CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH {RE-PRINTED FROM ''PROGRESS IN LANGUAGE") BV OTTO JESPERSEN, Ph.D., Litt.D. PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN THE UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN- AUTHOR OP "how to teach a foreign language," "growth and structure OF the ENGLISH LANGUAGE," "A MODERN ENGLISH GRAMMAR" "lehrbuch der phonetik," "phonetische grundfragen" ETC. LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. i 191S PREFACE When the publishers told me that a reprint of Progress in Language with Special Reference to English (1894, second edition — practically with- out any changes, in 1909) was again called for, I thought it not advisable to issue the book once more in its former shape. It has always been to some extent prejudicial to the book that it was made up of two really distinct treatises : ( i ) chap- ters i.-v. and ix., dealing with questions of gene- ral philology, the development and origin of language, and (2) chapters vi.-viii., dealing with some special points in the history of English. It is true that the two parts were by no means incompatible, in so far as the general view of linguistic progress had influenced the way in which English grammar was treated in the special chapters, and inversely the results gained in these formed part of the evidence on which V 301 PREFACE. the general conclusions were based. Still, it could not be supposed that everybody interested in the general problems of philology would care equally for subtleties of English grammar, nor, on the other hand, that students of English would like to buy a book, half of which was only loosely connected with his special field of interest. I have therefore thought it best now definitely to separate the two parts, the more so as the time that has elapsed since the first publication of my book has affected them in different ways. While, namely, so much has been written of late years on general linguistics that parts of the book, more particularly perhaps the controversial portions, may now seem a little out of date, the same cannot be said about the English chapters. Indeed, I see no incon- venience in reprinting them from the old plates, even though I should now, of course, be able to add much illustrative matter, and though it would be possible now to refer to some new treatises and new editions of standard works. Very little would, however, be gained by such changes, and I have, consequently, refrained PREFACE. trom any changes except those necessitated by the new numbering of chapters and sections. The rest of Progress in Language I shall try to re-write so as to make it a better and fuller expression of my views on the origin and development of language as they have matured during long years of thought and study. Otto Jespersen. University of Copenhagen, August, 19 1 7. CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. CHAPTER I. ENGLISH CASE-SYSTEMS, OLD AND MODERN. 1. (103) The arrangement of inflexions current in grammars, according to which all cases of the same noun, all tenses, persons, etc., of the same verb, are grouped together as a paradigm, is not a truly- grammatical one : what is common to Old English dceg — d(Ege — dceges — dagas — dagum — daga, — for in- stance, is not the flexional element, but the word, or stem of the word ; the tie between all these forms, accordingly, is not of a grammatical, but of a lexical character. That such an arrangement may offer some advantages from a practical point of view cannot, indeed, be denied ; but, on the other hand, it causes many things to be wrested from one another which belong together grammatically, e.g., the termination -«;;/, which is common to the dative plural of all the flexional classes. Besides, it forces us to separate from one another the two parts of grammar which treat respectively of the forms of words and of their uses. In the latter, we must needs deal with (say) all datives under one head, all genitives under another, and so forth, while in accidence these forms (2) ENGLISH CASE-SYSTEMS, OLD AND MODERN. 3 are distributed according to declension classes. Such a disjunction, however, of accidence and syntax, beyond what is strictly necessary, is doubtless in- jurious to the right understanding of grammar. At any rate, this pa^-adigmatic arrangement of grammati- cal phenomena will not answer the purposes of this chapter, where we seek to get as perspicuous a survey as possible of the grammatical forms of two distinct stages of one and the same language. 2. (104) Many works of comparative philology, however, employ another arrangement. In this each case is dealt with more by itself, so that either (as in Schleicher's Compendium) the accusative singular, for example, is treated separately in each language, or (as in Brugmann's Grundriss) the mode of formation of one definite case in one definite class of nouns (/-stems, etc.) is followed out through all the allied tongues. According to this arrangement all those facts are brought into a single class which are related to one another from the point of view of a student of comparative philology ; but, as an inevit- able consequence, the survey of the forms of any one language (or stage of language) is obscured ; the unity of time and place is effaced ; and, moreover, we get only a formal conception of the phenomena. The morphological element has been brought to the front at the expense of the syntactical, which has to be treated in another section, so that the constant reciprocal action of form and function is generally lost sight of. CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. 3. (105) Lastly, we come to what I will term the purely grammatical arrangement. The grammar of a language is, as it were, an answer to the question, What general means of expression does such and such a language possess?