Chapter XIX: Origin of Grammatical Elements (2)

To form a new word it is often sufficient that some existing word is felt in a vague way to be made up of something + an ending, the latter being subsequently added on to another word. In Fr. _mérovingien_ the _v_ of course is legitimate, as the adjective is derived from Mérovée, Merowig, but this word was made the starting-point for the word designating the succeeding dynasty: _carlovingien_, where _v_ is simply taken over as part of the suffix; nowadays historians try to be more ‘correct’ and prefer the adjective _carolingien_, which was unknown to Littré. _Oligarchy_ is _olig_ + _archy_, but for the opposite notion the word _poligarchy_ or _polygarchy_ was framed from _poly_ and the last two syllables of _oli-garchy_, and though now scholars have made _polyarchy_ the usual form, the word with the intrusive _g_ was the common form two hundred years ago in English, and corresponding forms are found in French, Spanish and other languages. _Judgmatical_ is made on the pattern of _dogmatical_, though there the stem is _dogmat-_. In jocular German _schwachmatikus_ ‘valetudinarian,’ we have the same suffix with a different colouring, taken from _rheumatikus_ (thus also Dan. _svagmatiker_). Swift does not hesitate to speak of a _sextumvirate_, which suggests _triumvirate_ better than _sexvirate_ would have done; and Bernard Shaw once writes “his equipage (or autopage)”--evidently starting from the popular, but erroneous, belief that _equipage_ is derived from Lat. _equus_ and then dividing the word _equi_ + _page_. Cf. _Scillonian_ from _Scilly_ on account of _Devonian_ as if this were _Dev_ + _onian_ instead of _Devon_ + _ian_.

XIX.--§ 15. Tainting of Suffixes.

It will be seen that in some of these instances the suffix has appropriated to itself not only part of the sound of the stem, but also part of its signification. This is seen very clearly in the case of _chandelier_, in French formed from _chandelle_ ‘candle’ with the suffix _-ier_, of rather vague signification, ‘anything connected with, or having to do with’; in English the word is used for a hanging branched frame to hold a number of lights; consequently a similar apparatus for gas-burners was denominated _gaselier_ (_gasalier_, _gasolier_), and with the introduction of electricity the formation has even been extended to _electrolier_. _Vegetarian_ is from the stem _veget-_ with added _-ari-an_, which ending has no special connexion with the notion of eating or food, but recently we have seen the new words _fruitarian_ and _nutarian_, meaning one whose food consists (exclusively or chiefly) in fruits and nuts. Cf. _solemncholy_, which according to Payne is in use in Alabama, framed evidently on _melancholy_, analyzed in a way not approved by Greek scholars. The whole ending of _septentrionalis_ (from the name of the constellation _Septem triones_, the seven oxen) is used to form the opposite: _meridi-onalis_.

A similar case of ‘tainting’ is found in recent English. The NED, in the article on the suffix _-eer_, remarks that “in many of the words so formed there is a more or less contemptuous implication,” but does not explain this, and has not remarked that it is found only in words ending in _-teer_ (from words in _-t_). I think this contemptuous implication starts from _garreteer_ and _crotcheteer_ (perhaps also _pamphleteer_ and _privateer_); after these were formed the disparaging words _sonneteer_, _pulpiteer_. During the war (1916, I think) the additional word _profiteer_[97] came into use, but did not find its way into the dictionaries till 1919 (Cassell’s). And only the other day I read in an American publication a new word of the same calibre: “Against _patrioteering_, against fraud and violence ... Mr. Mencken has always nobly and bravely contended.”

XIX.--§ 16. The Classifying Instinct.

