signification, and its disappearance is a real loss to the language.*

In the opinion of the ablest linguists, English has lost nothing in force, variety, or precision of expression, by the simplification of its forms, and the substitution of determinatives for inflections. The present movement is still in the same direction. The subjunctive is evidently passing out of use, and there is good reason to suppose that it will soon become obsolete altogether. The compound past infinitive also, formerly very frequent, is almost disused. Lord Berners says: should have aided to have destroyed, had made haste to have entered, and the like, and this was common in colloquial usage until a very recent period. In cases of this sort, where the relations of time are clearly expressed by the first auxiliary, it is evident that nothing is gained by employing a second auxiliary to fix more precisely the category of the infinitive, but where the simple inflected past tense precedes the infinitive, there is sometimes ground for the employment of an auxiliary with the latter. I intended to go and I intended to have gone, do not necessarily express precisely the same thing, but the latter form is not likely long to resist the present inclination to make the infinitive strictly aoristic, and such forms as I had intended to go will supersede the past tense of the latter mood.

*Weorthan, or worthen, is not unfrequent in early English. For example, in one of the old Prologues to the English Scriptures, Wycliffite Versions, I., p. 40, note, we find:

"Alle gladnes and delite of this erthely vanyte vanyschith, and at the last worthith to nought " In fact this verb did not become altogether obsolete until the seventeenth century, for Heywood says:

"Thou therefore that wast nothing before thou wert, &c., &c." "Thou, which wast not, wert made." "Give me a reason (if thou canst) how thou werl created." The Hierarchie of the blessed Angells, London, 1635, p. 383.

In these cases, wert is not the subjunctive of the verb to be, but a remnant of worthen, and, in the last two, used as a passive auxiliary.

LECTURE XV.

GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS.*

.

I.

IN considering the interjection, it was stated that words of that class were distinguished from all other parts of speech by the quality of inherent and complete significance, so that a single ejaculatory monosyllable, or phrase not syntactically connected with a period, might alone communicate a fact, or, in other words, stand for and express an entire proposition. The interjection might be involuntarily uttered, and impart a fact of a nature altogether subjective to the speaker, as, for example, that he was affected with sensations of physical pain or pleasure, with grief or with terror; or it might assume a form more approximating to that of syntactic language, and address itself to an external object, as an expression of love, of pity, of hate or execration, of desire, command or deprecation.

*The illustrations, and much of the argument, in this and the following lectures on the same subject, are too familiar to be instructive to educated persons, but I have introduced them, in the hope that those engaged in teaching languages night derive some useful suggestions from them.

The application of the distinction between interjections, as parts of speech, which, used singly and alone, may communicate a fact, a wish, or command, and therefore express an entire proposition, and parts of speech which become signifi cant only by their connection with other vocables, is properly limited to the vocabulary of languages where, as in our own, words admit of little or no change of form, and to the simplest, least variable forms of words in those other languages, which express the grammatical relations, and certain other conditions of the parts of speech, by what is called inflection.

I propose now to illustrate the distinction between inflected and uninflected, or grammatically variable and grammatically invariable words, and to inquire into the essential character and use of inflections. Inflection is derived from the Latin flecto, I bend, curve or turn, and inflections are the changes made in the forms of words, to indicate either their grammatical relations to other words in the same period, or some accidental condition of the thing expressed by the inflected word. The possible relations and conditions of words are very numerous, and some languages express more, some fewer of them by the changes of form called inflections.

The languages which embody the general literature of Europe, ancient and modern, employ inflections for the fol lowing purposes: First, in nouns, adjectives, pronouns and articles, to denote

(a) gender,

(b) number, and

(c) case, or grammatical relation.

Secondly, in adjectives and adverbs, to mark degrees of comparison. Thirdly, in adjectives, to indicate whether the word

is used in a definite or an indefinite application. Fourthly, in verbs, to express number, person, voice, mood and tense; or, in other words, to determine whether the nominative case, the subject of the verb is one or more, singular or plural; whether the speaker, the person addressed, or still another, is the subject; whether the state or action or emotion expressed by the verb, is conceived of solely with reference to the subject, or as occasioned by an external agency; whether that state, action or emotion, is absolute or conditional; and whether it is past, present or future.*

Interjections, prepositions and conjunctions are uninflected, or invariable in form.

The variations of the verb are usually the most numerous, and the uses and importance of inflections may be well illustrated by comparing an English uninflected with a Latin inflected verb.

The English defective verb ought is the old preterite of the verb to owe, which was at an early period used as a sort of auxiliary with the infinitive, implying the sense of necessity, just as we, and many of the Continental nations, now employ have and its equivalents. I have much to do, in English; J'ai beaucoup à faire, in French; Ich habe

* No single one of the languages to which I refer employs inflection for all the purposes I have specified. The Greek and Latin have the most complete, the English the most imperfect system of variation. The Icelandic, Swedish, and Danish exhibit the rare case of a modern passive voice, but, like the other tongues of the Gothic stock, they want the future tense; and, on the other hand, they possess, in common with these latter, the definite and indefinite forms of the adjective, which existed also in Anglo-Saxon, but are not distinguished in Greek and Latin. There may be some doubt whether this distinction is not rather a special exception than a general characteristic of the inflectional system which belongs to the cultivated languages of Europe, but the great importance of Scandinavian, German and Anglo-Saxon literature, entitle the peculiarities of Gothic grammar to a conspicuous place in all treatises upon mod ern and especially English philology.

viel zu thun, in German, all mean, substantially, there is much which I must do. Afterwards, by a common process in language, the general idea of necessity involved in this use of the word owe resolved itself into two distinct senses: the one of pecuniary or other liability in the nature of a debt, or the return of an equivalent for property, services or favors received; the other that of moral obligation, or at least of expediency. Different forms from the same root were now appropriated to the two senses, to owe, with a newly formed weak preterite, owed, being exclusively limited to the notion of debt, and the simple form ought being employed in all moods, tenses, numbers and persons, to express moral obligation or expediency, or as an auxiliary verb.

Before I proceed to illustrate the use of inflections by comparing the invariable ought with a Latin inflected verb of similar signification, I will pause to offer some further observations on the history of the verb to owe. This verb is derived from a Gothic radical signifying to have, to possess, or, as we now say, in another form of the same word, to own. Shakespeare very often uses owe in this sense, both in the present and the new or weak preterite form, owed; for the separation between the two forms owed and ought, though it commenced before Shakespeare's time, was not fully completed till a later period. Thus in Twelfth Night, at the close of the first act, these lines occur:

Fate, show thy force: ourselves we do not owe;
What is decreed must be, and be this so!

In like manner in the Tempest I. 2:

Thou dost here usurp

The name thou ow'st not