^ Now, by the purely grammatical arrangement the methods of expression existing in a particular language at a particular time are tabulated in such a manner that those forms come together which are grammatically analogous. By this arrangement, forms which belong together from a dictionary point of view, e.g., dcBg, dcEge, are wrested from one another, and the same may be the case with forms which belong together historically, e.g., Old English nominative plural neuter hof-u and word ; it is true that they were once formed with the same ending, but an Englishman of King Alfred's time could not possibly be aware of this point of agreement. Clearly by this mode of treatment the individual element, by which I mean that which is peculiar to each language or to each successive stage of language, is brought more distinctly into view ; we are, moreover, enabled to survey the potentialities of development of each particular language : we see plainly where the differences between the various cases are so well marked that they can easily be kept distinct, and where they bear such a close resemblance to each other in form or function, or in both alike, as to run the risk of being levelled and blended. In an ideal language it would be an easy matter to ^ Cf. Sweet, Words, Logic and Grammar, p. 31. ENGLISH CASE-SYSTEMS, OLD AND MODERN. 5 carry out such an arrangement : since each modifica- tion of meaning would have its own expression, which would be constant for all cases and quite unambigu- ous, a separation of accidence and syntax would be precluded, zjfso facto ; whether we should say, the genitival relation is expressed by -a, or -a denotes the genitive, would be quite immaterial. 4. (106) Not so in the idioms actually existing or recorded with their countless freaks of chance and capricious exceptions. In Latin, for example, -i sometimes denotes the genitive singular, sometimes the nominative plural, and if, conversely, we ask how the genitive singular is formed, the answer will be : now by -2, now by 4s^ etc. Consequently, we get two different modes of arrangement, according as we take as our base I. Analogies of form (such and such a termination expresses such and such a meaning) — the morpho- logical classification, — or, II. Resemblances of function (such and such a relation is signified by such and such terminations) — the syntactical classification. The two arrangements stand to one another as the two parts of a dictionary, in one of which the form (say, some German or French vocable) is given, and the signification sought (in other words, the English equivalent is appended) : in the other, the meaning is the known quantity, and the appended part is the Ger- man or French term which was required to be known. CHAPTERS ON ENGLISfl. 5. (107) Before attempting to give a synopsis, arranged upon these principles, of English case- systems at different epochs of the growth of the language, I have to premise with regard to O/ci English that, as a matter of course, I shall have to give, in the main, West-Saxon forms, though for a thorough understanding of the historical process of development of Standard English it would have been better if I had been in a position to avail myself of a Mercian, or, still better, a London grammar represent- ing the language as spoken about the year 800. Again, in stating the function, I shall have to be very brief, and content myself with merely giving names, leaving it to the reader to understand by " dative " (for example) — not the notion of dative in itself, for such a notion has no existence, but — " Old English dative ". For the particular use which English people of a thousand years ago made of their dative case, I must refer to the Old English syntax, which is^ unfortunately, still to be written. In the present chapter I can give nothing but a skeleton-like scheme, which does not aim at completeness. 6. (108) It will not fail to meet with general approval that, in drawing up this scheme, I have followed SlEVERS'S excellent Angels dchsische Gram- niatik (2 Aufl., 1886). In accordance with my general views, however, as stated above, I shall differ from Sievers in paying much more regard than he does to what would naturally appear to King Alfred and his contemporaries as the significant element in ENGLISH CASE-SYSTEMS, OLD AND MODERN. y language : I shall have to separate word and case- ending, as far as this is feasible, in the same manner as the instinctive linguistic sense of that time would have done, regardless of the prehistoric condition of things. Old English ea£-e, for instance, is historically, it is true, an w-stem ; but for my present purposes I shall have to look upon it as consisting of ea^" + the nominative ending -^, the genitive being ea^" + ^f^ and so on. We want a special term for this distinction ; and I propose to call the substantial part of the word, felt as such by the instinct of each generation as something apart from the ending (eag- in the example chosen), the kernel of the word, while eagan is the historic " stem ". No doubt, in some cases it will depend on a more or less arbitrary choice, how much of the traditional form is to be treated as kernel and how much as ending. For instance, cage itself might be said to be the kernel, the genitive ending being -n^ before which the e of the kernel is changed into a. This division would, however, seem to be unnatural for Old English ; although so much must be granted, that in Middle English we must look upon eie (not ei) as the kernel, to which the ending -n is affixed in the nominative plural.^ The fact is, that along with the perpetual wearing away of words there is often an alteration in the feeling as to the relations of kernel and ending. ^ In Old English here the kernel is htrc, but in wine it is win; cf. dative plural hcrj-um (written henum, herigum, etc.), but 8 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. Now a little more, now a little less may be included in one or the other, exactly as when one generation considers the sound-combination anaddere as consist- ing oi a ■\- nadderCy whilst the next looks upon it as a7i -\- addere (Modern English, an adder), or when 7?tine uncle is transmuted into my nuncle. 7. (109) It will be seen that if Old English eage is said to be an «-stem, what is meant ie this, that at some former period the kernel of the word ended in -«, while, as far as the Old English language proper is concerned, all that is implied is that the word is inflected in a certain manner. If, therefore, in the following pages, I shall speak of ;2-stems, i- stems, etc., it is only as designations for classes of declension. It follows, however, from my view that we are not properly entitled to put down, e.g., wyrm as an 2-stem, for by doing so we should fail to give a true picture of the real condition of things in the Old English period. If a modern linguist is able to see by the vowel-mutation (umlaut) that wyrm was an /-stem, an Englishman of that time could not have suspected any such thing, as the endings of the several cases of wyrm are identical with those of (the ^-stems, e.g.) dom. When Sievers reckons wyrm among /-stems, or gives sige as an es- ^j-stem, he is writing for the benefit of those who take only a secondary interest in Old English grammar, and care chiefly for the way in which it reflects prehistoric phenomena. He is thinking little of those other students who make the first object oi their investiga- ENGLISH CASE.SYST^MS, OLD AND MODERN. 