Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/100

78 sexual qualities were attributed to everything in the world both of nature and of mind: often on the ground of conceptions and analogies which we find it excessively difficult to recognize and appreciate. This state of things still prevailed in the Anglo-Saxon: nouns were masculine, feminine, and neuter, according to the ancient tradition (for example, tôth, 'tooth,' was masculine; syn, 'sin,' was feminine; and wîf, 'wife, woman,' was neuter); and every adjective and adjective-pronoun was declined in the three genders, and made to agree with its noun in gender as well as in number and case, just as if it were Latin or Greek. But in that vast decay and ruin of grammatical forms which attended the elaboration of our modern English out of its Saxon and Norman elements, the distinctive suffixes of gender and declension have disappeared along with the rest; and with them has disappeared this whole scheme of artificial distinctions, of such immemorial antiquity and wide acceptance. It has completely passed from our memory and our conception, leaving not a trace behind; the few pronominal forms indicative of sex which we have saved—namely, he, she, it, his and him, her, and its—we use only according to the requirements of actual sex or its absence, or to help a poetic personification; and we think it very inconvenient, and even hardly fair, that, in learning French and German, we are called upon to burden ourselves with arbitrary and unpractical distinctions of grammatical gender.

The disposition to rid our words of whatever in them is superfluous, or can be spared without detriment to distinctness of expression, has led in our language, as in many others, to curious replacements of an earlier mode of indicating meaning by one of later date, and of inorganic origin—that is to say, not produced for the purpose to which it is applied. Thus we have a few plurals, of which men from man, feet from foot, and mice from mouse are familiar examples, which constitute noteworthy exceptions to our general rule for the formation of the plural number. Comparison of the older dialects soon shows us that the change of vowel in such words as these was originally an accident only; it was not significant, but euphonic; it was called out