Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/107

III.] valuable distinction—all these are part and parcel of the ceaseless changes of language, and not essentially different from the rest; they are only that part against which the best public sentiment, a healthy feeling for the conservation of linguistic integrity, arrays itself most strongly, and which therefore are either kept down altogether, or come but slowly and sparingly to acceptance. Let us note a few instances of such linguistic degeneration.

There is in English a long-standing tendency to efface the distinction of form between the imperfect and participle, usually assimilating the former to the latter, though not infrequently also the latter to the former. Spoke and broke, for spake and brake, held for holden, and many others, are of recent acceptance, but now impregnably established; from begin, and a considerable class of like verbs, the two forms he began and he begun, and so forth, are in nearly equal favour; he come for he came, I done for I did, and others like them, are still blunders and vulgarisms; and we may hope that they will always continue such. These alterations find support in one of the analogies of the language, which has doubtless done much to call them forth. In our regular verbs, namely, there is an entire coincidence of form between the preterit and participle. The careless speaker reasons—not consciously, but in effect—thus: If I say I gained and I have gained, I dealt and I have dealt, why not also I sung and I have sung, he drank and he has drank, we held and we have held, they done and they have done?

It is not often, perhaps, that the preterit and participle will stand in connections which fail to show distinctly which form is meant by the speaker or writer. But we have also a few verbs—of which put is a familiar example—in which all distinction of present and preterit is likewise lost: if we say they put, the general requirements of the sense alone can point out the tense, just as if the phrase were so much Chinese.