Inflectional System Research Articles

The Saurāshtrans of South India

Some three years ago chance brought to light in the India Office Library a little book with an English title on the cover: First catechism of Sourashtra grammar. By T. M. Rama Rou. Madras, 1905. It challenged inquiry because the script was quite unfamiliar. With it was another little book in the same script and by the same author—Saurāṣṭra-bōdhini (1906)—which fortunately gave the alphabet, in the usual order, and lists of the complex combinations of all the vowels with all the consonants, so that the script could be read. The language is listed as Paṭṅūlī, but is not described, in the Linguistic Survey of India. The author of the two books had, however, provided the necessary clue to understanding in his grammar, the opening sections of which happen to be bilingual, quoting and translating the rules of Sanskrit grammarians. For the rest, since it was usually possible to anticipate what the writer must say, for example in denning grammatical terms, and since after all the book itself gave an account of the inflectional system of the language, it remained only to arrive at the meaning of words, so far as it was not obvious from analogues in other modern Indo-Aryan languages; and (a more difficult task) to grasp the part played in the language by certain striking forms of expression which have no Indo-Aryan parallels.—To learn a modern language by methods appropriate to the interpretation of lost languages of the past is of course a procedure difficult to defend, when it would be so simple, and so much better, to learn it from the lips of the speakers in India. But the better course was not open to me, and I was not willing to postpone indefinitely an investigation which promised to be interesting from other points besides the linguistic.

The Presentation of German Noun Inflection

IN THEIR TREATMENT of noun inflection our textbooks for the study of German are burdened with over-systematization. In these books the inflectional structure of the noun is divided into the 'strong declension' (which is in turn subdivided into three classes-really declensions), the 'weak declension,' and the 'mixed declension.' For each of these five declensions, paradigms are cited that represent the two or three genders concerned and which, where conditions permit, illustrate the presence or absence of vowel mutation, and also certain other variations of type, with four cases for the singular and four for the plural. Usually there is also given some information as to what kinds of nouns belong in each category-information which, except as it concerns the 'first class strong,' is mostly unsatisfying, and which in any event is more readily assimilable if presented gradually or if acquired through the process of analogy. Often five, or the greater part of five, lessons are devoted to the presentation of the declensions.' The encounter with these convinces the learner, at the very outset, that German has indeed a complicated system of inflection. When the student has learned all the paradigms, together with the accompanying details, he feels that he knows the noun, and unfortunately for him the teacher is too often of the same opinion. And yet, when this system has been mastered, the learning of the noun, even for the most elementary purposes, has been only begun. For the acquired knowledge has but trivial value if the student does not know to which declension this, that, and the other noun belongs. The correct placement of the great majority of nouns-numerous as they are-must be learned for one word at a time. From this there is no escape. The student needs to know the principal parts of all the nouns encountered, or at least those of the more important ones, which are to form his active vocabulary. But this is not at all a hopeless task. For, after all, only a relatively small number of nouns has to be learned during the first

The Punctual and Segmentative Aspects of Verbs in Hopi

Verbs in the Hopi language are noteworthy for their very rich and expressive development of verbal aspects and voices. I shall say nothing in this paper of the nine voices (intransitive, transitive, reflexive, passive, semi-passive, resultative, extended passive, possessive, and cessative); and of the nine aspects (punctual, durative, segmentative, punctual-segmentative, inceptive, progressional, spatial, projective, and continuative) I shall deal with only two. It may be noted that there are no perfective and imperfective aspects; in fact Hopi does not in any way formalize as such the contrast between completion and incompletion of action. Its aspects formalize different varieties of the contrast between point-locus and extent-locus of phenomena, indifferently in time or space, or in both. Hopi also has three tenses: factual or present-past, future, and generalized or usitative. Hopi verbs belong to seven classes or conjugations having slightly different inflectional systems. Class 1, the largest and most creative class, contains a few categories not found in the other classes, among them the segmentative aspect. The simplex of the Class 1 verb is a bare root of the form CVCV, and is in the third person singular intransitive voice, punctual aspect, and present-past tense. The segmentative aspect is formed by final reduplication of this root plus the durative suffix -ta, and produces a change in the meaning of the simplex of the folloxving character: the phenomenon denoted by the root, shown in the punctual aspect as manifested about a point, becomes manifested as a series of repeated interconnected segments of one large phenomenon of a stretched-out segmental character, its extension usually being predominantly in one dimension, indifferently of space or time or both. The nature of the change can best be shown by examples. ha'ri it is bent in a rounded angle hari'rita it lies in a meandering line, making successive rounded angles (applied for instance to meander patterns in decoration)