minate condition from which it is equally ready to take on the semblance of verb or of noun. We may rudely illustrate their quality by comparing them with such a word in our own language as love, which, by the wearing off of the formative elements with which it was once clothed, has reverted to the condition of a bare root, and which must therefore now be placed in such connection, or so pregnantly and significantly uttered, as to indicate to the intelligent and sympathizing listener in what sense it is meant and is to be understood—whether as verb, in "I love," or as substantive, in "my love," or as virtual adjective, in "love-letter."
The inquiry, which might naturally enough be raised at this point, how the radical syllables of which we are treating were themselves originated, and whether there be any natural and necessary connection between them, or any of them, and the ideas which they represent, such as either necessitated or at least recommended the allotment of the particular sign to the particular conception, we must pass by for the present, having now to do only with that for which direct evidence is to be found in language itself, with the historically traceable beginnings of Indo-European speech; this question, with its various dependent questions of a more theoretical and recondite nature, is reserved for consideration at a later time (in the eleventh lecture).
It deserves to be renewedly urged that, in this account of the primitive stage of Indo-European language, there is nothing which is not the result of strict and careful induction from the facts recorded in the dialects of the different members of the family. No one's theory as to what the beginnings of language must have been, or might naturally have been expected to be, has had anything to do with shaping it. It has been a matter of much controversy among linguistic theorizers what parts of speech language began with; whether nouns or verbs were the first words; but I am not aware that any acute thinker ever devised, upon à priori grounds, a theory at all closely agreeing with the account of the matter of which comparative philology soon arrived through her historical researches. That the first traceable linguistic entities are not names of concrete
