Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/108

86 The common confusion of learn and teach, as in "I learnt him to swim," is another case of a somewhat similar character, being also favoured by a recognized usage of our language, which permits us in numerous instances to employ a verb in both a simple and a causative sense. We say correctly "the ship ran aground" and "they ran it aground"; why not as well "the boy learned his lesson " and "they learned him his lesson"?

A reprehensible popular inaccuracy—commencing in this country, I believe, at the South or among the Irish, but lately making very alarming progress northward, and through almost all classes of the community—is threatening to wipe out in the first persons of our futures the distinction between the two auxiliaries shall and will, casting away the former, and putting the latter in its place. The Southerner says: "It is certain that we will fail," "I would try in vain to thank you." To say I shall in circumstances where we should say he will, to put we should where good usage would require they would, seems to these people, who have never investigated either the history or the philosophy of the difference of the phraseology in the two persons, an inconsistency which may and should be avoided. The matter, however, is one which implies a violation not only of good English usage, but also of sound etymological morality: shall originally and properly contains the idea of duty, and will that of resolve; and to disregard obligation in the laying out of future action, making arbitrary resolve the sole guide, is a lesson which the community ought not to learn from any section or class, in language any more than in political and social conduct.

Once more, our verb has long been undergoing a process of impoverishment by the obliteration of its subjunctive mood. This had begun even in the Anglo-Saxon, by the partial loss of the distinctive signs of subjunctive meaning, and the assimilation of the subjunctive and indicative forms. The wearing-off of inflections since that period has nearly finished the work, in wiping out, in almost every verb in the language, all formal distinction between the two moods, except in the second and third persons singular present and the second