before him, could regard the formation, of which they are types, as one "specially," or "distinctively pertaining to verbs," is to me as "inconceivable 112 as to Prof. Schrader. With the latter I find it impossible to suppose that the vowels of ristanaku, zikaraku, could ever have belonged to any part of a verb. Again, if ristan-aku be a verb, then is ristan a verbal base, instead of what we know it to be, a numeral adjective of highly complex construction. Starting from ris 'beginning, first,' we have ristu 'first part,' then ristan 'first ordinal number.' And so probably of the other words in this paragraph, which, as Schrader says, are formed on bases which, "by the very nature of the case, never do, nor ever can appear as verbs." But there remains the question-are none other of these compounds in aku ever formed upon verbal bases? What is to be said of Hincks's sentence, unnoticed by either of his opponents, nor quoted even by Mr. Sayce— sa.ni.na . la i.sa.a.ku rival I have not'? Can it be affirmed that the root, with which the pronoun anaku is here combined, ever appears in any other form than those belonging to verbs; or that the compound isaaku, including the pronoun as subject, and governing the noun sanina as object, is not as much a verb as the single words habeo, exw, or Gothic haba and aih? Take again the forms cited by Prof. Schrader: To Merodach I am constant' (ka-ai

6

unless the nouns are to be called verbs, there is no other word ,אַתָּה הָאִישׁ, נַעַר חוא

but the pronoun to bear that name. And so, no doubt, since the proposition sarraku 'I (am) king,' contains but one word, that one must be a verb. But surely the right account is, that in such cases the verb is not present at all, but understood. And here, perhaps, we may adduce an illustration which, though brought to the present subject from a distance, can hardly be called far-fetched, if we compare the way in which such sentences are treated by the Scoto-Gaelic language and its degenerate sister, the Manks. In the former, I am the door,' is in the Authorized Version, thus expressed, Is mise an dorus, where mise is the emphatic pronoun of the first person, and the verb is the copula. But from Manks, is, in its use as a copula, has been lost; and the same sentence is therefore rendered thus: Mish y dorrys; mish being identical in etymology and almost in sound with Scoto-Gaelic mise. Yet surely the grammatical description of the latter sentence is not, that in it, mish, which in Scoto-Gaelic was a pronoun, has in Manks become a verb; but that in Manks, now deprived of the verb, the verb has to be mentally supplied. Exactly the same contrast between the two languages is displayed in all the texts hereafter cited for the use of the Syriac eno.

1 "besondere verbal-form," Schr. in loc. cit.

2 "unbegreiflich," pp. 391, 392.

3 Ch. v. § 18.

-na-ak); 'I fail not' (la ba-at-la-ak). Prof. S. himself admits kaainak to be based on the form kayan, which he deduces from the root 15; and if the vowels of kaainak are not exactly what we should expect in any part of the tense of a verb, they present no violent discrepancy from such. But what is there in the vowels of baṭlak to disqualify it as an inflexion of the Arabic and Aramaïc verbal root,, more than in the vowels of the first pers. sing. baṭaltu, beṭēlēth? and the word itself is to all appearance simply a verb intransitive. Yet further, Mr. Sayce affords us at least two specimens of the ku form which are not only "distinctively and specially verbs," but, like isaaku, transitive ones governing an object. I refer to the passage, puputa rabacu acala dabsacu1 ́ crops I increase, corn I mature.' Unless, then, the reading be disputed, which it has not been in Prof. S.'s critique of Mr. Sayce's Grammar, I think we have here two words which are as genuine and complete verbs as any in the compass of language. Action and subject of the verb are united in the forms rabacu, dabsacu; and the object expressed separately in puputa and acala. I quite agree with Mr. Sayce that, "however possible it may be to imagine a substantive in sarracu, zicaracu, this is altogether out of the question with rabacu and dabsacu," and, substituting "verbal forms in cu" for "Permansive Tense," I can adopt, without limitation, his statement that "these two words alone are quite sufficient to establish" the existence of such in Assyrian.

.....

Taking, then, this position, that sarraku and ristanaku are not verbal, but substantival and adjectival forms, and that rabacu and dabsacu are true verbal forms and nothing else, the question arises, what comprehensive definition or account of these forms in -ku are we to give so as to reconcile these adverse conclusions? Here two views presented themselves to my own mind as conceivable. First, should the date of the inscriptions justify it, might we not consider this a case of linguistic (sprach-historisch) development in time, and place the forms in a series whereof sarraku shall be the first, and dabsacu the last, term? the process of pronominal combination having originated with nouns, and terminated with verbs. This, of course, postulates that the inscription with dabsacu should be comparatively recent, and that with

1 p. 67.

ristanaku, ancient. But a personal reference to Mr. Sayce1 informs me that chronologically "it is impossible to give any priority to either of these forms; indeed, so far as one's evidence goes, the latter would be older than the former." This conjecture then vanishes, and leaves us apparently but one other way of treating the case, viz. to arrange these -ku forms not in a line, but in a circle, and to affirm that, during the whole Assyrio-Babylonian period of Semitic, this afformative -AKU or -AK, which subsequently, as the Ethiopic language shows, became restricted to verbal bases, was capable of attaching itself indifferently to these, to substantival, to adjectival, and, in short, to all bases susceptible of inflexion; and only fortuitously became subject to the limitation which we find in Ethiopic.

III.

