A comparative grammar of the Korean language and the Dravidian languages of India

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1906 edition. Excerpt: ... to their credit, manage this matter rather better than the Indo-European languages do. The whole subject of the relative idea will come up under the head of relative participles, where it will be shown how perfect is the Turanian grammatical mechanism to express these more complicated notions. CHAPTER IX. The Verb, Caldwell says that a large proportion of Dravidian roots are used indiscriminately either as verbs or as nouns, but it depends upon circumstances whether any particular root is so used. This is generally true in English. We use the words table, ground, nose, hand, pen, bottle, book, paint, color, paper and a thousand others as true verbs. But at the same time it must be recognised that the verbal idea is a derived one and not the basic one. To bottle means to put into a bottle, and the verb is an usurpation, if we may say so, of the noun for the mere sake of brevity. This seems to me to be a refinement of language that has been evolved gradually, for at first the root must have been either verbal or substantive. If verbal the substantive was derived and if substantive the verb was derived. In Korean we find few roots that are used either verbally or substantively. Of course there are very many verbal nouns and there are many verbs made by joining a pure noun to a verbal inflection but in the sense that a stem is either verbal or substantive there is no such thing. In Korean sang-gak means "thought" and by adding the verb handa we have the compound verb sang-gak handa which means literally "to make thought" or "to do thought," that is " to think." Thousands of verbs are made in Korean by adding the verb handa to a noun, but the substantive part and the verbal part are kept distinct. This is a very singular phenomenon. These...