A Tractate on Language; With Observations on the French Tongue, Eastern Tongues and Times, and Chapters on Literal Symbols, Philology and Letters, Figures of Speech, Rhyme, Time and Longevity (Paperback)

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: On The Words Do And To. It may be deemed visionary to endeavour to shew an identity between the words Do and To?but if the accompanying illustrations and citations bring not conviction to the mind of the reader, the author is content to leave this identity as a theory, although he can not see why this identity should not exist; for before words were multiplied one and the same rejoiced in several applications, hence they had many intentions, which on analysis were found to possess little more meaning than their primaries. It is a canon in etymology, that that language is its parent, where the true signification can be found, and where its use is common, accepted and familiar. A word had one meaning and one meaning only originally. I infer that to and do are identical, and this intrinsic meaning is to be found, and the cause of its different application also, and in support of this conjecture, 1 refer to Richardson's Dictionary, Section III. Grammarians say, no two words are synonymous, not because they are sure of this observation, but because it ought to be so, for nature never adopts but what is suggested by necessity. The parent stock of synonymes is tropes and figures, by which language becomes abstracted and refined, which is the cause of adventitious and metaphorical senses, and words of divers intentions and misprision of terms. Were a redundance to pervade a language, we might be said to speak, as Hudibras jocosely says of Cerberus, " a leash of languages at once." TO, prefixed to a noun invests it with a verbal character, and DO is prefixed to other parts of the verb undistinguished from the noun by termination, and to those parts only. The radical form of a verb is to follow the particle to. According to the writer of the Diversions of Parley, these ...