The consideration of these and a multitude of similar phenomena suggests, that the Sanscrit _as-mi_, Gr. _ei-mi_, Lat. _s-um_ (for _es-um_), Eng. _a-m_, may have had for its root the demonstrative pronoun _sa_, and meant primarily "that (or there) as to me." Be that as it may, all philologists are agreed that the verbs now used to express _being_ in the abstract, expressed originally something physical and palpable. Thus Ital. _stato_, Fr. _été_, _been_, are from the Lat. _statum_, the participle of _sto_, "to stand;" and _exist_ itself meant "to stand out or be prominent." Eng. _be_, Lat. _fu-_ is identical with Gr. _phy-_ "to grow;" and, according to Max Müller, as the root of _as-mi_ meant "breath" or "breathing." It may then be safely affirmed that no word had for its primary function to express mere existence; it seems enough for the purpose of predication that existence be implied.
With regard to ordinary verbs, the analytic processes of comparative grammar show no traces of a substantive verb entering into their structure. It is now an accepted doctrine of philology that, as a rule, the root of a verb is of the nature of an abstract noun; and that it became a verb simply by the addition of a pronominal affix--as in the Greek [Greek: di/-dô-mi, di/-dô-s, di/-dô-si], in which the terminations were originally [Greek: -mi, -si, -ti]. The habits of thought arising out of the present analytic state of the Indo-European languages naturally lead us to conceive these pronominal affixes as nominatives. But _gift I_ does not seem a very natural way of getting at the meaning "I give;" and therefore Mr. Garnett maintains that the affixes were originally in an oblique case--the genitive or the instrumental--so that the literal meaning was "gift of me," or "giving by me." That this is the nature of the verb in the agglutinate languages--by far the most numerous class--it seems hardly possible to dispute; for in these the affixes remain rigidly distinct and little disguised. Thus, according to Garnett, the Wotiak, in order to express "my son," "thy son," &c., joins oblique cases of the personal pronouns to the noun _pi_ in the following way:--
pi-[)i] .... son of me pi-ed . . . son of thee pi-ez . . . son of him pi-mi . . . son of us pi-dy . . . son of you pi-zy . . . son of them