Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/99

III.] We do not feel that we have thus sacrificed aught of that distinctness of expression which should be aimed at in language; we lie is not less unambiguous than lagamasi; it is, in fact, a composition of equivalent elements in another mode; just as I did love is, in a different form, the same combination with I loved.

In the declension of our nouns we have effected a more thorough revolution, if that be possible, than in the conjugation of our verbs. The ancient tongue from which our English is the remote descendant inflected its nouns, substantive and adjective, in three numbers, each containing eight cases. Of the numbers, the Anglo-Saxon had almost wholly given up one, the dual, retaining only scanty relics of it in the pronouns; and, of the cases, it had in familiar use but four—the nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative—with traces of a fifth, the instrumental. The dual, indeed, on account of its little practical value, has disappeared in nearly all the modern languages of our family, its duties being assumed by the plural; and the prepositions have long been usurping the office of the case-endings, and rendering these dispensable. In English, now, all inflection of the adjective has gone out of use, and we have saved for our substantives only one of the cases, the genitive or possessive—to which a few of the pronouns add also an accusative or objective: thus, he, his, him, they, their, them, etc. Here, too, we should be loth to acknowledge that we have given up what the true purposes of language required us to keep, that we can speak our minds any less distinctly than our ancestors could, with all their apparatus of inflections.

A remarkable example of the total abandonment of a conspicuous department of grammatical structure, without any compensating substitution, is furnished in our treatment of the matter of gender. The grammatical distinction of words as masculine, feminine, or neuter, by differences of termination and differences of declension, had been from the very earliest period the practice of all the languages of the family to which the English belongs. It was applied not alone to names of objects actually possessed of sex, but to all, of whatever kind, even to intellectual and abstract terms; the whole language was the scene of an immense personification,