§ 12] INTRODUCTION. 7

If, however, the formation of the verb and noun had been
quite as simple as this, there would still have been nothing to
distinguish some of the cases of the noun from some of the
persons of the verb. But, as it appears that all verbs were at
first reflexive [i.e, in the middle voice], we may conjecture
that the persons of the verb were in part distinguished from
the cases of the noun by the doubling of the appropriate pro-
nominal root. The difference between the noun and verb was
however still more clearly indicated by the gradual introduction
of the formative suffixes described in the next section.
11. Suffixes are of two kinds, viz. inflectional and
formative.
Inflectional Suffixes are the terminations which mark
the cases, &c. of nouns, and the persons, &c. of verbs ; and
they must have had their first beginnings, as before described
[§ lo], in the addition of pointing to predicative roots.
Formative Suffixes are the worn down remains of words,
which, though their meaning may be hopelessly lost, still retain
the power of marking the part of speech to which a word
primarily belongs. When added to a Predicative root they
formed what is known as the Stem of a noun, verb, &c., and
were followed by the inflectional suffix. There are verbs
remaining which have never had a verbal formative-suffix
inserted between the root and the personal inflection ; because,
when the corresponding noun had been marked by its noun-
suffix, there was no need to add any further mark to the verb.
Since the almost entire loss of our Old English inflectional
suffixes, our verbs and nouns consist for the most part of
variously constructed stems.
