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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 79 PART II. ON CURTIU8' CHRONOLOGY OF THE INDO-GERMANIC LANGUAGES. In a former Lecture on the ' Stratification of Language ' I ventured to assert that wherever inflection has yielded to a rational analysis, it has invariably been recognised as the result of a previous combination, and wherever combination has been traced back to an earlier stage, that earlier stage has been simply juxtaposition. Professor Pott in his' Etymologische Forschungen' (1871, p. 16), a work which worthily holds its place by the side of Bopp's ' Comparative Grammar, ' questions the correctness of that statement; but in doing so he seems to me to have overlooked the restrictions which I myself had introduced, in order to avoid the danger of committing myself to what might seem too general a statement. I did not say that every form of inflection had been proved to spring from a previous combination, but I spoke of those cases only where we have succeeded in a rational analysis of inflectional forms, and it was in these that I maintained that inflection had always been found to be the result of previous combination. What is the object of the analysis of grammatical inflections, or of Comparative Grammar in general, if not to find out what terminations originally were, before theyhad assumed a purely formal character? If we take the French adverb sincerement, sincerely, and trace it back to the Latin sincerd mente, we have fo.- a second time the three stages of juxtaposition, combination, and, to a certain extent, inflection, repeated before our eyes. I say inflection, for mente though originally an independent word, soon becomes a mere adverbial suffix, the speakers so little thinking of its original purport that we may say of a stone that it falls lourdemeut, heavily, without wishing to imply that..