whereas poison is visha, Latin virus. It is through the influence of two phonetic laws peculiar to the Greek language - the one allowing the dropping of a sibilant between two vowels, the other the elision of the initial v, the so-called digamma- that ishu and visha converged towards the Greek iós.

There are three roots in Sanskrit which in Greek assume one and the same form, and would be almost undistinguishable except for the light which is thrown upon them from cognate idioms. Nah, in Sanskrit, means to bind, to join together; snu, in Sanskrit, means to flow, or to swim; nas, in Sanskrit, means These three roots assume in Greek the

to come.

form néo.

Néō, fut. nésō (the Sanskrit NAH), means to spin, originally to join together; it is the German nähen, to sew, Latin nere. Here we have only to observe the loss of the original aspirate h, which reappears, however, in the Greek verb néthō, I spin; and the former existence of which can be discovered in Latin also, where the c of necto points to the original guttural h.

SNU, snauti, to run, appears in Greek as néō. This néo stands for sne Fō. S is elided as in mikrós for smikrós,1 and the digamma disappears, as usual, between two vowels. It reappears, however, as soon as it stands no longer in this position. Hence fut. neúsomai, aor. éneusa. From this root, or rather from the still simpler and more primitive root nu, the

1 Cf. Mehlhorn, § 54. Also oḍúλλw, fallo; opóyyos, fungus. Festus mentions in Latin, smitto and mitto, stritavus and tritavus.

Aryan languages derived their word for ship, originally the swimmer; Sanskrit naus, nâvas; Greek naûs, nēós; Latin navis; and likewise their word for snow, the Gothic snaivs, the Latin nix, but nivis, like vivo, vizi. Secondary forms of nu or snu are the Sanskrit causative snavayati, corresponding to the Latin nare, which grows again into natare. By the addition of a guttural, we receive the Greek nếchō, I swim, from which nésōs, an island, and Náxos, the island. The German Nachen, too, shows the same tendency to replace the final v by a guttural.

The third root is the Sanskrit nas, to come, the Vedic nasati. Here we have only to apply the Greek euphonic law, which necessitates the elision of an s between two vowels; and, as our former rule with regard to the digamma reduced neƑō to néō, this will reduce the original nésō to the same néō. Again, as in our former instance, the removal of the cause removed the effect, the digamma reappearing whenever it was followed by a consonant, so in this instance the s rises again to the surface when it is followed by a consonant, as we see in nóstos, the return, from néesthai.

If, then, we have established that sound etymology has nothing to do with sound, what other method is to be followed in order to prove the derivation of a word to be true and trustworthy? Our answer is, We must discover the laws which regulate the changes of letters. If it were by mere accident that the ancient word for tear took the form asru in Sanskrit, dákry in Greek, lacruma in Latin, tagr in Gothic, a scientific treatment of etymology would be an impossibility. But this is not

the case. In spite of the apparent dissimilarity of the words for tear in English and French, there is not an inch of ground between these two extremes, tear and larme, that cannot be bridged over by Comparative Philology. We believe, therefore, until the contrary has been proved, that there is law and order in the growth of language, as in the growth of any other production of nature, and that the changes which we observe in the history of human speech are not the result of chance, but are constrained by general and ascertainable laws.

LECTURE VIL

ON THE POWERS OF ROOTS.

AFTER We have removed everything that is formal, artificial, intelligible in words, there remains always something that is not merely formal, not the result of grammatical art, not intelligible, and this we call for the present a root or a radical element. If we take such a word as historically, we can separate from it the termination of the adverb, ly, the termination of the adjective al. This leaves us historic, the Latin historicus. Here we can again remove the adjectival suffix cus, by which historicus is derived from histor or historia. Now historia, again, is formed by means of the feminine suffix ia, which produces abstract nouns, from histōr. Histor is a Greek word, and it is in reality a corruption of ĭstūr. Both forms, however, occur; the spiritus asper instead of the spiritus lenis, in the beginning of the word, may be ascribed to dialectic influences. Then ister, again, has to be divided into is and tur, tīr being the nom. sing. of the derivative suffix tur, which we have in Latin da-tor, Sanskrit, dâ-tar, Greek do-tér, a giver, and the radical element is. In is, the s is a modification of d, for d in Greek, if followed immediately by a t, is changed to s. Thus we arrive at last at the root id, which we have in Greek oîda,

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