Man is a classifying animal: in one sense it may be said that the whole process of speaking is nothing but distributing phenomena, of which no two are alike in every respect, into different classes on the strength of perceived similarities and dissimilarities. In the name-giving process we witness the same ineradicable and very useful tendency to see likenesses and to express similarity in the phenomena through similarity in name. Professor Hempl told me that one of his little daughters, when they had a black kitten which was called _Nig_ (short for Nigger), immediately christened a gray kitten _Grig_ and a brown one _Brownig_. Here we see the genesis of a suffix through a natural process, which has little in common with the gradual weakening of an originally independent word, as in _-hood_ and the other instances mentioned above. In children’s speech similar instances are not unfrequent (cf. Ch. VII § 5); Meringer L 148 mentions a child of 1.7 who had the following forms: _augn_, _ogn_, _agn_, for ‘augen, ohren, haare.’ How many words formed or transformed in the same way must we require in order to speak of a suffix? Shall we recognize one in Romanic _leve_, _greve_ (cf. Fr. _grief_), which took the place of _leve_, _grave_? Here, as Schuchardt aptly remarks, it was not only the opposite signification, but also the fact that the words were frequently uttered shortly after one another, that made one word influence the other.

The classifying instinct often manifests itself in bringing words together in form which have something in common as regards signification. In this way we have smaller classes and larger classes, and sometimes it is impossible for us to say in what way the likeness in form has come about: we can only state the fact that at a given time the words in question have a more or less close resemblance. But in other cases it is easy to see which word of the group has influenced the others or some other. In the examples I am about to give, I have been more concerned to bring together words that exhibit the classifying tendency than to try to find out the impetus which directed the formation of the several groups.

In OE. we have some names of animals in _-gga_: _frogga_, _stagga_, _docga_, _wicga_, now _frog_, _stag_, _dog_, _wig_. _Savour_ and _flavour_ go together, the latter (OFr. _flaur_) having its _v_ from the former. _Groin_, I suppose, has its diphthong from _loin_; the older form was _grine_, _grynd(e)_. _Claw_, _paw_ (earlier _powe_, OFr. _pol_). _Rim_, _brim_. _Hook_, _nook_. _Gruff_, _rough_ (_tough_, _bluff_, _huff_--_miff_, _tiff_, _whiff_). _Fleer_, _leer_, _jeer_. _Twig_, _sprig_. _Munch_, _crunch_ (_lunch_). _Without uttering or muttering a word._ _The trees were lopped and topped._ In old Gothonic the word for ‘eye’ has got its vowel from the word for ‘ear,’ with which it was frequently collocated: _augo(n)_, _auso(n)_, but in the modern languages the two words have again been separated in their phonetic development. In French I suspect that popular instinct will class the words _air_, _terre_, _mer_ together as names of what used to be termed the ‘elements,’ in spite of the different spelling and origin of the sounds. In Russian _kogot’_ ‘griffe’ (claw), _nogot’_ ‘ongle’ (fingernail), and _lokot’_ ‘coude’ (elbow), three names of parts of the body, go together in flexion and accent (Boyer et Speranski, _Manuel de la l. russe_ 33). So do in Latin _culex_ ‘gnat’ and _pulex_ ‘flea.’ _Atrox_, _ferox_. A great many examples have been collected by M. Bloomfield, “On Adaptation of Suffixes in Congeneric Classes of Substantives” (_Am. Journal of Philol._ XII, 1891), from which I take a few. A considerable number of designations of parts of the body were formed with heteroclitic declension as _r-n_ stems (cf. above, XVIII § 2): ‘liver,’ Gr. _hēpar_, _hēpatos_, ‘udder,’ Gr. _outhar_, _outhatos_, ‘thigh,’ Lat. _femur_, _feminis_, further Aryan names for blood, wing, viscera, excrement, etc. Other designations of parts of the body were partly assimilated to this class, having also _n_ stems in the oblique cases, though their nominative was formed in a different way. Words for ‘right’ and ‘left’ frequently influence one another and adopt the same ending, and so do opposites generally: Bloomfield explains the _t_ in the Gothonic word corresponding to E. _white_, where from Sanskr. we should expect _th_, _çveta_, as due to the word for ‘black’; Goth. _hweits_, _swarts_, ON. _hvítr_, _svartr_, etc. A great many names of birds and other animals appear with the same ending, Gr. _glaux_ ‘owl,’ _kokkux_ ‘cuckoo,’ _korax_ ‘crow,’ _ortux_ ‘quail,’ _aix_ ‘goat,’ _alopex_ ‘fox,’ _bombux_ ‘silkworm,’ _lunx_ ‘lynx’ and many others, also some plant-names. Names for winter, summer, day, evening, etc., also to a great extent form groups. In a subsequent article (in IF vi. 66 ff.) Bloomfield pursues the same line of thought and explains likenesses in various words of related signification, in direct opposition to the current explanation through added root-determinatives, as due to blendings (cf. above, Ch. XVII § 6). In Latin the inchoative value of the verbs in _-esco_ is due to the accidentally inherent continuous character of a few verbs of the class: _adolesco_, _senesco_, _cresco_; but the same suffix is also found in the oldest words for ‘asking, wishing, searching,’ retained in E. _ask_, _wish_, G. _forschen_, which thus become a small group linked together by form and meaning alike.

