Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/296

274 The separation of neuter from masculine was both later in origin and less substantially marked, having little to do with suffixes of derivation, and extending through only a small part of the declensional endings (it is mainly limited to the nominative and accusative).

This system of Indo-European declension has suffered not less change in the history of the various branches of the family than has that of conjugational inflection. The dual number was long ago given up, as of insignificant practical value, by most of the branches: the oldest Aryan dialects exhibit it most fully; it also makes some figure in ancient Greek; but even the most antique Germanic tongues have a dual only in the personal pronouns of the first and second persons; and the Latin shows but the faintest traces of it (in the peculiar nominative and accusative endings of duo, 'two,' and ambo, 'both'). As regards, again, the cases, the complete scheme only appears in the Indian and Persian; and even there the process of its reduction has begun, by the fusion, in one or another number, and in one or another class of words, of two cases into one—that is to say, the loss of the one as a distinct form, and the transference of its functions to another. In the oldest known condition of the classic tongues, this process has gone yet farther; in Latin, the locative and instrumental are thus fused with the dative and ablative; and in Greek, the genitive and ablative have been also compressed into one. The oldest Germanic dialects have nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative; with traces of the instrumental, which the later tongues have lost. But the modern development of the prepositions, and their rise to importance as independent indicators of the relations formerly expressed by the case-endings, has brought with it a yet more sweeping abandonment of the latter. We, in English, have saved a single oblique case, the ancient genitive, so restricting its use at the same time as to make a simple "possessive" of it—and further, among the pronouns, an accusative or "objective" (me, us, etc., and whom); in the Romanic languages, the noun has become wholly stripped of case-inflection. In what manner we have rid ourselves of the distinctions of