9 tion the mutual relations of the facts of a language at a definite historical epoch, and who go to the study of Old English partly for the sake of seeing the mechanism of this particular idiom as an organi- cally connected whole, partly with a view to seeking in it the explanation of later developments of the English language. 8, (no) In the succeeding tabulations the fol- lowing abbreviations are used : — n = nominative a = accusative d = dative i = instrumental g = genitive s = singular P = plural m = masculine f = feminine nt (or n) = neuter b = words with original short (^rief) syl- lable 1 = words with original long syllable (long vowel or short vowel fol- lowed by long consonant) si — strong adjectival (pronominal) de- clension w — weak adjectival declension * r = rare ^ The declension of adjectives and pronouns is only men- tioned when deviating Irom that oi nouns. io CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. E = early (Alfred inclusive) L =. late WS = special West Saxon N = North of England S = Sievers's Gramniatik. Italicised letters indicate the stem (class of declen- sion) : — (words like dom, hof^ ivord ; by others termed ^-sterns), z, etc.; ^=those consonantal stems which do not form part of some larger group, such as ;/, r. What is said about the <2-class applies likewise to the w^-stems with a long vowel or a diphthong preceding the w (S, § 259), so that, in mentioning wd^ I only mean those in which the w is preceded by a consonant (S, § 260) ; the y^-stems are only referred to when they present deviations from the other d- stems (g p) ; abstr ,=vioxdi?> like sirengtt (S, § 279). n a p n ^b must be read : nominative and accusative plural of neutral ^'-sterns consisting of an originally short syllable. I. MORPHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION. 9. (hi) The Old English language used the following formal means to denote case-relations : — A. THE KERNEL OF THE WORD UNCHANGED. (i) n a s. o,jo (except Im), wo, i (l)f, u Imf, r, nd, c mn, c If [dom hof word, here secg cyn(n) rice westen, bearu searu (beadu), ben, feld hond, faeder modor, freond, fot scrud, boc]. — Also N ? b [wlit, S, § 261, anm. 5]. ENGLISH CASE-SYSTEMS, OLD AND MODERN. ti (2) n s f. (not a s.) d 1, jd {wd) [ar, sib(b) gierd (beadu) ] ; L also / (l)f [ben], -e being used in a s. (3) d s. some [(aet) ham, (to) daeg and a few more, S, § 237, anm. 2], of r only faeder sweostor ; r. u If [hond] and s [dogor S, § 289] ; L <: If [ac, etc., S, § 284, anm. 2]. (4) gs. ^^ [faeder broSor, etc.] ; r. h u If [hond]. (5) nap. ^ ln,yere nihte Se hi on fSone doei togaedere cumon sceoldon;^ similarly {Oros., 136, 23 and foil.) on westeweardum pisses middangeardes , ... on easte- \?fQ^xAyyiXipeosan middangearde (comp. same page, 1. 7), and so on. 45. (147) This condition of things naturally gave rise to a good deal of uncertainty, which manifested itself partly in a rather inaccurate pronunciation of the endings, partly in the use of them in places where they did not belong. This now and then happened in such a manner as to bring about coincidences of sound without assisting clearness, nay, even at its expense, as, for instance, is the case when we find in the Cura Past., 166, 2 and 20 : to anra 5ara Sreora burga, instead of anre (see Sweet's note in his A. S. Reader, p. 191). Generally, however, such uses of endings on analogy ^ See particularly the materials collected by M. Sohrauer, Kkine Beitr. zur ae. Grannn., pp. 10-26. ^ On with the dative case here corresponded to an older in, while with the accusative it was the old an (comp. Germ, in, an), but I doubt very much if the old West Saxon author was alive to any difference in his use oi on in the two phrases. 42 Chapters on engusU. are apt to crop up in such places particularly where the traditional terminations are not sufficiently dis- tinct, or where cases have been levelled which it is important should be kept apart. For example, giefa stands alike for the nominative plural and the genitive plural, and misapprehensions are the consequence. These are obviated by the extension to the nomina- tive and genitive respectively of the termination -e from the /-class and -ena from the ;2-class (nominative giefe, genitive giefena). But if the transmutations, phonetic as well as non- phonetic, of the old declensions took their rise from the numerous inconsistencies of the system and its want of fixed boundaries, formal or functional, then what is described above as the true grammatical arrangement exhibits the prospects of the various cases and endings in their struggle for existence. By its aid we are, in some measure, in a position to cast the horoscope of the whole system and predict the main features of its destinies. 46. (148) The vocalic terminations (B) were evidently the least distinct and least sharply defined ; each of these had many values, n@r were they uniformly distributed in the different classes of inflexion. Here accordingly every succeeding genera- tion when it came to learning the language was offered only scanty points of support and a great many chances of going wrong. It is therefore not surprising that these endings were confounded and effaced and in a later period entirely dropped, as English case-systems, old aI^d modern. 43 there was no well-defined barrier between the use of the bare kernel of the word, and the kernel plus the vocalic termination -e, in which the endings -^, -^, -«, had at that time been merged. The nasal endings were possessed of greater power of resistance. But they, too, were doomed, chiefly owing to the exceedingly common use of the ending -an in the weak forms of adjectives, where it was of no consequence whatever for the signification, and could therefore be neglected without any loss. In the case of verbal forms, too, where endings in -n occurred also, they did not perform any function of sufficient importance to check the tendency to drop the sound in pronunciation ; in fact, at an early period we meet with collocations like binde we, binde ^e, mote we, etc., in which the -n had fallen away (Siev., § 360). 