XIX.--§ 17. Character of Suffixes.

There seems undoubtedly to be something accidental or haphazard in most of these transferences of sounds from one word to another through which groups of phonetically and semantically similar words are created; the process works unsystematically, or rather, it consists in spasmodic efforts at regularizing something which is from the start utterly unsystematic. But where conditions are favourable, i.e. where the notional connexion is patent and the phonetic element is such that it can easily be added to many words, the group will tend constantly to grow larger within the natural boundaries given by the common resemblance in signification.

I have no doubt that the vast majority of our formatives, such as suffixes and flexional endings, have arisen in this way through transference of some part, which at first was unmeaning in itself, from one word to another in which it had originally no business, and then to another and another, taking as it were a certain colouring from the words in which it is found, and gradually acquiring a more or less independent signification or function of its own. In long words, such as were probably frequent in primitive speech, and which were to the minds of the speakers as unanalyzable as _marmalade_ or _crocodile_ is to Englishmen nowadays, it would be perhaps most natural to keep the beginning unchanged and to modify the final syllable or syllables to bring about conformity with some word with which it was associated; hence the prevalence of suffixes in our languages, hence also the less systematic character of these suffixes as compared with the prefixes, most of which have originated in independent words, such as adverbs. What is from the merely phonetic point of view the ‘same’ suffix, in different languages may have the greatest variety of meaning, sometimes no discernible meaning at all, and it is in many cases utterly impossible to find out why in one particular language it can be used with one stem and not with another. Anyone going through the collections in Brugmann’s great _Grammar_ will be struck with this purely accidental character of the use of most of the suffixes--a fact which would be simply unthinkable if each of them had originally one definite, well-determined signification, but which is easy to account for on the hypothesis here adopted. And then many of them are not added to ready-made words or ‘roots,’ but form one indivisible whole with the initial part of the word; cf., for instance, the suffix _-le_ in English _squabble_, _struggle_, _wriggle_, _babble_, _mumble_, _bustle_, etc.

XIX.--§ 18. Brugmann’s Theory of Gender.

