Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/268

244 1611 was not allowed to appear in a work at once so scholarly and so idiomatic as our English version of the Bible, which occurs but a few times in Shakespeare, and instead of which we find his, her, and even it, used by writers far down in the seventeenth century.

It is worthwhile to remark that the feminine possessive pronoun has a story somewhat similar to the neuter's. Her is the Anglo-Saxon hire slightly modified by time and usage. In hire, and consequently in her, the r is not an original element, but merely inflectional; hire or her being the genitive of heo, she. We still say, as our Anglo-Saxon forefathers said, her book, her gown. But the instinct of uniformity which led to the addition of s to et had led also before to the addition of the same letter to her for the formation of a possessive absolute, hers. We say, not This gown is her, but This gown is hers; as we say, Your book, but This book is yours; Our house, but This house is ours. Thus all these absolute possessive nouns in s are double possessives, having the possessive affix s added to the inflectional possessive form. In the case of the first example, hers, the inflectional possessive her became the objective, taking the place of the An- glo-Saxon objective or accusative hí, probably because hers was regarded as a possessive formed from her, which in some parts of England among the peasantry is now used as a nominative. In illustration of which I remember the story of a schoolmaster, who, crossing a common, directed the attention of two ragged urchins to a woman who was screaming for some one at her cottage door. Whereupon Pedagogus received answer, "Her beant a callin o' we. Uz doant belong to she." On hearing which he collapsed as with cholera.

To the above illustration of the way in which pronouns find their way into a language, I will add one timely example of this taking of a part of an original word as a root. Had we lived three or four hundred years ago, we should have said about this time of year that we liked pison for dinner. But by this we should not have meant that fluid which is sung, cold, in the touching ballad of "Villikins and his Dinah," but simply peas; and we should have pronounced the word, not py-son, but pee-son. Pison, or pisen, is merely the old plural in en (like oxen, orethren) of pise—pronounced peese—the name of the vegetable which we call pea. Our forefathers said a pise, as we say a pea. When the old plural in en was dropped, pise (peese) came to be regarded as a plural in s of a supposed singular, pi (pronounced pee); and by this backward movement toward a non-existent starting-point, we have attained the word pea.

To return to my former topic. The British Parliament is called omnipotent, and a majority may, by a single vote, change the so-called British Constitution, as a majority of Congress may, if it will, set at naught the Constitution of the United States. But neither Parliament nor Congress, not both of them by a concurrent vote, could make or modify a pronoun.