BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE.

It has occurred to me that some readers of The Chautauquan may have been disappointed in these articles because in their judgment they have been thus far not sufficiently “practical.” Many people, far too many, desire chiefly to find some short, straight road to knowledge. They like to have some man who is called an “authority” upon a certain subject cut his knowledge up into small parcels or “chunks” of convenient size, and arrange them with labels, alphabetically, in an article or a book, so that they maybe referred to at need, and followed like a recipe for making a pudding, and with as little thought. But there are no such recipes for acquiring real knowledge. In this way an acquaintance with facts may be made which, used blindly, may prove of some immediate service, and may not. Nothing, however, learned in this perfunctory way is worthy of the name of knowledge. For it is a barren process; it really teaches nothing; it profits nothing; it does nothing for the education of the person by whom it is adopted. Real knowledge comes only by a thoughtful learning of the relations of facts. True as to all subjects, this is eminently true as to language; because, language is eminently a subject of relations. There is hardly a word that we use which has not relations to other words, and other forms of speech; relations historical, spiritual, almost moral; to set forth which in detail would furnish occasion for a little essay. The mere learning to speak and to write a language is only a matter of memory and practice; nothing more. It is child’s work, and it is continually done, and is best done, by children. A man may speak and write English, French, German or Latin with unexceptionable correctness and fluency, and yet know no more about that language than a well instructed parrot would which had been taught to use all the words which he uses. His study would not be a study of language; and in that which he had painfully learned he might be easily and unconsciously surpassed by a child who had never studied at all. Now what I hope to do here is to help my readers to some knowledge of the English language, in so far as my own imperfect acquaintance with my mother tongue and its literature will enable me to do so.

We have seen what English is, of what stuff it is made, how it came by its present compositeness of substance; how it became strong, and full, and flexible, and fervent; let us now look a little into its structure, i. e., the way in which it is put together, in doing which we shall see by comparison how it differs from other languages. This matter of structure, the formation of the sentence, is the distinctive trait of a language. Mere words are not the essential difference between languages. Many words are common (with slight phonetic variation) to all the languages of the Aryan or Indo-European stock, as we have already seen. Multitudes of words have been adopted into all the modern tongues from other languages ancient and modern, dead and living, as most of the readers of The Chautauquan know. The bulk of English dictionaries like Webster’s and Worcester’s is composed of words which are of Latin, Greek, French or Italian origin, and which indeed are essentially the same words in all these languages; their unlikeness being merely a phonetic variation, mostly caused by difference in pronunciation, or change in termination. For example, flower is in Latin flos (genitive floris), in Italian fiore, in French fleur, in Spanish flor; each language having somewhat changed the sound of the word, according to rules or habits which are loosely called laws; but the word is in all essentially the same. A sentence—many sentences—might be written in English, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and German, in which all the words of subject-matter (all but verbs like have and be, and prepositions and conjunctions) should be essentially the same, and so like that an intelligent person with some faculty for language, and who understood any one of these languages, could apprehend the meaning of any one of the supposed sentences with little difficulty. And yet the sentences would be respectively English, Latin, French, and so forth. Why and how? It is to the reason of this, that is the why and the how of it, that we shall now give a little time and attention.

The most important and significant distinction between languages is in their grammar; that is, in the structure of the sentence. In the languages mentioned above the greatest unlikeness in this respect is manifested in English, Latin and German, or to name them in their order of grammatical importance, Latin, German and English. The term “grammar” has two senses; one large and vague, and called by some “philosophical” or “scientific” (phrases commonly used with a deplorable union of pretension and looseness), which includes all that relates to the history, the substance and the structure of a language; the other much narrower and simpler; the sense implied when the phrases “good grammar” and “bad grammar” are used. To this sense I shall here confine myself, and shall here repeat a definition of grammar which I have given before.[A]

Grammar concerns the forms of words and their dependent relations in the sentence.

To illustrate this: It is “bad grammar,” ludicrously, monstrously bad grammar, to say in Latin, Nos habeo bonus mater, and yet these Latin words, literally and simply translated in their order, mean, We have a good mother, which in English is perfectly “good grammar.” In the Latin (to call it Latin) every word is wrong; in English every word is right. The reason of this is that in Latin words change their forms according to their relations, not according to their essential meaning. Habeo means have; but it can not be used to express a plural having; that requires for we (nos) the form habemus. Bonus means good; but it can not be used to express the goodness of a feminine object, for which the form bona is required. Yet further: Even bona can not be used to qualify a noun which is the object of a verb, or, as we say, in the objective (or accusative) case, for which the form bonam is required. Mater means mother, but as the object of the verb have, mater must change its form to matrem. By these required changes of form the Latin sentence becomes, Nos habemus bonam matrem, which is “good grammar,” although poor Latin, but which, after all the changes, means simply, We have a good mother; nothing more nor less. Yet further: The sentence, as written above, although grammatical, is poor Latin because it is at variance with the habit, or as it is sometimes called the spirit, or even the genius, of the Latin language. In Latin the word habemus (although like habeo it means simply, have) is so positively and distinctively limited in use to the first person plural that the pronoun nos—we—is quite superfluous, and is never used unless with an emphatic purpose; habemus, without the nos, means, we have. Moreover it was the Latin habit of speech to place the object generally before the verb; and good Latin for, We have a good mother would be, bonam matrem habemus—i. e., A good mother we have, or rather (literally) Good mother we have for the Latin strangely has no articles, or none which correspond to our an (or a) and the, and which may be translated by them.