As I have said, man is a classifying animal, and in his language tends to express outwardly class distinctions which he feels more or less vaguely. One of the most important of these class divisions, and at the same time one of the most difficult to explain, is that of the three ‘genders’ in our Aryan languages. If we are to believe Brugmann, we have here a case of what I have in this work termed secretion. In his well-known paper, “Das Nominalgeschlecht in den indogermanischen Sprachen” (in Techmer’s _Zs. f. allgem. Sprachwissensch._ 4. 100 ff., cf. also his reply to Roethe’s criticism, PBB 15. 522) he puts the question: How did it come about that the old Aryans attached a definite gender (or sex, geschlecht) to words meaning foot, head, house, town, Gr. _pous_, for instance, being masculine, _kephalē_ feminine, _oikos_ masculine, and _polis_ feminine? The generally accepted explanation, according to which the imagination of mankind looked upon lifeless things as living beings, is, Brugmann says, unsatisfactory; the masculine and feminine of grammatical gender are merely unmeaning forms and have nothing to do with the ideas of masculinity and femininity; for even where there exists a natural difference of sex, language often employs only one gender. So in German we have _der hase_, _die maus_, and _der weibliche hase_ is not felt to be self-contradictory. Again, in the history of languages we often find words which change their gender exclusively on account of their form. Thus, in German, many words in _-e_, such as _traube_, _niere_, _wade_, which were formerly masculine, have now become feminine, because the great majority of substantives in _-e_ are feminine (_erde_, _ehre_, _farbe_, etc.). Nothing accordingly hinders us from supposing that grammatical gender originally had nothing at all to do with natural sex. The question, therefore, according to Brugmann, is essentially reduced to this: How did it come to pass that the suffix _-a_ was used to designate female beings? At first it had no connexion with femininity, witness Lat. _aqua_ ‘water’ and hundreds of other words; but among the old words with that ending there happened to be some denoting females: _mama_ ‘mother’ and _gena_ ‘woman’ (compare E. _quean_, _queen_). Now, in the history of some suffixes we see that, without any regard to their original etymological signification, they may adopt something of the radical meaning of the words to which they are added, and transfer that meaning to new formations. In this way _mama_ and _gena_ became the starting-point for analogical formations, as if the idea of female was denoted by the ending, and new words were formed, e.g. Lat. _dea_ ‘goddess’ from _deus_ ‘god,’ _equa_ ‘mare’ from _equus_ ‘horse,’ etc. The suffix _-iē-_ or _-ī-_ probably came to denote feminine sex by a similar process, possibly from Skr. _strī_ ‘woman,’ which may have given a fem. *_wḷqī_ ‘she-wolf’ to *_wḷqos_ ‘wolf.’ The above is a summary of Brugmann’s reasoning; it may interest the reader to know that a closely similar point of view had, several years previously, been taken by a far-seeing scholar in respect to a totally different language, namely Hottentot, where, according to Bleek, CG 2. 118-22, 292-9, a class division which had originally nothing to do with sex has been employed to distinguish natural sex. I transcribe a few of Bleek’s remarks: “The apparent sex-denoting character which the classification of the nouns now has in the Hottentot language was evidently imparted to it after a division of the nouns into classes[98] had taken place. It probably arose, in the first instance, from the possibly accidental circumstance that the nouns indicating (respectively) man and woman were formed with different derivative suffixes, and consequently belonged to different classes (or genders) of nouns, and that these suffixes thus began to indicate the distinction of sex in nouns where it could be distinguished” (p. 122). “To assume, for example, that the suffix of the m. sg. (_-p_) had originally the meaning of ‘man,’ or the fem. sg. (_-s_) that of ‘woman,’ would in no way explain the peculiar division of the nouns into classes as we find it in Hottentot, and would be opposed to all that is probable regarding the etymology of these suffixes, and also to the fact that so many nouns are included in the sex-denoting classes to which the distinction of sex can only be applied by a great effort.... If the word for ‘man’ were formed with one suffix (_-p_), and the word indicating ‘woman’ (be it accidentally or not) by another (_-s_), then other nouns would be formed with the same suffixes, in analogy with these, until the majority of the nouns of each sex were formed with certain suffixes which would thus assume a sex-denoting character” (p. 298).

Brugmann’s view on Aryan gender has not been unchallenged. The weakest points in his arguments are, of course, that there are so few old naturally feminine words in _-a_ and _-i_ to take as starting-points for such a thoroughgoing modification of the grammatical system, and that Brugmann was unable to give any striking explanation of the concord of adjectives and pronouns with words that had not these endings, but which were nevertheless treated as masculines and feminines respectively. It would lead us too far here to give any minute account of the discussion which arose on these points;[99] one of the most valuable contributions seems to me Jacobi’s suggestion (_Compositum u. Nebensatz_, 1897, 115 ff.) that the origin of grammatical gender is not to be sought in the noun, but in the pronoun (he finds a parallel in the Dravidian languages)--but even he does not find a fully satisfactory explanation, and the Aryan gender distinction reaches back to so remote an antiquity, thousands of years before any literary tradition, that we shall most probably never be able to fathom all its mysteries. Of late years less attention has been given to the problem of the feminine, which presented itself to Brugmann, than to the distinction between two classes, one of which was characterized by the use of a nominative in _-s_, which is now looked upon as a ‘transitive-active’ case, and the other by no ending or by an ending _-m_, which is the same as was used as the accusative in the first class (an ‘intransitive-passive’ case), and an attempt has been made to see in the distinction something analogous to the division found in Algonkin languages between a class of ‘living’ and another of ‘lifeless’ things--though these two terms are not to be taken in the strictly scientific sense, for primitive men do not reason in the same way as we do, but ascribe or deny ‘life’ to things according to criteria which we have great difficulty in apprehending. This would mean a twofold division into one class comprising the historical masculines and feminines, and another comprising the neuters.

