_sweet-ard_, originally a very sweet person, has been changed and resuscitated as _sweet-heart_,[13] by the same process which changed _shamefast_ into _shamefaced_. But, still more curious, this suffix _ard_, which had lost all life and meaning in Low German, was taken over as a convenient derivative by the Romance languages. After having borrowed a number of words such as _renard_, fox, and proper names like _Bernard_, _Richard_, _Gerard_, the framers of the new Romance dialects used the same termination even at the end of Latin words. Thus they formed not only many proper names, like _Abeillard_, _Bayard_, _Brossard_, but appellatives like _leccardo_, a gourmand, _linguardo_, a talker, _criard_, a crier, _codardo_, Prov. _coart_, Fr. _couard_, a coward.[14] That a German word _hart_, meaning strong, and originally strength, should become a Roman suffix may seem strange; yet we no longer hesitate to use even Hindustani words as English suffixes. In Hindustani +válá+ is used to form many substantives. If +Dilli+ is Delhi, then +Dill-vállá+ is a man of Delhi. +Go+ is cow, +go-válá+ a cow-herd, contracted into +gválá+. Innumerable words can thus be formed, and as the derivative seemed handy and useful, it was at last added even to English words, for instance in “Competition wallah.” These may seem isolated cases, but the principles on which they rest pervade the whole structure of language. It is surprising to see how much may be achieved by an application of those principles, how large results may be obtained by the smallest and simplest means. By means of the single radical î or +yâ+ (originally +ya+), which in the Aryan languages means to go or to send, the almost unconscious framers of Aryan grammar formed not only their neuter, denominative, and causative verbs, but their passives, their optatives, their futures, and a considerable number of substantives and adjectives. Every one of these formations, in Sanskrit as well as in Greek, can be explained, and has been explained, as the result of a combination between any given verbal root and the radical _î_ or +yâ+. There is, for instance, a root +nak+, expressive of perishing or destruction. We have it in +nak+, night; Latin _nox_, Greek νύξ, meaning originally the waning, the disappearing, the death of day. We have the same root in composition, as, for instance, +jîva-nak+, life-destroying; and by means of suffixes Greek has formed from it νεκ-ρός, a dead body, νέκ-υς, dead, and νέκ-υ-ες in the plural, the departed. In Sanskrit this root is turned into a simple verb, +naś-a-ti+, he perishes. But in order to give to it a more distinctly neuter meaning, a new verbal base is formed by composition with +ya+, +naś-ya-ti+, he goes to destruction, he perishes.