47. (149) Where, on the other hand, the -;/ was protected by a following vowel, it could withstand the levelling tendencies better. This would be especially the case in the genitive plural, because of the distinc- tive meaning of this genitive. The same thing is also particularly true of the two -s endings, each of which was confined to a sharply limited sphere of use. The -s is too important to be left out ; if, on the other hand, the two endings -as and -es are levelled in the Middle English -es, this is mainly due to the influence exercised by the other endings. As -a and -e were not distinctive enough in point of meaning to oppose a strong resistance to the tendency prevailing in all 44 CHAPTERS ON ENGUSM. languages to obscure vowels in weak syllables, nay, even invited this tendency, -as and -es had to submit to the resulting " phonetic law ". This they did without any very great detriment to intelligibility, the connexion in which they occur being nearly everywhere sufficient to show whether the genitive singular or nominative plural was meant, especially after the rule had been established by which the genitive is always placed before its governing word (see chapter iii.). As regards the prospects which changes of kernel have of maintaining themselves, we can only be certain of this much, that those which have become attended with inherent change of signification are, by a natural consequence, more likely to be permanent than the others, which are more liable to be affected by levelling tendencies, inasmuch as a new regular form which agrees with the shape of the word in other cases is sure to be understood as well as, or even better than, the traditional one. But, on the other hand, forces tending to change pronunciation are continually at work, and these give rise to fresh changes of kernel ; we may mention, for instance, the laws of quantity which have split up the Old English sceadu into the two Modern English words shade and shadow. To foretell the durability of such modifica- tions is, of course, a matter of impossibility. 48. (150) To sum up, setting aside changes of kernel, the other modifications of the nouns in Old English declensions are of a character to enable us ENGLISH CASE-SYSTEMS, OLD AND MODERN. 45 to form an opinion on the main features of their destinies by considering the reciprocal relations of phonetic expression and inward signification, the more so as it was just the least ambiguous endings (-as^ -es) that were used to denote the syntactical relations which are the most distinctive and appear to be the most indispensable in language, vi^., plurality and connexion (genitive). Logically to define the other case-relations is a matter of much more difficulty : the dative and accusative cases often come in contact with each other, and both have also some points of agreement with the nominative. Hence arises the chance of endless confusions, even where the forms are sharply distinguished (see the next chapter). In fact, there is every occasion, be it said incidentally, alike from a formal and syntactical point of view, to prefer the arrangement of the cases prevalent in Den- mark since Rask — nominative accusative, dative, genitive — to any other, and more especially to that still current in Germany where the genitive is placed between the nominative and the accusative. CHAPTER II. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 49. (151) In the Oldest English pronouns we find the nominative, accusative, and dative cases distinct both in point of accidence and syntax, al- though in a few pronouns there is no formal differ- ence between the nominative and accusative (in the plurals of the third person {hie) ; in the neuter {hit, hwcety etc.), in the feminine form heo or hie). The first step in the simplification of this system is the abandonment of the separate forms mec, J^ec, usic, eowicy uncit, incit, which are used only in the very oldest texts as accusatives distinct from the datives me, ]pe, us, eow, unc, inc, and which are soon ousted by the latter forms. By parallel developments occurring somewhat later, the old dative forms hire {hir, her), him and hwam {whom) are made to fill the offices held hitherto by the old accusatives heo, hine and hwone. In some of the southern counties hine is, however, preserved up till our times in the form of [an] , see Ellis, Early Engl. Pronunciation, v., p. 43 ; in the literary transcription of these dialects this is written 'un, e.g., in Fielding's Tom Jones (Squire (46) CASESHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 47 Western, etc.), and in Thackeray's Pcfidennis (i., 62, •' Show Mr. Pendennis up to 'tm ").^ In the plural, also, the dative form has expelled the old ace. ; hem (O. E. him, heom ; preserved in familiar and vulgar speech : " I know 'em ") and the later them are originally datives ; 2 the neuter singular, on the other hand, has preserved the old accusative forms hit {it), }?cet {that), hwcBt {what), at the expense of the old datives. The reason of this constant preferring of the dative forms in the person-indicating pronouns is no doubt the fact that these pronouns are used as indirect objects more often than either nouns or adjectives ; ^ at any rate, it is a phenomenon very frequently found in various languages ; compare Danish ham, hende, dem, hvem, originally datives, now also accusatives and partly even nominatives (while it is true that in mig and dig the ace. has outlived the dative) ; North ^ Pendinnis, p. 50, Thackeray uses 'n as a plural (" Hand down these 'ere trunks." " Hand'n down yourself") ; but this is hardly due to a direct and correct observation of the real spoken language. ^ Chron.y 893, the Parker MS. has "hie asettan him . . . ofer," but the Laud MS.: "hi assetton hi . . . ofer " ; it is perhaps allowable here to suppose a blending of the transi- tive "asetton hie" and the intransitive " asseton him"; cf. § 188. But in Ckron., S28, we have an indubitable outcome of the tendency to replace the old ace. by the dat., for the Parker MS. reads: "he hie to eaj^modre hersumnesse gedyde," but the Laud MS. : "he heom ealle [N.B. not eallum I] to eadmo- dere hyrsumnesse gedyde ". 