As to the feminine, we saw two old endings characterizing that gender, _a_ and _i_. With regard to the latter, I venture to throw out the suggestion that it is connected with diminutive suffixes containing that vowel in various languages: on the whole, the sound [i] has a natural affinity with the notion of small, slight, insignificant and weak (see Ch. XX § 8). In some African languages we find two classes, one comprising men and big things, and the other women and small things (Meinhof, _Die Sprachen der Hamiten_ 23), and there is nothing unnatural in the supposition that similar views may have obtained with our ancestors. This would naturally account for Skr. _vṛk-ī_ ‘she-wolf’ (orig. little wolf, ‘wolfy’) from Skr. _vṛkas_, _napt-ī_, Lat. _neptis_, G. _nichte_, Skr. _dēv-ī_, ‘goddess,’ etc. But the feminine _-a_ is to me just as enigmatic as, say, the _d_ of the old ablative.

XIX.--§ 19. Final Considerations.

The ending _-a_ serves to denote not only female beings, but also abstracts, and if in later usage it is also applied to males, as in Latin _nauta_ ‘sailor,’ _auriga_ ‘charioteer,’ this is only a derived use of the abstracts denoting an activity, sailoring, driving, etc., just as G. _die wache_, besides the activity of watching, comes to mean the man on guard, or as _justice_ (Sp. _el justicia_) comes to mean ‘judge.’ The original sense of _Antonius collega fuit Ciceronis_ was ‘A. was the co-election of C.’ (Osthoff, _Verbum in d. Nominal-compos._, 1878, 263 ff., Delbrück, _Synt. Forsch._ 4. 6).

The same _-a_ is finally used as the plural ending of most neuters, but, as is now universally admitted (see especially Johannes Schmidt, _Die Pluralbildungen der indogerm. Neutra_, 1889), the ending here was originally neither neuter nor plural, but, on the contrary, feminine and singular. The forms in _-a_ are properly collective formations like those found, for instance, in Lat. _opera_, gen. _operæ_, ‘work,’ comp. _opus_ ‘(a piece of) work’; Lat. _terra_ ‘earth,’ comp. Oscan _terum_ ‘plot of ground’; _pugna_ ‘boxing, fight,’ comp. _pugnus_ ‘fist.’ This explains among other things the peculiar syntactic phenomenon, which is found regularly in Greek and sporadically in Sanskrit and other languages, that a neuter plural subject takes the verb in the singular. Greek _toxa_ is often used in speaking of a single bow; and the Latin poetic use of _guttura_, _colla_, _ora_, where only one person’s throat, neck or face is meant, points similarly to a period of the past when these words did not denote the plural. We can now see the reason of this _-a_ being in some cases also the plural sign of masculine substantives: Lat. _loca_ from _locus_, _joca_ from _jocus_, etc.; Gr. _sita_ from _sitos_. Joh. Schmidt refers to similar plural formations in Arabic; and as we have seen (Ch. XIX § 9), the Bantu plural prefixes had probably a similar origin. And we are thus constantly reminded that languages must often make the most curious _détours_ to arrive at a grammatical expression for things which appear to us so self-evident as the difference between he and she, or that between one and more than one. Expressive simplicity in linguistic structure is not a primitive, but a derived quality.

FOOTNOTES:

[89] Why so? Did sheep and cows also begin with vowels only, adding _b_ and _m_ afterwards to make up their _bah_ and _moo_?

[90] The examples taken from Gabelentz’s _Grammar_ and an article in Techmer’s _Internat. Zeitschrift_ I.