This illustration, brief and simple although it be, is sufficient, I think, to make the great and essential distinction between English and Latin, and measurably between English and all other modern civilized tongues, clear to the readers of these articles. The essential difference is not one of words but of the construction of the sentence. In Latin and other languages that construction depends not upon the thought and the meaning of the words, but upon the forms of the words—their inflections. Now the distinctive trait of English is that it is a language without inflections—not absolutely so, but so to all intents and purposes; and, being without inflections, it is therefore without grammar, which, as we have seen, concerns the forms of words and their dependent relations in the sentence. Nos habeo bonus mater is bad grammar because the forms of the words are incorrect according to the usage of the Latin language. Bonus means good; but for the expression of the quality good in its barest, simplest idea bonus takes on five forms in Latin; bonus for masculine goodness in the singular, bona for feminine singular, bonum for neuter singular; boni masculine plural; bonÆ feminine plural, bona neuter plural. To be brief; for use in various relations, this word bonus takes on no less than thirteen forms, of which more need not here be given. Mater—mother—takes on eight of these forms or inflections, which are called cases. But in English good has but one form. Singular, plural, masculine, feminine, neuter, nominative, possessive, dative, objective, vocative—in whichever of these senses the word which it qualifies is used it has but one form—good. Thus it is with all English adjectives, and with articles (an and the) which are a kind of adjective. In all other languages adjectives and articles have various forms adapted to the various numbers, genders, and cases of nouns. In English nouns have two cases (strictly but one, the nominative not being a true case), the second of which is the possessive: e. g., mother’s; and they have a singular and a plural form, e. g., mother, mothers.

In other languages the verb is inflected into a multitude of forms, expressive of voice (active and passive), person, number and time of action. In English the variations of form in the verb are very few. There is no passive voice. The English has but one passive verb; the obsolete hight, which means, is called. As to time, there are only the forms of present and perfect, e. g., love and loved; as to person and number, inflections only in the present tense, e. g., love, lovest, loves; and of these one, lovest, is obsolete, or very obsolescent. To these inflected forms there is to be added only the present or indefinite participle loving. Beyond this there are in English, by way of inflection, only the cases of the pronouns, e. g., he, his, him, who, whose, whom, etc. And it is here to be remarked that almost all the questions of “good grammar” and “bad grammar” that arise in English relate to the use of pronouns. (For surely we may leave out of consideration here the difficulties of those who say I see or I seen him, for I saw him, or I have went for I have gone, and the like.) Here, therefore, we have set forth, although very succinctly, the distinctive grammatical position of the English language.

That position is briefly this: In English words have (with the few exceptions mentioned above) but one form; and as grammar is concerned only with the formal relations of words in the sentence, English has no grammar. Among languages it is the grammarless tongue.

Let us further illustrate this point by a brief consideration of a subject which is very perplexing to the learners of a foreign language, and which is not less so to the historical students of language in general; a subject which, I believe, has never been explained by the latter with any semblance of satisfaction—gender. All other languages are infested with gender; in English there is no such distinction in words as that of gender. English, it should be needless to say, has words to express difference of sex; that no language can fail to do, for failing in that, it would not communicate the facts and thoughts of every-day life. But grammatical gender has no relation to sex, no relation to the essential characteristics of things. Gender, grammatical gender, is an attribute of words. He creatures are male, she creatures female, and the words which are their names are generally (but not universally) masculine and feminine in all languages. Things neither male nor female are neuter, which means merely, neither. But this is not gender. Gender, as I have said before, is an attribute of words; of words only. For example, the Latin word penna—a pen, or quill, is feminine; in French the word table—table, is also feminine. It is needless to say that there is no question as to the sex of a pen, or of a table; nor is there any quality in either of those objects which has a sexual trait or characteristic. In each case it is the word which is of the feminine gender; and in all, or almost all, languages but English all or almost all words are afflicted with this mysterious pest of gender. How annoying and perplexing it is, and how it complicates the use of language, and makes the acquisition of foreign languages difficult, no student needs be told. For it creates an ever present and far-reaching perplexity. It dominates the construction of the sentence and binds it up in bonds of iron. For every adjective, and in French and other languages having articles, every article which is applied to a noun must be of the gender of that noun. You can not say in Latin bonus penna, a good pen, without “bad grammar,” you must say bona penna. You can not say in French un mauvais table, a bad table, but must say une mauvaise table; nor le table, but la table—although both mean the table, nothing more nor less. The absurdity of this is made very apparent when a feminine word is applied to a male object. Thus majestÉ—majesty, is feminine; but when a king is called your majesty, the words sa majestÉ (her majesty) are used because the word majesty is feminine; and instead of saying he (il) did thus or so, we must say she (elle) did it, although the she was a man; the reason being that the word majestÉ is feminine.[1] All this has been swept clean away in English, in which language there is no distinction of gender but only that of sex: male creatures, or those so personified, are masculine, female, feminine; those which have no sex are neuter; and there an end. English is eminently a language of common sense; and one marked evidence of this trait is its freeing itself entirely from the nuisance of grammatical gender along with other grammatical trammels.[2]