For that the Ethiopic form of first pers. sing. perf. in -ku, as in gabar-ku, is identical with this Assyrian -aku, there can, I think, be little doubt. Such a form could never have been evolved within the Ethiopic itself, such as we know it; because in it, as in Arabic and Aramaïc, the first personal pronoun wants the palatal terminal element which appears in Assyrian, Hebrew, Moabitic, Egyptian, and Sub-Semitic; and which must therefore have come down from that primitive unity of Semitic speech, whereof Assyrian is the truest representative, as in Aryan is Sanskrit. In Ethiopic, Arabic and Aramaïc "I" is ana, anā, eno; but not anaku, "N, 18, anok, nec, etc. And further, the identity of this -ku termination with that afformative of the first person which appears in Arabic astu, in Hebrew and Moabitic as 'n, and in Aramaïc as П, also seems pretty certain, on account of the general resemblance of the whole Æthiopic perfect to the same tense in the cognates, both in form and in prin

2

1 In Mr. Sayce's Principles of Comparative Philology, p. 87 (Trübner, 1874), will be found a letter embodying my views of the subject when the Hebrew forms, Jer. xxii. 23, had first suggested to me the idea of searching the cognates for illustrations of the Assyrian formation in -ku. The far more important Aramaic analogies had not at that time presented themselves.

2 The main peculiarity of the Ethiopic perfect is, that in all pronominal inflexions a is exchanged for a ; but however this variation is to be accounted for, its absolute uniformity implies regularity.

ciples of formation; notwithstanding the change of temporal value from dabsacu I ripen,' to ' I softened,' and the conversion of the Assyrian and Æthiopic palatal into the lingual of the other languages. Thus does Ethiopic become the link whereby, at this point, Assyrian passes into a chain of harmonious connexion with its kindred of a later generation.

IV.

But, further, have we nowhere in Semitic any parallel to this deliberate erection of a personal pronoun as subject of a verb together with a verbal base, into the semblance of a tense? Anaku is separable into the two elements ana+ku; the latter being, as we said, absent in the Aramaïc form of the pronoun. Yet that language in both its branches habitually constructs a present tense by the attachment of ană Chaldee, eno Syriac, as an afformative to the participle present. Schaaf, Winer, and Fürst, in their Chaldee Grammars, give copious

2

3

4

+

I (am) killing. We have קָטָלוּ אֲנָא for קָטֵלְנָא instances of the form I know, etc., etc., and יָדַעְנָא ,I send שָׁלַחְנָא ,I remember דָבֵרְנָא קָטֵלאַתְּ for קָטְלַת this formation was extended to the second person, as

'thou (art) killing,' and included both genders and numbers, as well as the participles of all conjugations. Fürst even adds a Rabbinical form =+; and in Biblical Hebrew, as Schaaf reminds us,

1 The root, allied to p, etc., is not in actual use in Hebrew. Vide Gesenius and Fürst sub voc.

Opus Aramæum, pp. 334-336.

* Grammatik des Chaldaismus, 2te Aufl. p. 42.

4 Chaldaische Grammatik, p. 119. Well worthy of observation are Fürst's remarks (note, p. 118) on the disappearance of this participial form from the more recent MSS. and the editions of the Targums, in consequence of its real character being forgotten and confounded with the perfect. In my own copy of Onkelos, Ny, corresponding to Hebrew 'ny, Gen. iv. 9, is pointed '; to the utter confusion of the sense, because the latter form is the first person plural of the perfect, and therefore the equivalent of Hebrew we knew.' Fürst's Rabbinical example hardly looks genuine. Schaaf, however, has (p. 336)

(sic) cabbali

and nav,

zatus sum. Rather? cabbalizor. It is worth remarking that in ♬ Schaaf prints the Kholem full (1), wherein he seems not to be borne out by the editions. Yet one would think that unless the word had stood ", the punctuators would hardly have felt compelled to treat it as other than a Perfect. is the only instance which the preformative absolutely proves to be a participle.

we have words which the Masoretic punctuation treats as combinations of the participle with the second pers. sing. feminine. He instances Gen. xvi. 11, 'et paries;' and in Jerem. xxii. 23, quæ habitas tu,' and also ' 'quæ nidificata es tu;' omitting, I know not why, a third example in the same verse, ', participle Niphal of (? quam miseranda es tu'); but adding Jer. li. 13, 'quæ habitas tu.' But to return to Aramaïc, far more complete is the illustration from Syriac. In that language the classical Peshito version yields us, so far as verbal bases are concerned, passim, the form Woqotel'no for goțel÷eno 'I (am) killing,' where the linea occultans causes a perfect fusion (as to sound) of the pronoun and participle into one word, which indeed, in some cases, can be written as such, e.g. first plural qoṭlinan, 'we (are) killing;' and the system comprehends all persons, even the third, as oo Wo gotel'u, or WAO oo VA gotela'w, 'he (is) killing,' etc., etc. Dabsacu, then, is fully represented by qoțelno; but as regards bases other than verbal, the modes in which pronouns may be combined with them are various, and I must leave to the professed Syriast an exhaustive description of them. First, however, there seems no reason for supposing that a Syrian would have indulged in any such large and unrestrained use of eno united to a noun as we see when the Assyrian king flushes forth his egotism in a stream of eleven forms of anaku in conjunction with a braggart epithet or title. But (I.) in direct affirmations, the most common case of the subordination of eno to another word not a verb, and of semi-absorption by the same, is (a) where that word is eno itself repeated instead of the copula. Thus John x. 9, 'I (am) the door,' is 21 Lil`eno'no taryo; vide also x. 11, and vi. 48, xi. 25, xv. 1, 5. However, (B) the second eno may be understood; and then the pronoun stands singly and entire, as J. i. 23, where 'I (am) the voice' is eno golo. But (II.) in oratio obliqua, whether eno be used once or twice, the combination may take place at the end of the word or words which constitute the predicate, as (y) in I. Cor. i. 12, a passage which is worth quoting at length

hode den omar'no, dith menkun domar, "eno d'pawlos' no:" 'This,