A comparative grammar of the Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German, and Sclavonic languages Volume 2

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1860 Excerpt: ...while, on closer inspection, In the Transactions of the Phil. Historical CI. of the Academy of Belles Lettres for the year 1836. The separate Edition of my Treatise is out of print, and a new Edition will be struck off hereafter, to complete this Comparative Grammar. of time, past or future, has a sonant representative. Hence, in Sanskrit and its cognate languages, there occurs, we find nothing in their possession but what they had from the first, though at times its application is new. Thus the Latin, in comparison with the Greek, which is so closely allied to it, shews, in the forms of its tenses and moods in bam, bo, vi, rem, and rim, an aspect which is completely strange. These terminations, however, as has been long since shewn, are nothing else than the primitive roots of the verb "to be," common to all the members of the Indo-European family of languages, and of which one has for its radical consonant a labial, the other a sibilant which is easily converted into r: it is, therefore, not surprising, that bam presents a great resemblance to the Sanskrit abhavam and Lithuanian buwaii, "I was" (see 522.); while forms like amabo, through their final portion, stand in remarkable agreement with the Anglo-Saxon beo, and Carniolan bum, "I shall be" (see $.662., &c), and border on the Irish dialect of the Celtic in this respect, that here also the labial root of " to be" forms an elementary part of verbs implying futurity (see §. 256.). In the Latin subjunctives, as amem, ames, and futures, as legam, leges, I have already, through the medium of the Sanskrit, perceived an analogy with the Greek optatives and German subjunctives, and designated, as exponent of the relation of mood or time, an auxiliary verb, which...