It has freed itself from those trammels; for at one time it was hampered by them sorely. Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, was an inflected speech, and was tied up in the bonds of gender and other grievous grammatical tetherings. This was long ago; but it was after Britain had become England, or Engle-land, the land of the English people and of English speech. When our English forefathers were little better than semi-savages, bloody, barbarous, heathen, worshiping Thor and Woden, and in a state of benighted ignorance of which it would be difficult for those of my readers who have not tried to pierce the darkness of that historical past to form even an approximate notion—at this time, and in this social and intellectual condition of the speakers of the English language, it was copiously provided with grammar. Even Greek had not much the better of it in this respect. It had not only forms for person and number, but gender forms, and cases galore.[3] Take, for example, a word which was English a thousand years ago, just as it is to-day, man. This simple word has undergone no change in all the thousand years, unless by losing a little breadth of sound; it having probably been pronounced mahn, of which sound the rustic mon of provincial England is a relic and representative. But man could not be used pure and simple, under all circumstances and in all cases, in the English of that day any more than, as we have seen, mater and bonus could be so used in Latin. There was the nominative singular—man, simply; the genitive mannes—of a man; the dative men, to or for a man; accusative mannan—a man objectively; nominative plural men; genitive manna—of men, or men’s; and a dative mannum—to or for men.

Of all these various forms or cases of man, the language has freed itself, excepting the genitive singular, mannes, and the nominative plural, men. These have been retained, not by accident, or neglect, but at the dictate of common sense, because convenience and intelligibility required their use. It was found necessary to distinguish the plural from the singular; and the genitive or possessive idea from the simple and absolute; but man as a dative or accusative singular, and men as the same in the plural, were found quite as useful and convenient as the old inflected forms; and therefore (or therefore finally and in a great measure) the latter were discarded. The genitive or possessive has been retained; but it has slightly changed its form; by contraction only, however; mannes has become man’s. The old sign of the possessive was es; and it is this, and not the pronoun his (as once was supposed) that is represented in our possessive case, in which the apostrophe merely marks the elision of the old e. There is really no good reason for the use of the apostrophe, none which would not apply equally to many other cases in which no elision is marked. In the Elizabethan era it was not used, and with no consequent confusion. Mans folly, the boys hat, Johns coat, are as clear in meaning as they would be with the apostrophe; and the possible confusion of the possessive with the plural, as in that fancy of the girls, and that fancy of the girl’s is so remote and so very unlikely as to be worthy of little consideration.

As to English in its earliest form (Anglo-Saxon) suffice it here to say in this regard that it was so largely an inflected language, that is, it varied the forms of its words so numerously to express time of action, mode of action, person, number, case, and gender, that it is in this respect almost as unlike modern English as Greek is, and is little less difficult of acquirement to the English speaking student of to-day than Latin. Its very articles had gender forms as well as case forms; and, moreover, like the MÆso-Gothic and like the Greek it had preserved the old dual number (for the expression of a plural of two) although only in the personal pronoun. A comparative examination of the pronoun of the first person and of the present tense of the verb to have in their ancient and modern forms will show the mode and the reason of the changes by which English has assumed its present character.

OLD ENGLISH PRONOUN OF THE FIRST PERSON.

The dual form has been swept away entirely as needless, and worse, cumbrous and perplexing; but it will be seen that we have retained every one of the other forms. Ic has become I; mine is still the possessive of I; me is still not only the objective form of the first person, but the dative, “make me a hat,” or “buy me a horse,” being merely “make a hat to or for me,” or “buy to or for me a horse.” We and us will be recognized at sight, and ure has only changed its pronunciation from oor to our. These forms have been retained in our modern English partly because a pronoun is the most ancient of indestructible parts of speech,[B] but chiefly because of their usefulness, their convenience. A brief consideration of them by the intelligent reader will make this so plain that more need not be said on the subject.