3 A. Kock, in Nord. Tidskrift for Philologi, n. r. iii., 256. 48 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. German wem for wen,'^ French /m as an absolute pronoun (while the ace. has carried the day in e/k, eux, elles ; mot and tot may be either); Italian lui, lei, loro^ etc. 50. (152) In this chapter I propose to deal at some length with those tendencies to further modi- fications of the pronominal case-system which may be observed after the accusatives and datives have everywhere become identical. The forms concerning us are in their present spelling : — nom. ace. — dat. /, we me, us thou, ye thee, you he, she, they him, her, them who zvhom. Simplification has gone further in the case of the pronouns of the second person than in that of the others ; in fact, if we were to believe the ordinary grammars, the substitution oi you (or ye is the only point in which a deviation from the old system has taken place. But ordinary grammars are not always trustworthy ; in laying down their rules they are too * Frankc, in Phonetischc Studien, ii., 50. ' Storm, Engl. Philologie, 208 ; compare also the interesting remarks in Franceschi, In Citta e in Campagna, 585 : " lui, lei, loro, per egli, ella, eglino ed elleno, che nel parlar famigliare par- rebbe affettazione. . . . Questi e altri idiotismi e certe sgram- maticature . . . io fo di quando in quando scappar fuori dai mei personaggi, perche vivono nella bocca del popolo toscano, come sa chi vi nacque o vi stette lungamente in mezzo, e porto amore alia sua parlata." CASE-SmPflNGS IN TtiE PRONOUNS. 4Q apt to forget that the English language is one thing, common-sense or logic another thing, and Latin grammar a third, and that these three things have really in many cases very little to do with one an- other. Schoolmasters generally have an astonishing talent for not observing real linguistic facts, and an equally astonishing inclination to stamp everything as faulty that does not agree with their narrow rules ; and the precepts inculcated in the school-room have no doubt had some influence in checking natural tendencies, though the following pages will suffice to show that the best authors have in many points de- viated more from the rules laid down in grammars than is generally supposed. 51. (153) Many of the phenomena I shall treat of have, as a matter of course, been noticed and partly explained by modern grammarians of the historical school ; I shall specially mention KoCH, Hist. Gramm.^ ii. (especially p. 244^); Matzner, £'«^/. Graynm., ii. passim ; ABBOTT, A Shakespearian Grammar, § 205 ff. ; A. Schmidt, Shakespeare- Lexikon ; STORM, Englische Philologie, 1881, p. 207 ff. ; GUMMERE, The English Dative-Nom. of the Person. Pron., in American Journ. of PhiloL, iv. ; W. Franz, Die ^ In the second edition of Koch's work, Prof. Zupitza has already remarked that the earliest of Koch's examples must be explained differently or are untrustworthy; but even Koch's " altenglische " examples prove nothing; thus >»w in " }?er restid ]?am doun " must certainly be the common reflexive dative (see below, § 86), and not the subject of the sentence. 4 $6 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. dialektspr. bei Dickens, Engl. St., xii., 223 f, and Zur syntax des alt even Nenenglisch, ibid., xvii., 212 ff. ; Kellner, in the Introduction to Cdxton' s Blanchardy^i (EETS. Extra Series 58). On the whole these authors content themselves with a purely lexical treatment of the matter, giving for instance all the examples of / for me and vice versd under one head, and only occasionally offering an explanation of some phenomena ; the fullest and most satisfactory explanations are found in Storm's excellent work. In the following sections I shall attempt a systematic arrangement according to the psychological or phonetic principles underlying the phenomena and causing speakers or writers to use another case than that exacted by the rules of ordinary grammar. I shall first take those classes of case- shiftings which are of a more general character and may occur more or less frequently in all languages of our type, giving last those which belong more specially to English or to one particular period of English. It must be specially mentioned that in many of the sentences quoted two or even more causes of shifting have operated concurrently. I. Relative Attraction. 52. (154) A pronoun in the principal proposition is often put in the case which the corresponding relative pronoun has or ought to have. This is particularly easy to explain where no relative pro- noun is used ; the so-called relative ellipsis originates CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 5! in a construction apo koinou, the personal pronoun belonging equally well to both propositions. Ex- amples abound, both where the relative pronoun is expressed and where it is understood. Chaucer, J/. P., 5, 623, "Him that she cheest,^^ shal her have as swythe " | Caxton (see Kellner, xiv.), "Mm that he rought with full stroke was all in to brused" | Shak., Cor., v., 6, 5, ''Him I accuse (:) the city port by this hath enter'd" | Ant., iii., i, 15, ''/am we serues [serve's] away" | Ro?n., 1032 (ii., 3, 85), " ker I loue now Doth grace for grace, and loue for loue allow " (the oldest quarto s/ie whom) I Haml, ii., i, 42, " him you would sound . . . be assured he closes ..." | Temp., v., i, 15 ; As, i., I, 46 ; I H. VI., iv., 7, 75 | Tennyson, 370, " Our noble Arthur, him Ye scarce can over- praise, will hear and know " | Troll., Duke's Ch., i., 161 (a lady writes), " I have come to be known as her whom, your uncle trusted and loved, as her whom your wife trusted . . ." Very often after it is : — Marlowe, /^z£/, 1034, " Tis not thy wealth, but her that I esteeme" (= I esteeme her) | Sh., 2 H. VI., iv., I, 1 17, " it is thee I feare " | Sonn. 62, "Tis thee (my self) that for my self I praise " I Thack., Pend., i., 269, " it's not me I'm anxious about " | ibid., iii., 30 1, " it is not him I want" I Troll., Old Man, 121, '' It is her you should consult on such a matter ". 52 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. Nom. for ace. is rarer in case of relative attraction.