Particles of the English Language. 323 as yes or no are incapacitated from forming part of any phrase, and are eqvially strong when unaccompanied. In Greek, vat and 01) stand by themselves as answers, but the same remark will apply to this latter particle as to ita and non ; vai is the Latin 7icB^ and, as Grimm observes, seems, singularly enough, allied to the negative. He purposely avoids entering upon the subject of this connection. May it not have arisen from the use of the negative, like our " nay,'* immo^ or an^i {ante)^ in Italian ? which are negative, inasmuch as they object to the preceding phrase as not being strong enough, whilst they agree with its general meaning and enhance its force ? Cer- tainly in these cases the negative and affirmative senses often approach very near to one another, as, for instance, in the following passage of B. Jonson : " A good man always profits by his endeavour, yea^ when absent ; nay^ when dead, by his example and memory.^ The affirmative particle is in the Gothic jai^ sometimes ja^^. Old High German jd^'^. Anglo-Saxon g'ea^ English yea; and from the junction of this with si (sit) sprung the Anglo-Saxon gese and our yes, to which in Saxon there was a corresponding negative nese. The third way of an- swering a question by the union of a particle with some word on which an emphasis is placed, shows itself, when ja and 72e are joined with the personal pronouns : — Thus, ja ich — • ja dii — ja er, were used ; and the answer in the Anglo- Saxon version given by John to those who asked him, " Art thou that prophet,*" is " nic.'^ It is on this usage that Grimm grounds his conjectures as to the origin of the French affirmatives. Besides si from sic or sit, it is known to everybody that the French language possessed the two ^^ This particle j« is an element also of the Gothic copula jaA. Grimm (iii. 270) consider the h to come from hu equivalent to the Latin que ; we have seen above that analogy warrants this change of letters^ and it is further borne out by suah^ sic^ and liuazuh^ quisque^ &c. I cannot acquiesce in the notion of the Latin et and the Greek re being a mere case of transposition, not so much on account of the different position they hold in a sentence as a leading word and an enclitic, (at least if we admit the view of an and na above), but because I consider that -re stands in the same relation to que^ that Tis does tO(7z«5, and Teo-a-ape^, to quatuor. The Oscan pe completes this analogy, and in the same way, ttotc and otg become ^roKa and oKa in Doric, (Miiller, Etrusker, p. 30, 31, note) unless indeed he considers all of these forms as originally identical, and that usage made et and Ka the leading, que and -re the enclitic copular.
- ^ Ya is used by Barbour. See Jamieson in v.
