Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/266

242 sex and the outrage to its dignity, which have for centuries lurked in this use of man, it is not necessary to say, "If a person wishes to sleep, en mustn't eat cheese for supper," but merely, as the speakers of the best English now say and have said for generations, "If one wishes to sleep, one mustn't, etc." One, thus used, is a good pronoun, of healthy, well-rooted growth. And we have in some another word which supplies all our need in this respect without our going to the French for their over-worked en; e. g., ''Void des bonnes fraises. Voules vous en avoir?'' These are fine strawberries. Will you have some? Thus used, some is to all intents and purposes a pronoun which leaves nothing to be desired. With he, she, it, and we, and one, and some, we have no need of en or any other pronoun.

Or we should have had one long ere this. For the service to which the proposed pronoun would be put, if it were adopted, is not new. The need is one which, if it exists at all, must have been felt five hundred years ago as much as it could be now. At that period, and long before, a noun in the third person singular was represented, according to its gender, by the pronouns he, she, or it, and there was no pronoun of common gender to take the place of all of them. In the matter of language, popular need is inexorable, and popular ingenuity inexhaustible; and it is not in the nature of things that, if the imagined need had existed, it should not have been supplied during the formative stages of our languages, especially at the Elizabethan period, to which we owe the pronoun its. The introduction of this word, although it is merely the possessive form of it, was a work of so much time and difficulty that an acquaintance with the struggle would alone deter a considerate man from attempting to make a new pronoun. Although, as I have said, the mere possessive case of a word which had been on the lips of all men of Anglo-Saxon blood for a thousand years, and although introduced at a period notable for bold linguistic innovations, and soon adopted by some of the most popular writers, Shakespeare among them, nearly a century elapsed before its firm establishment in the English tongue.

For pronouns are of all words the remotest in origin, the slowest of growth, the most irregular and capricious in their manner of growth, the most tenacious of hold, the most difficult to plant, the most nearly impossible to transplant. To say that I, the first of pronouns, is three thousand years old, is quite within bounds. We trace it through the old English form ich, the Anglo-Saxon ic, the Maeso-Gothic ik, the Icelandic eg, the Latin and Greek ego, the Hebrew verbal postfix ī, to the Sanskrit ah-am. Should any of my readers fail to see the connection between ah-am and I, let him consider for a moment that the sound or name of the latter is ah-ee.

The antiquity of pronouns is shown, also, by the irregularity of their cases. This is generally a trait of the oldest words in any language; verbs and adjectives as well as pronouns. For instance, the words expressing consciousness, existence, pleasure, and pain, the first and commonest linguistic needs of all peoples—in English, I, be, good, bad; in Latin, ego, esse, bonus, malus—are regular in no language that I can remember within the very narrow circle with which I have been able to scrape acquaintance. Telegraph and skedaddle are as regular as may be; but we say go, went, gone; the Romans said eo, ire, ivi, itum; and the irregularities, dialectic and other, of the Greek eimi, are multitudinous and anomalous. English pronouns have real cases, which is one sign of their antiquity, the Anglo-Saxon having been an inflected language; but not in Anglo-Saxon, Latin or any other inflected language, are the oblique cases of I