arise the modern 'owe' and 'ought,' which have been separated by the twofold sense of their original,— I am under a moral obligation, and I am a debtor. The separation has given to the former the modern preterite 'owed,' and has made the latter both preterite and present. Illustrations:

All England âhte for to knowe.-Old Political Song.
The knight, the which that castle aught.-Spenser.

I owe to be baptized of thee, and thou comest to me.— - Wycliffe.

EXERCISES.

1. Compose predicates (indicative mood) to the plurals of the following subjects: star, son, monarch, ox, hero, wife, mouse, goose, duty, enemy, he, it, I.

2. Change your verbs into the potential mood.

3. Change the following infinitives into imperatives: to write, singing, to study, to be active, striking, to be acquitted, to begin, to be true, speak, lament.

4. Write subjects for the preceding, changing the verbs into the past indicative and interrogative form.

5. Change the following into present, perfect, and compound participles: instruct, learn, say, bring, bite, dance, fight, praise,

amuse, move.

6. Change your compounds into the passive voice.

7. Write subjects for the verbs in (5) changing the verbs into the future tense and progressive form.

8. Change your verbs of (7) into the past perfect indicative passive.

9. Compose three sentences expressing condition in the present potential; three expressing necessity in the present perfect potential.

10. Compose a sentence containing a proper noun, a class, and

a mass noun.

11. Compose a sentence that shall contain a demonstrative pronoun, an interrogative pronoun, and a relative pronoun, using the same word as interrogative and relative.

12. Compose three sentences, in each of which an adverb shall modify an adjective; and three, in each of which an adverb shall modify another adverb.

13. Compose a sentence that shall have in it all the parts of speech.

14. Compose a sentence that shall exhibit the different degrees of comparison.

15. Compose six sentences with verbs which require an object, and six with verbs which do not require an object.

16. Change the verbs of the first six into the passive voice.

17. Form all the possible verbals from the following in both voices, and incorporate in sentences each of the verbals thus formed: sow, run, dive, pierce, be, have, purl, array, do, read, produce.

6

CHAPTER V.

WORDS-FORMATION.

He who calls departed ages back again into being, enjoys a bliss like that of creating. The philosopher does this.- NIEBUHR.

LL inflections illustrate fundamentally the process of

ALL

word-making by combination. Thus our familiar 'am' is the hereditary representative of an original as-mi, a verb and a pronoun, meaning 'be-I.' So 'is' stands for asti, 'be-that', a form more apparent in the German ist, the Latin est, and the Greek Tí. In like manner, the d of 'loved' descends from the past or preterite did; and 'I loved' means etymologically I love-did=I did love I did or performed a loving. Mi, ti, and did, once independent elements, have sunk into mere grammatical signs, with the exception of the latter, which still maintains its standing as a separate word.

Again, the final member of careful' is perfectly recognizable as the adjective 'full,' yet with the consciousness of its origin nearly lost, approaching the character of ous in 'perilous.' The ly of 'lovely' is nothing more than a metamorphosis of our common ‘like,' anciently lic, as in leóflic= 'love-like'. In nearly all the constituents of our speech we can thus discover two elements, one of which conveys the central idea, while the other indicates some modification of that idea.

These cases, in which extensibility of application and frequency of use have changed words of distinct mean

ing into non-significant appendages, are broadly distinguished from others like 'fear-inspiring,' 'break-neck,' and 'house-top,' which are directly translatable back into the elements which form them. But all combinations run essentially the same course. There are couples which we hardly know whether to write separately or with the hyphen, as 'well-known,' 'mother-tongue.' There are others so grown together that we seldom or never think of their dual nature, as himself,' 'herself.' Sometimes the connection is so close, that the original parts are quite obscured. Such is 'fortnight'='fourteen-nights.' Such is 'breakfast,' given to the morning meal because it broke the longest fast of the twenty-four hours. Fearless' was once fearloose (free from fear), and Pope says, 'Be ware [beware]

of man.'

We have seen elsewhere that while the vicissitudes of language often bring the same word to the office of designating things widely different, the variation of significant content is not infrequently aided by a variation of phonetic form. Examples are: 'gentle,' 'genteel,' and 'gentile'; 'owned,' 'owed,' and 'ought'; 'minúte,' and 'mínute'; 'corps' and 'corpse'; 'can,' from 'ken,' 'to know,'

etc.

In general, there are four ways of making new words from given ones. (1) by formative suffixes, as 'gold-en,' 'hand-some'; (2) by joining together distinct words, as 'steam-ship," white-wash'; (3) by internal change, as ‘man,' and 'men,' 'think' and 'thank'; (4) by prefixes, as 'benumb,' ́a-stir.' The first method usually modifies the part of speech; the last usually modifies the sense: 'hunt,' 'hunt-er'; 'destroy,' 'destroy-er'; 'destruct-ive,' 'destructive-ly'; 'in-destructive,' 'in-destructible '; en

throne,' 'de-throne.' The fusion of parts frequently compels a change for the sake of euphony, as 'col-lect' for con-lect, dif-fer' for dis-fer, 'di-vulge' for dis-vulge, 'an-archy' for a-archy. The essential part of a derivative, its nucleus, may be called its base, or, loosely speaking, its root. As there may be an accumulation of subordinate parts, so there are primary and secondary bases, as in 'truth-ful,' 'truthful-ly,' 'un-truthful-ly.'

While the accompanying lists of formative elements will assist very greatly in discriminating natives from aliens, they will not afford an infallible key to the etymology of the words into which they enter. Though the strict rule for the construction of the compounds is, that all the parts of speech must be from the same language, English writers often permit themselves to make heterogeneous combinations. Words formed thus from different languages are mongrels, or, which is the Greek for ‘mongrel,' hybrids: 'shepherd-ess'=English + Romance; ‘social-ism' or 'moral-ize 'Latin + Greek. In 'bo-tan-ic-al,' the base and the primary suffix are Greek, and the secondary suffix is Latin; while 'botan-ic-al-ly' adds a Saxon element.

a1

at

The important prefixes are:

=

SAXON.

on: a-back, a-bed, a-foot, a-fishing.
from: a-kin, a-new, a-rise, a-wake.
back

an-swer, a-bide, a-gain.

over a-right, e-i-ther (Anglo-Saxon á-ther). = Old English at: at-one, at-onement.

1 Old English on, then an: supposed to have in 'a-go' the combination y-gone, old form of the participial prefix ge, and seen in the obsolete y-clept, y-clad.