me implies, follow, in becoming Japanese inversion,
instead of preceding the word they affect. To make up, nevertheless, for
any lack of perplexity due to an absence of inflections, adjectives, en
revanche, are most elaborately conjugated. Their protean shapes are as
long as they are numerous, representing not only times, but conditions.
There are, for instance, the root form, the adverbial form, the
indefinite form, the attributive form, and the conclusive form, the two
last being conjugated through all the various voices, moods, and tenses,
to say nothing of all the potential forms. As one change is superposed
on another, the adjective ends by becoming three or four times its
original length. The fact is, the adjective is either adjective, adverb,
or verb, according to occasion. In the root form it also helps to make
nouns; so that it is even more generally useful than as a journalistic
epithet with us. As a verb, it does duty as predicate and copula
combined. For such an unnecessary part of speech as a real copula does
not exist in Japanese. In spite of the shock to the prejudices of the
old school of logicians, it must be confessed that the Tartars get on
very well without any such couplings to their trains of thought. But
then we should remember that in their sentences the cart is always put
before the horse, and so needs only to be pushed, not pulled along.

The want of a copula is another instance of the primitive character of
the tongue. It has its counterpart in our own baby-talk, where a quality
is predicated of a thing simply by placing the adjective in apposition
with the noun.

That the Japanese word which is commonly translated "is" is in no sense
a copula, but an ordinary intransitive verb, referring to a natural
state, and not to a logical condition, is evident in two ways. In
the first place, it is never used to predicate a quality directly. A
Japanese does not say, "The scenery is fine," but simply, "Scenery,
fine." Secondly, wherever this verb is indirectly employed in such a
manner, it is followed, not by an adjective, but by an adverb. Not "She
is beautiful," but "She exists beautifully," would be the Japanese way of
expressing his admiration. What looks at first, therefore, like a copula
turns out to be merely an impersonal intransitive verb.

A negative noun is, of course, an impossibility in any language, just
as a negative substantive, another name for the same thing, is a direct
contradiction