.Professor V.hitfield opened his talk on a felicitous note occasioned by Iieillet's flirtation with the English verb "to love". It was up to us to determine what should be the glossffeiatic attitude towards "love'% he said, the text of meillet1 s discussion on the characteristics of the verb is as follows; A. iieillet, hinguistique his tori que et lingulstique générale, p. 100 ,. .The sane wofcl can serve~both as a noun ana as a verb in languages where the rdle of the word in the sentence is not to be ascertained from its form (morphological form); the English word love ^ivas an idea of procedure and demonstrates at the same time that the identity of form does not cause confusion between the category of the noun and that of the verb. The same radical elements form nouns and verbs in languages whose words have complex formation. One and the same Indo-European or Semitic root is a common element to verbal and nominal forms 5 in such cases one may speak of verbal roots because such a root as the Latin ag~ forms the Latin verb ago, likewise such nouns as ac- tus or actio which evoke the notion of process can be founctTTbecause this notion is retained)by~associating them with their(verbal)forms, These roots, however, are neither verbal nor nominal; they form part of the word which indicates the element of meaning common to both the verb and the noun. In this way we can visualise how the same linguistic unit can appear under its nominal and its verbal aspect just as in the case of the words which can be either nouns or verbs. A "verbal root" in the languages which use morpho- logical flexion is capable of being both a noun and a verb just as in{the languages which are free of all flexion. naturally this can not be said to have definite consequences for the way in which Indo-Suropean ox* Semitic roots have been historically constituted but at least it is probable that roots are the remains of words which were capable of being nouns or verbs according to use such as occurs in the case of the English word love or as in many Chinese words