still possess the first essays in the
grammatical science of the Brahmans, the so-called _pratisakhyas_. These
works, though they merely profess to give rules on the proper
pronunciation of the ancient dialect of the Vedas, furnish us at the same
time with observations of a grammatical character, and particularly with
those valuable lists of words, irregular or in any other way remarkable,
the Ganas. These supplied that solid basis on which successive generations
of scholars erected the astounding structure that reached its perfection
in the grammar of Panini. There is no form, regular or irregular, in the
whole Sanskrit language, which is not provided for in the grammar of
Panini and his commentators. It is the perfection of a merely empirical
analysis of language, unsurpassed, nay even unapproached, by anything in
the grammatical literature of other nations. Yet of the real nature, and
natural growth of language, it teaches us nothing.

What then do we know of language after we have learnt the grammar of Greek
or Sanskrit, or after we have transferred the network of classical grammar
to our own tongue?

We know certain forms of language which correspond to certain forms of
thought. We know that the subject must assume the form of the nominative,
the object that of the accusative. We know that the more remote object may
be put in the dative, and that the predicate, in its most general form,
may be rendered by the genitive. We are taught that whereas in English the
genitive is marked by a final _s_, or by the preposition _of_, it is in
Greek expressed by a final {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}, in Latin by _is_. But what this {~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} and _is_
represent, why they should have the power of changing a nominative into a
genitive, a subject into a predicate, remains a riddle. It is self-evident
that each language, in order to be a language, must be able to distinguish
the subject from the object, the nominative from the accusative. But how a
mere change of termination should suffice to convey so material a
distinction would seem almost incomprehensible. If we look for a moment
beyond Greek and Latin, we see that there are in reality but few languages
which have distinct forms for these two categories of thought. Even in
Greek and Latin there is no outward distinction between the nominative and
accusative of neuters. The Chinese language, i