^ Sh., V. A., 109, "thus he that overrul'd I over- swayed " I Troil.y ii., 3, 252, ''praise him that got thee, she that gaue thee sucke " ; comp. HmL, i., 2, 105 ; 2 H. VI., iii., 2, 89; R. TIL, iv., 4, loi f I Bunyan (see Storm, 211), "the en- couraging words of he that led in the front ". II. Blendings. 53. (155) Contaminations or blendings of two constructions between which the speaker is wavering occur in all languages. The first class of contamina- tions concerning us here is caused by vacillation be- tween an accusative with infinitive and a finite verb, exemplified in the Bible phrase : O. E., '^Hwcene secgad men J?3et sy mannes sunu ? " Auth. V., " Whom do men say that I the son of man am?" (Matt, xvi., 13), as compared with the more " grammatically correct " con- struction in Wyclif : " Whom seien men to be mannus sone?" In the parallel passage, Luke, ix., 18 and 20, Wyclif writes : " Whom seien the puple that Y am ? . . . But who seien 36 that Y am ? " From secular authors I shall quote : — Chauc, Morr., iii.. 26, 803, "as ye han herd me sayd " [rhyme : apayd ; for me saye or / said'\ I B., 665, "yet wole we vs auyse whom ^ Relative attraction is the reason of the three abnormal he's in Caxton which Kellner quotes on p. xv., but does not ex- plain. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 53 that we wole that [v. r. om. that] shal ben our Justyse" I Sh.j^'i^r.jiv., 2, 2, "the nobility . . . whom we see haue sided in his behalfe " | Temp., iii., 3, 92, "Ferdinand {whom they suppose is droun'd)" | Meas., ii., i, 72, "[my wife] whom I thanke heauen is an honest woman" | Tim.,\Y.,'^y 120, "a bastard, whom the oracle Hath doubtfully pronounced thy [fol. the] throat shall cut" | Fielding, T.J., iv., 1 30, " I would have both you and she know that it is not for her fortune he follows her" | Darwin, Life and Z., i., 60, "to assist those ivhom he thought deserved assistance" | Muloch, Halifax, ii., 11, "one whom all the world knew was so wronged and so un- happy ".^ Note also Sh., Cor., i., i, 236, " And were I anything but what I am, I would wish me only he," where he is the only natural form, as him would only obscure the meaning of the phrase. ^ In R. Haggard, Cleopatra, ii., ^ The phenomenon is nearly akin to the well-known insertion of what should be the subject of the subordinate clause as the object of the principal proposition; see, for instance, Chaucer, B., 4392, "Herkneth^AJs^6/ts/w^&W^i^s how they singe. And see th& fressche floures how they springe" | Sh., Wint. T.,\., 2, 181, " you perceive me not how I give lyne ". A good many examples have been collected by Kellner, Blanch., xvi. (" And God saw the light that it was good"); of. also Wright's note, Sh., Tw, N., p. 100. * Compare also Stevenson, Treas. IsL, 171, "Some one was close behind, I knew not whom ", 54 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. 1 21, "rather than I would see her thy wedded wife and t/iou her loving lord," we have an approach to the phenomenon mentioned below, § 164. When we find in the middle of the sixteenth cen- tury such sentences as these : — Roister B., 38, "And let me see 7^7^ play me such a part againe " | idzd, y6, " I woulde see _}'ou aske pardon," we may be pretty sure that the author meant you as the ace. case and the verbs play and aske as infini- tives ; but to a later generation neither the form of the pronoun nor that of the verb would exclude the possibility of you being the nominative before finite verbs ( = let me see (that) you . . . ). 54. (156) In these cases the blending was due to the fact that what was grammatically the object of one verb was logically the subject of another verb. This is particularly frequent in the combination lei us (go, etc.), supplanting the older construction £^0 we, etc.^ The logical subject is here often put in the nominative, especially if separated from the word let :— Genesis, xxi. 44, " Let us make a covenant, / and thou"^ I Udall, Roister, 21, *'Let all these matters passe, and we three sing a song " * Still found in Sh., t.g.^ Macb., ii., 2, 65, " Retyre we " | v., 2, 25, " March we on". 2 Compare the O. E. translation, *• ]?aet freondscipe sig betwux unc, me and />tf," which is a regular appositional con- struction ; cf. § 61. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 55 I Sh., Merck, iii., 2, 21, 'Met fortune goe to hell for it, not /" | Ccfs., iii., i, 95, "let no man abide this deede, but we the doers " | Byron, iv., 240, " Let He who made thee answer that " I Hughes, To7n Brown's Sch., 3, " let you and I cry quits ". Storm {E. Philol., 211) has some modern quota- tions (from Dickens, who writes also : " Leave Nell and /to toil and work"), and quotes the Norwegian [and Danish] colloquial lad vi det for lad os det. In the corresponding Dutch construction both the nom. and ace. are allowed: '* laat mij xm toonen" as well as "laat ik nu toonen" (let me now show) ; similarly "laat hern [/ti/] nu toonen, laat ons [laten wzj] nu toonen, lat /lem [laten ze] nu toonen ".^ In a passage from Guy of Warwick, 3531, "Z^/ Ityni fynde a sarasyn And J/ to fynde a knyght of myn," we have a tran- sition case between this phenomenon and that dealt with in § 62. A similar confusion after the verb make is found in Sh., Temp., iv., i, 217, " mischeefe which may make this island Thine owne for ever, and / thy Caliban for aye thy foote-licker " ; here Caliban forgets the first part of his sentences and goes on as if the begin- ning had been "this island shall become". So also in Rtc/i. //., iv., i, 216, *' [God] make me, that nothing ^ See Taalstudie, 1887, 376. Mr. C. Stoffel informs me that the two constructions are not exact equivalents, a difference being made, for instance, between laat hij gaan, " qu'il aille," and laat hem gaan, '* allow him to jgo '\ 56 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. haue, with nothing grieu'd, And tkou with all pleas'd, that hast all atchieu'd ". In these cases the nominative is used in spite of grammatical rules requiring the ace, because the word is thought of as the subject ; this is even, though rarely, the case after a preposition ; in Roister Doister, p. 72, I find : " Nay as for they, shall euery mother's childe die ; " and a phrase in a letter that is read aloud twice in the same play runs the first time ^^ as for all them that woulde do you wrong" (p. 51), but the second time ** as for all they" (p. 57). In § 68 ff. we shall see some more instances of the nominative, as the case proper to the subject, getting the better of the ace, required by earlier grammatical rules. 