The life and growth of language : an outline of linguistic science / By William Dwight Whitney.

  • William Dwight Whitney
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The life and growth of language : an outline of linguistic science / By William Dwight Whitney. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    the same. There is do, which, from the original physi- cal notion of ' set, place,' has been extended and for- malized into expressing efficient action of every kind— do good, do one's best, do to death, and so on; and which also does service as verbal auxiliary—I do love, did I love? etc. Again, the Latin root cap {capere) means ' seize, grasp.' Its Germanic correspondent is hab, in Gothic haban, German liaben, our have. But here the more physical sense of ' grasp' has almost dis- appeared (we have it in Germ, liandliabe, our haft, the part of an instrument that is 'grasped' by the hand) ; in its place has come the more conceptional one of ' pos- sess.' So also with the Latin habere, the relation of which to capere on the one hand and liaben on the other is a puzzle to the etymologists. Finally, this too has been turned to use in verbal expression, and by a trans- fer which, though illustrated in the history of many languages, must be called a very remarkable one. Pres- ent possession often implies past action: liabeo cultellum invention, liabeo virgulam fissam, habeo digitum vul- ncratuni, '1 possess my knife found (recovered after loss), I possess a twig that is split, I have a wounded finger:' here the several conditions have been preceded by the several acts, of finding, splitting, wounding. On this absurdly narrow basis is built up the whole im- mense structure of the perfect -tense expression: the phrase shifts its centre of gravity from the ex- pressed condition to the implied antecedent act; and / have found (he knife, ich liabe das Messer gefunden, j'ai trouve le couteau, become indicators of a peculiar variety of past action contemplated as completed: fur- ther examples arc the Sanskrit hritavan, ' [*I am] pos- sessing [something] done,' i. e. 'I have done;' and Turkish dogd-um, 'striking mine,' i. e. ' I have struck.'
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