This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 Excerpt: ...(pres. part.). In the same way the whole of the Hindi conjugation except a solitary tense (the so-called "aorist") has become participial with gender and number but no person, as in so many 1 Progress in Language, 1894, p. 132. B According to Ludwig's "adaptation theory," as soon as the relations of words to each other in the sentence got to be understood, "pre-existing suffixes," no doubt floating about in circumambient space, were set apart to determine them. Thus the Greeks captured the suffix es, which in irbS-ea-ai and iroS-fo-wv (iroSwv) has no grammatical meaning, but which came to symbolise the nom. pi. in T68cs and the 2nd pers. singular in (rvwes, being thus made to do duty for the plural in nouns and the singular in verbs. Thus also we are back in the old days, when speech was regarded as an elaboration of the conscious will, instead of being the result of unconscious cerebration acting through the vocal organs, as it had previously acted through the facial muscles, say, in the miocene precursor. agglutinating systems. Similarly vernacular Bengali is now mainly agglutinating, forming nominal cases, number, and gender by juxtaposed nouns, the case-endings themselves being the same for singular and plural, while conjugation is effected by verbal nouns, or participles and auxiliaries. "In a word the whole language tends to become reduced to nouns, joined together to express declension and conjugation1." What is happening so generally during the process of disintegration (synthesis to analysis) must have taken place universally during the process of integration in the pre-inflecting agglutinative stage of linguistic evolution. From that stage language developed, according to its different initial tendencies, in...
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