55. (157) Other contaminations leading to con- fusions of two cases are found here and there. In Sh., Temp., ii., i, 28, we read: "Which, oi he, or Adrian . . . First begins to crow?" This is a blending of " Which, he or A.," and " Which of [the two] him and A.," or else of may be a printer's error for or, as conjectured by Collier. In Sir Andrew's interruption, Tw. N., ii., 5, 87, " [you waste the treasure of your time with a foolish knight. — ] That's mee I warrant you," me is due to the use of the accus. in the preceding sentence ( = with me); immediately afterwards he says : " I knew 'twas /; " in Malvolio's speech, "If this should h& thee,'' thee is similarly the * Compare Hamlet, i., 4, 54, and H. Fritsche's note in his edition of that play, Berlin, 1880. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 57 object of the preceding / /oue. Comp. Thack., Fend., iii., 87, ''If ever I saw a man in love, that man is him'". The opposite result of the contamination is found in Sh., TroiL, ii., 3, 102, "Achillis hath inveigled his foole from him. — Who, Thersites ? — He " ( = who is it ? it is he) ; parallel cases occur at every moment in colloquial language. 56. (158) A good deal of confusion arises from some words being both prepositions and conjunctions. With regard to but^ Dr. Murray says in N. E. D. : — " In some of these uses, the conjunction is, even in Modern English, not distinctly separated from the preposition : the want of inflexions in substantives, and the colloquial use of me, us, for /, we, etc., as complemental nominatives in the pronouns, making it uncertain whether but is to be taken as governing a case. In other words 'nobody else went but me (or I)* is variously analysed as = 'nobody else went except me ' and ' nobody else went except (that) I (went),' and as these mean precisely the same thing, both are pronounced grammatically correct." (Comp. also Murray's examples, especially under the heads C. 3 and 4.) It should, however, be remarked that the confusion in the use of but is not a consequence of the want of distinct case-endings in the nouns and the use of me instead of / in other connexions ; in my view it is on the contrary the existence of such two- sided words as but, etc., that is one of the primary causes of mistakes of me for / or vice versa and care- less uses of the cases generally. Even in such a 58 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. language as German, where the cases are generally kept neatly apart, we find such combinations as " niemand kommt mir entgegen ausser ein unver- schdfHter" (Lessing) ; " wo ist ein gott okne der herr'^ (Luther) ; '' kein gott ist ohne ichl' etc.^ Sometimes both the preposition and the conjunc- tion would require the same case as in these quota- tions from Murray's Diet. : "Se is sethwam freond butan dracan anum | bot ]?e haf i na frend ". In the follow- ing examples there is a conflict between the two con- structions ; and in some of them (which I have starred) the nominative is used, although both the preposition and conjunction would require the accusative, or vice versa. Ancr. R., 408, " no J)ing ne con luuien ariht bute he one " | Chauc, C, 282, '* no man woot of it but god and he'' (rhymes with be) \ Min. P., 2, 30, "no wight woot [it] but /" | Malory, 42, "neuer man shall haue that office but ^^" | Mar- \owQ,Jew^ 1 576," I neuer heard of any man but *heMalign'dtheorderoftheIacobines"2 | Sh., Cytnb., i., I, 24, " I do not thinke, so faire an outward, and such stuffe within endowes a man, but *hee'' \ ibid.y ii., 3, 153, "That I kisse aught but *he " | Asy i., 2, 18, " my father had no childe, but */" | Macb., iii., i, 54, (854), ^ See Paul, Principien der Sprachgesch., ist ed. 225, 2nd ed. 318; in Danish similar examples abound ("ingen uden jeg" etc.). * Relative attraction concurring. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 59 "There is none but /le whose being I doe feare" | Romeo, 250, (i., 2, 14), "Earth hath swallowed all my hopes but '^she " | R. III., ii., 2, ^6, '' What stayes had I but '^they ? " | 2 H. Vl.y i., 2, 69, " here's none but thee and /" | Temp., iii., 2, 109, " I neuer saw a woman But onely Sycorax my dam, and '^she'' \ Thackeray, Van, F., 521, " how pretty she looked. So do you ! Everybody but me who am wretched" | R. L. Stevenson, Child s Garden, 17, "So there was no one left but me''} 57. (159) Save {saiif) presents similar phenomena of confusion, although it is comparatively seldom found as a preposition, as in Matth. Arnold, Poems, \., 1 59, " For of the race of Gods is no one there, save me alone'' ; and in Tennyson, p. 319, "Who should be king save hz'm who makes us free?"^ In Chaucer sauf {save) is very common with nom. {B., 474, 627; G., 1355 ; /., 25 ; L. G. W., 1633 ; Morris, ii., 221, 493; 342, 801), so also in Shakespeare {Tw. N., iii., i, 172 ; CcBs., iii., 2, 66, etc.), and in modern poets {e.g., Byron, iv., 332, "Who shall weep above your universal grave, save I?"). Where the word is not meant as the subject, the accusative is used {e.g., Chaucer,^., 4491, "^Instead of is sometimes used in such a way as to approach a conjunction; see Mrs. Grand, The Heavenly Twins, p. 42, " Now they rule him instead oi him them". 2 Matzner (ii., 501) has two examples oi save with ace, from Rogers and Skelton, 6o CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. " Save j/ow I herde neuere man so singe ; " where^ however, one MS. (H) hasj^^). An example of an ab- normal use of the nom. is Shak., Sonn. 109, 14, " For nothing in this wide universe I call, save tkott, my rose". For except, compare the following examples : — Meredith, Trag. Cotn., 28, *' And everybody is to know him except I?" \ MuXoch., Halifax, ii., 22, " No one ever knew of this night's epi- sode, except us three" | Mrs. Browning (a letter in Mrs. Orr, Life and Letters of Rob, Br., 232), " Nobody exactly understands him except me who am in the inside of him and hear him breathe" | Hardy, Tess, loi," Per- haps any woman would, except me ". 