Suffixes, Determinatives, and Words

Abstract

In the recently published third volume of his Indogermanische Grammatik Professor H. Hirt, in his strikingly original and suggestive way, has unfblded a panorama of the history of the formation of IE nouns which differs so radically from the conception of the majority of scholars both in many details and in his general point of view, that it will be of the utmost importance to examine the credibility of his theories and the reliability of his methods. This is true all the more because his presentation, as elsewhere, through its clarity, through the interest which it arouses, and through the confidence with which it is presented, is apt to fascinate the minds of those who have not yet formed an opinion of their own, but are seeking orientation in the problems of IE linguistics for the first time. The outstanding peculiarity of Hirt's opinion is this, that while he believes in adaptation as far as inflectional endings are concerned, and insists on the identity of these with the word-forming suffixes, yet the latter themselves are explained altogether in the manner of Bopp and his followers. It is true that he admits that new suffixes arise by misdividing words, so that the suffix is increased at the expense of the primitive word, and that he devotes a whole chapter to this process, but to him this simply means taking a formative part of the word and adding to a suffix which already was there (226), as in the example of Gr. (epvKbs by misdivision as pev1-LKbs giving rise to the suffix -LKOS. He ignores the possibility that parts of roots and unanalyzed words may become suffixes through word contamination and subsequent associations of old and new forms, e.g. that IE *9him-osl Skt. him-ds 'cold' brought its