A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India v3.c17.9

v3.c17.9

In that stage of the Sanskrit language which is usually accepted as the classical one, the verb is synthetical throughout, except in one or two tenses where, as will be hereafter shown, the analytical method has already begun to show itself. By separating the inflectional additions, and unravelling the euphonic changes necessitated by them, we may arrive at a residuum or grammarian's abstraction called the root. These roots, which have no real existence in spoken language, serve as useful and indispensable pegs on which to hang the long chain of forms which would otherwise defy all attempts at reducing them to order. Some writers have lately thought fit to sneer at the philologist and his roots, and have made themselves merry over imaginary pictures of a time when the human race talked to each other in roots only. These gentlemen set up a bugbear of their own creation for the purpose of pulling it to pieces again. No one, as far as I am aware, has ever asserted that at a given period of the world's history a certain race of men used such words as bhú, gam, or kar, till some one hit on the ingenious device of adding to bhú the word ami, and, modifying bhú into bhava, burst upon his astonished countrymen with the newly-discovered word bhavâmi, "I am." What has been asserted, and truly too, is that in Sanskrit we find a large number of words expressing the idea of "being," in which the consonantal sound bh is followed by various vowels and semivowels, which, according to phonetic laws, spring from the vowel û, and that as, for scientific purposes, some common generic term is required to enable us to include under one head all parts of the verb, we are justified in putting together these two constant unvarying elements, and so obtaining a neat technical expression bhú, to which, as to a common factor, can be referred all the words expressive of "being" in its relations of time, person, and condition. Analysis and arrangement of this sort is an essential part of every science, and the native grammarians had done this much work for us before European skill was brought to bear on the subject.