Now let us see the unlike fate of the verb to have. This will be more readily apparent if we look at it in Latin, in French, and in English (it is actually the same word in all these languages, with slight phonetic variation); and we shall thus also have another demonstration of the manner in which English differs from other languages.

It will be seen at once that the Latin and the French have each a special plural form, and also three forms for the three persons of that number. English has swept away this plural form entirely, and uses for the plural in all its persons the simple have of the first person singular. The form of the second person singular has also virtually disappeared; the simple have appearing in its substitute, you have. Whether the form of the third person singular will ever follow the other is doubtful; but it is certain that our language has lost nothing in clearness, and has gained much in simplicity by the doing away with all the formal superfluity by which the old numbers and persons were distinguished.

This simplification of the forms of words is not absolutely confined to the English language. It appears to be a tendency of language; a modern tendency, using modern in its widest sense. For this movement toward simplification appears in the Latin, in the Romance tongues formed from it, and in the Gothic languages. In none, however, does this simplification, this destruction of superfluous forms, approach, even remotely, that which has taken place in English. So different, indeed, are the results, that the process seems, if not of another kind, at least as having another motive. For example, all the other languages retain the absurdity of gender. In this respect German is no better than French. And let me here remark that the common notion that English and German are most alike of all modern languages, and most nearly akin, is altogether wrong. On the contrary, English and German are very unlike; the most unlike of all the Gothic (or Teutonic) languages. English and French have much greater likeness, both in substance and in structure. There are more words now common to the English language and to the French than to English and German; and the syntax of the French language is very much more like that of the English, than German syntax is. A French sentence literally translated in the French order of the words is, in most cases, so like an English sentence that it requires little change to be correct English, while a similar translation of a German sentence produces an effect both harsh and ludicrous.

The simple form of the English language is the result of two causes. Of these the first in order of time was the conflict and subsequent mingling of the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and the Norman-French. When two languages are thus brought together and are both spoken by two peoples, all that is superfluous in the words of each soon begins to disappear. Each people grasps only the essential in the foreign words which it is obliged to use; each soon adopts the curtailed form of its speech used by the neighbors of another race and speech with whom it is obliged to live in daily communication; and ere long a composite speech of simpler forms takes the place of two tongues—each of which was more complex in structure, but less rich and varied in substance. By this process, out of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, came modern English. But not only thus. Other languages have mingled, but never before with such a result. Never was there in any other amalgamation, such an esurience of superfluous form; a devouring which has to all intents and purposes made English a language of one-formed words, and therefore a language practically without formal grammar. In this characteristic is its strength; from this comes its flexibility, its adaptation to all the needs of man, the highest and the lowest. Hence it is eminently the language of common sense as well as of the highest flights of poetry. The English mind saw that it was not necessary to have two words to express possession in the singular and in the plural; that good as clearly expressed the goodness of a woman as of a man, and that of a dozen men as well as that of one; that pens and tables needed no distinction of gender in their names; in fact that nothing was gained, and that much was lost by these grammatical excrescences; and therefore they were done away with very thoroughly, almost entirely. The process was pretty well completed some three hundred years or more ago; since when no noteworthy changes in this respect have taken place. But it is still going on, although so slowly as to be perceptible only on close examination. All the little specks of grammar that English has are mostly to be found in the pronouns, as I have before remarked. In the use of one of these a change is very gradually taking place. Whom has begun to disappear, began, indeed, a long time ago; but of late is fading somewhat more perceptibly. For example: all speakers of good English say, The man whom I saw, not The man who I saw; whom being the objective form of who.

But now-a-days not one person in a hundred of the best bred and best educated speakers of English asks, Whom did you see? but, Who did you see? Indeed, the latter form of the question may be regarded almost as accepted English. Yet in the latter phrase, as in the former, the pronoun is the object of the verb see, and should strictly have the objective form. But, Whom did you see? would now sound very formal and precise, almost priggish, like gotten instead of got. When, however, the pronoun is brought in direct contact with the verb, as in the phrase, The man whom I saw, we shrink from insult to the little semblance of grammar that our language possesses, and give the word its objective form. The time will probably come, although it may be remote, when whom will have altogether disappeared. As to gotten, its use is now so confined to the over-precise in this country as to make it almost an Americanism. Its disappearance from our language in England is also one of the evidences of the process of simplification which is still slowly going on. Another, which has taken place within the memory of the elder living generation, is the disappearance of the subjunctive mood, which is now obsolete, or so very obsolescent as to be met with very rarely. But thirty-five or forty years since correct writers used this mood, and wrote, for example, if he go instead of if he goes. Of the effect of this grammarless condition of the English language we may see something in a subsequent article.