did not exactly accord with those of some modern grammarians.... Every Semitic scholar knows that personal pronouns are employed to represent the verb-substantive in all the known dialects, exactly as in Coptic, but with less variety of modification. In this construction it is not necessary that the pronoun should be of the same person as the subject of the proposition. It is optional in most dialects to say either _ego ego, nos nos_, for _ego sum, nos sumus_, or _ego ille, nos illi_. The phrase ‘Ye are the salt of the earth,’ is, in the Syriac version, literally ‘You they (_i.e._ the persons constituting) the salt of the earth.’ Nor is this employment of the personal pronoun confined to the dialects above specified, it being equally found in Basque, in Galla, in Turco-Tartarian, and various American languages.... It is true that the Malayan, Javanese, and Malagassy grammarians talk of words signifying _to be_; but an attentive comparison of the elements which they profess to give as such, shows clearly that they are no verbs at all, but simply pronouns or indeclinable particles, commonly indicating the time, place, or manner of the specified action or relation. It is not therefore easy to conceive how the mind of a Philippine islander, or of any other person, can supply a word totally unknown to it, and which there is not a particle of evidence to show that it was ever thought of.... A verb-substantive, such as is commonly conceived, vivifying all connected speech, and binding together the terms of every logical proposition, is much upon a footing with the phlogiston of the chemists of the last generation, regarded as a necessary pabulum of combustion, that is to say, _vox et præterea nihil_.... If a given subject be ‘I,’ ‘thou,’ ‘he,’ ‘this,’ ‘that,’ ‘one;’ if it be ‘here,’ ‘there,’ ‘yonder,’ ‘thus,’ ‘in,’ ‘on,’ ‘at,’ ‘by;’ if it ‘sits,’ ‘stands,’ ‘remains,’ or ‘appears,’ we need no ghost to tell us that it _is_, nor any grammarian or metaphysician to proclaim that recondite fact in formal terms.”[248] * * * * *