[91] I must also mention A. Conrady, _Eine indochinesische Causativ-denominativ-bildung_ (Leipzig, 1896), in which Lepsius’s theory is carried a great step further and it is demonstrated with very great learning that many of the tone relations (a well as modifications of initial sounds) of Chinese and kindred languages find their explanation in the previous existence of prefixes which are now extinct, but which can still be pointed out in Tibetan. Though I ought, therefore, to have spoken of prefixes instead of ‘flexional endings’ above, p. 371, the essence of the contention that prehistoric Chinese must have had a polysyllabic and non-isolating structure is thus borne out by the researches of competent specialists in this field.

[92] Madvig Kl 170, Max Müller L 1. 271, Whitney OLS 1. 283, G 124, Paul P 1st ed. 181, repeated in the following editions, see 4th, 1909, 350 and 347, 349; Brugmann VG 1889, 2. 1 (but in 2nd ed. this has been struck out in favour of hopeless skepticism), Schuchardt, _Anlass d. Volapüks_ 11, Gabelentz Spr 189, Tegnér SM 53, Sweet, _New Engl. Gr._ § 559, Storm, _Engl. Phil._ 673, Rozwadowski, _Wortbildung u. Wortbed._, Uhlenbeck, _Karakt. d. bask. Gramm._ 24, Sütterlin WGS 1902, 122, Porzezinski, Spr 1910, 229.

[93] Two explanations of this formative element were given by the old school: according to Schleicher C § 290, it was the root _ja_ of the relative pronoun; according to Curtius and others it was the root _i_ ‘to go,’ Greek _fer-o-i-mi_ being analyzed as ‘I go to bear,’ whence, by an easy (?) transition, ‘I should like to bear,’ etc.

[94] Cf. Sommer, Lat. 528, and on Armenian and Tokharian _r_ forms MSL 18. 10 ff. and Feist KI 455. But it must not be overlooked that H. Pedersen (KZ 40. 166 ff.) has revived and strengthened the old theory that _r_ in Italic and Keltic is an original _se_.

[95] If _s_ was a definite article, why should it be used only with some stems and not with others? Why should neuters never require a definite article?

[96] While it is difficult to see the relation between a demonstrative pronoun or a deictic particle and genitival function, it would be easy enough to understand the latter if we started from a possessive pronoun (ejus, suus), and, curiously enough, we find this very sound _s_ used as a sign for the genitive in two independent languages, starting from that notion. In Indo-Portuguese we have _gobernadors casa_ ‘governor’s house,’ from _gobernador su casa_ (above, Ch. XI § 12, p. 213), and in the South-African ‘Taal’ the usual expression for the genitive is by means of _syn_, which is generally shortened into _se_ (_s_) and glued enclitically to the substantive, even to feminines and plurals: _Marie-se boek_ ‘Maria’s book,’ _di gowweneur se hond_ ‘the governor’s dog’ (H. Meyer, _Die Sprache der Buren_, 1901, p. 40, where also the confusion with the adjective ending _-s_, in Dutch spelt _-sch_, is mentioned. For the construction compare G. _dem vater sein hut_ and others from various languages; cf. the appendix on E. _Bill Stumps his mark_ in ChE 182 f.).

[97] Cf. Lloyd George’s speech at Dundee (_The Times_, July 6, 1917): “The Government will not permit the burdens of the country to be increased by what is called ‘profiteering.’ Although I have been criticized for using that word, I believe on the whole it is a rather good one. It is _profit-eer-ing_ as distinguished from _profit-ing_. Profiting is fair recompense for services rendered, either in production or distribution; profiteering is an extravagant recompense given for services rendered. I believe that unfair in peace. In war it is an outrage.”

[98] Bleek is here thinking of classes like those of the Bantu languages, which have nothing to do with sex.

[99] For bibliography and criticism see Wheeler in _Journ. of Germ. Philol._ 2. 528 ff., and especially Josselin de Jong in _Tijdschr. v. Ned. Taal- en Letterk._ 29. 21 ff., and the same writer’s thesis _De Waardeeringsonderscheiding van levend en levenloos in het Indogermaansch vergel. m. hetzelfde verschijnsel in Algonkin-talen_ (Leiden, 1913). Cf. also Hirt GDS 45 ff.