grammatical gender has been shown in a previous lecture (the third); we still keep up a linguistic distinction of natural gender by the use of our generic pronouns of the third person, he, she, and it; the modern Persian has abandoned even that, and the consideration of sex no longer enters into it in any way, save in the vocabulary, in the use of such words as son and daughter, bull and cow. Of the other modern tongues of the family, some, like these two, have eliminated from their grammatical systems the distinctions of gender; some, like the French, have reduced the three genders to two, by effacing the differences of masculine and neuter; but the larger part, like the German, still faithfully adhere to the inherited distinction of masculine, feminine, and neuter, so long ago established.
The ancient Indo-European language made no difference, as regarded declension, between its two classes of nouns, nouns substantive and nouns adjective. In their genesis, the two are but one; the same suffixes, to no small extent, form both; each passes by the most easy and natural transfer into the other; whether a given word indicating the possession of quality should be used attributively or predicatively, or as an appellative, was a question of subordinate consequence. The pronouns, also, both substantive and adjective, were inflected by a declension mainly corresponding, although marked by some peculiarities, and tending earlier to irregular forms.
With conjugation and declension, the subject of grammatical structure is, in fact, as good as exhausted: everything in language is originally either verb or noun. To the other parts of speech, then, which have been developed out of these, we shall need to give but a brief consideration.
Adverbs, the most ancient and necessary class of indeclinable words, or particles, are by origin, in the earliest stage of language as in the latest, forms of declension, cases of substantives, or adjectives, or pronouns. We have seen already how our adverbs in ly were elaborated out of former oblique cases (instrumentals) of adjectives in lîc ('like'); so also the usual adverbial ending ment of the Romanic languages is the Latin ablative mente, 'with mind' (thus,
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