LECTURE XIV.

THE NOUN, ADJECTIVE AND VERB.

Ir is not disputed, that in the genesis of language the interjection, even if not technically a part of speech, and the onomatopoetic or imitative words, must be regarded as the primary linguistic utterances, but grammatical physiologists differ much with respect to the order of succession in the other principal parts of speech. Presented in the usual form of a historical problem, the inquiry is an idle one, for the noun, whether substantive or adjective, and the verb, can be conceived of as existing only as members of a period or proposition, and therefore the noun supposes the verb, and the verb the noun. With the exception of the Lautgeberden, or vocal-gestures, and the imitative sounds, words are as essentially and necessarily social as man himself, and a single word can no more spring into spontaneous life, or exist in isolation, than can the intelligent being who uses it. We know external objects only by their sensuous properties and their action, and we must necessarily suppose all names of objects to have been primarily descriptive, because we can imagine no possible ground of a name, but the ascription of a quality or an act as characteristic of the object named. It

would seem, then, that before the name could be applied, the adjective or the verb expressive of the quality or act, the predicate, in short, must exist; and on the other hand, as concrete ideas must precede abstract ones, we cannot comprehend the origin of the adjective or the verb, independently of the noun, or name of some object possessing the quality, or habitually practising the act, predicated by the adjec tive or verb. But though words have no separate individual existence, though they live and move only in interdependence upon each other, yet in studying their forms and organization, each must be primarily investigated by itself, because the limited nature of our faculties, whether sensuous or intellectual, obliges us to acquire the knowledge of the whole by the successive study of its parts, of the complex, through an acquaintance with the simple elements of which it is conceived to be composed.

In order to comprehend the physiology of a given language, or the functions and relations of its organs, a knowledge of its anatomy, or the normal structure of these organs, is necessary, and we will therefore examine briefly the formal characteristics of English words. These we have already considered in their bearing upon etymology, and though we are now to look at them from a different point of view, the facts are still the same, and I must accordingly be pardoned for some repetition of what, indeed, I by no means suppose to have been new when I first presented it. I do not propose in the present course to attempt a formal examination of every class of vocables into which grammarians have divided language, and I shall only discuss the character and offices of the noun or substantive, the adjective and the verb. I begin with the noun or substantive, not as historically first, or logically pre-eminent, but because, in learning

words by the process of domestic instruction called the natural method, we commence with names.

Before proceeding further, it will not be amiss to suggest an observation or two upon the names which grammarians have given to these parts of speech. The word noun is derived from the Latin nomen, a name, and is a very appropriate designation for the substantive, which is properly the name of an object. English grammarians generally include under the noun the adjective, and speak of nouns substantive and nouns adjective. The ground of this nomenclature is the theory, that the adjective is to be regarded as the name of an accident or quality existing not independently or abstractly, but only in the concrete, and that the term which designates an accident is not properly entitled to a separate grammatical position, but must be considered as a mere appendage or adjunct of the substantive. But this view is without any solid foundation. The verb is as truly the name of the act or status it represents, as the adjective of the quality it expresses, and there would be the same propriety in styling the former the noun verbal, as the latter the noun adjective. The designations noun substantive and noun adjective, even if logically accurate, are moreover objectionable for grammatical purposes, as being awkward and unwieldy. I therefore discard them, and though I may occasionally employ substantive, to vary the phrase, yet I shall generally use noun as equivalent to noun substantive, and not as embracing the adjective, which I consider as included in it only by a misnomer.

The Roman grammarians applied to the member of the proposition which predicates of a subject being, state, volition, action or perception, the name of verbum, or the word, as emphatically the most important vocable in the period, and

the term verb, commonly employed in most European languages, like other technical words of modern grammar, is derived from the Latin appellation. Some German philologists have preferred to use a compound of their own, Hauptwort, or chief-word, instead. More commonly, however, they style the verb Zeitwort, time-word, because the verb, by its form, or by the aid of auxiliaries, generally expresses the period of the act or status described, as past, present or future, and of course involves the notion of time. But this nomenclature appears to me highly objectionable.

Whenever we describe or name an object by a quality either unessential, or relatively unimportant, to our concep tion of its true character, we utter a philological untruth, and proclaim a philosophical error. We can as easily abstract the notion of an act or a condition from time, as we can that of color, or any other sensuous quality. We can as well imagine the act of running, or striking, without any reference to the period when the act takes place, as we can the property of redness, of weight, of sourness or sweetness, and therefore, although the variable forms of verbs usually express time, yet to the primary notion conveyed by the verb, time. is as unessential as it is to our conception of the taste of an orange. We may go further, and affirm that in strictness all verbs express present time, when they refer to time at all. In the process of ratiocination, we think by general terms alone, without reference to time, but it is certain that when we individualize an act or state, the image which it suggests is necessarily a present one. Whether I say, "Mr. Church painted his Heart of the Andes last year," or "Mr. Church will paint the Jungfrau next year," the picture and the painter are not past or future to my imagination, but present; and therefore the verb I use excites in both my mind and

that of my hearer a notion of a present artist and a present act. The imagination lives in a perpetual now. The notion of an individual event as having been, or as yet to be, is a purely logical conception, and only general propositions which exist in words alone, only that which we cannot picture to ourselves, that which has no specific reality, but is a mere intellectual figment, can be detached from the notion of present time at all. In most languages, verbs have forms which exclude the notion of time, as, for example, the infinitive as used in modern English, and even the forms grammatically expressive of time are, in general propositions, employed aoristically, or without any reference to time. For example, when I say, "birds fly," I do not affirm that birds. are now flying, that they actually did fly, or will fly, at any past or future point of time, but simply that the power of flight is at all times an attribute of the bird. The present tense of the verb to fly, as thus used, is as absolutely independent of time as the noun bird, or the adjective red, by which I may qualify it. If the expression of time is an inherent necessity of the verb, special forms for the future as well as the present and the past ought to be universal, but in most modern European languages, the future is a compound, the elements of which are a present auxiliary and an aorist infinitive, for in the phrases I shall go, he will go, shall and will are in the present tense, and go is aoristic. The AngloSaxon, with a single exception in the case of a substantive verb, had absolutely no mode of expressing the future by any verbal, form, simple or compound. The context alone determined the time, and in German, in the Scandinavian dialects, and in English, we still very commonly, as the Anglo-Saxons did, express the future by a present. Ich gehe morgen nach Philadelphie, I go, or I am going, to Philadel