58. (160) The conjunctions as and than, used in comparisons, give rise to similar phenomena. As it is possible to say both " I never saw anybody stronger than he" [scil. is], and ^^ than him" (ace. agreeing with anybody), and " I never saw anybody so strong as he," and "as him," the feeling for the correct use of the cases is here easily obscured, and he is used where the rules of grammar would lead us to expect him, and conversely. The examples of complete displacement are here, as above, starred : — Chauc, B., 1025, " So vertuous a lyver in my lyf Ne saugh I never, such as sche " \ ibid., M. P., 3, 984, " Ne swich as she ne knew I noon " I Udall, Roister, 33, "for such as thou" (com- pare ibid., 44) I Marl., Tamb., 18 14, "depend CASE-SMIPTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 6i on such weake helps as we'' \ ibid., 1877, ** for these, and such as we our selues, For vs " I Greene, Friar B., 1 2, 66, " I do love the lord, As he that's second to thyself in love " (relat. attr.) | Sh., Rom., 239, " For men so old as zve" \ Shrew, \., 2, 65, "'twixt such friends as wee" \ As,i\., 5, 58, "Heere shall he see grosse fooles as he" \ Wint. T., ii., i, 191 I Ant., iii., 3, 14, " is shee as tall as "^me ? " | Field., T. J., ii., 115, " you are not as good as me " I Trollope, Duke's Ch., iii., 3 1 (a young lord writes), " the Carbottle people were quite as badly off as '^us" \ Orig. Engl., 42 (vulg.), " some people wot lives [ = who live] on the same floor as *us, only they are poorer than '^us" \ Thomson, Rule Brit- annia, "The nations not so blest as thee. Must in their turn to tyrants fall " | Meredith, Egoist, 192, " What was the right of so miser- able a creature as she to excite disturb- ances ? " After such as the nom. is now the rule : — Tennyson, In Mem., xxxiv., p. 256, "What then were God to such as I ?" \ ibid., p. 419, " Gawain, was this quest for thee ? " " Nay, lord," said Gawain, "not for such as /" | Rob. Browning, iii., y^, " The land has none left such as he on the bier " | Mrs. Brown- ing, Sonnets/, t. Port., viii., "who hast . . . laid them on the outside of the wall, for such as 62 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. 1 to take" I Ward, Dav. Grieve^ i., 193, " re- ligion was not for such as he" \ Buchanan, Wand. Jew, 74, " The Roman wars not with such foes as Jie'' \ Co. Doyle, Sherl. //,, i., 181, *' God keep you out of the clutches of such a man as he ". Even after as well as the confusion is found, though in the mouths of vulgar persons : — Sh., Meas., ii., i, 75, " I will detest my selfe also, as well as she'' \ Field., 71/., iii., 121, "Dost fancy I don't know that as well as tJiee ? " The word like is normally used with the dative, but on account of its signification being often identical with that of as, the nominative is sometimes found : — Sh., Rom., 1992 (iii., 5, S^), " And yet no man like he doth greeue my heart," evidently on account of the following verb, whose subject in a way he is ; compare, on the other hand, zdz'd., 1754-6, "wert thou as young as I . . . doting like me, and like me banished " | R. Wintle, A Regular Sca7tdal, 35, *'Yes, if it was a sweet young girl . . . and not one like /". 59. (161) Examples with than : — Chaucer, L. G, W. (B), 476, "To me ne fond I better noon than j^^" | Sh., Cor., iv., 5, 170, " but a greater soldier then he, you wot one " I As, i., I, 172, " my soule . . . hates nothing more then */^^" (compare Trail., ii., 3, 199; Cymb., v., 3, 72, "then we'' (obj.) (relat. attr.) I CAS^-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 63 Field., T. /., i., 49, " My sister, though many- years younger than *me, is at least old enough to be at the age of discretion " | idzd., iii., 129, **you are younger than *me" I zdzd., i., 221 (vulg.), "gentle folks are but flesh and blood no more than us servants " I Byron, ii., 351, "none Can less have said or more have done Than *t/iee, Mazeppa " | t'h'd., iv., 213, "Yet he seems mightier far than *them'' \ iv., 223, '' Higher things than ye are slaves ; and higher Than '^theni or ye would be so" | v., 226, "than '^him" \ Shelley, 237, " I am . . . mightier than *thee'' I Thackeray, Van. F., 412, "she fancies her- self better than you and me" \ Trollope, Duke's Ch., i., 221 (a lady says), "[She should be] two inches shorter than me". This use of the ace. after than, of which Bishop Lowth in his grammar (1762, p. 145) is already able to quote many examples from the writings of Swift, Lord Bolingbroke, Prior, etc., is now so universal as to be considered the normal construction ; that is, to the general feeling than is a preposition as well as a conjunction. Even grammarians acknowledge the use of the accusative in this connexion,^ though their reasons are not always of the best ; thus W. Smith and D. HalP mention: "A stone is heavy, and the 1 Hyde Clarke, p. 133 ; Alford, Queen's Engl., iii ff. ; sec also Storm, E. PhiloL, p. 233. 2 A School Manual of Engl. Grammar, 1873, p. 119. 64 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. sand weighty ; but a fool's wrath is heavier than them both " (Prov., xxvii., 3), as " a construction founded on the Latin," namely, the ablative (without quani), to express the second member of a comparison (major Scipione), with which the English idiom has of course nothing whatever to do. Nevertheless, many gram- marians, and consequently many authors, reject this natural use of the accusative, and I think I am justi- fied in considering the nominatives in some, at least, of the following examples as called forth by a more or less artificial reaction against the natural tendencies of the language : — Carlyle, Heroes, 93, " the care of Another than he " I TxoW.., Duke' s Ch., i., 136, "he had known none more vile or more false than /" | G. Eliot, Mill, i., 186, "I have known much more highly-instructed persons than he make inferences quite as wide " | Tennyson, Becket, I, *'But we must have a mightier man than he for his successor" | Meredith, Egoist, 141, " if I could see you with a worthier than /" I Buchanan, Jew, ^y, " Naming the names of lesser Gods than /" | Co. Doyle, SherL H., i., 53, "I love and am loved by a better man than he" , The accusative is always used in than whom (found in Shakespeare, Love's L., iii., 180, in Milton, etc.); Alford is right in observing that than who is here excluded because the expression does not admit of an elliptical construction. I only once remember CASESHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 65 having found t/mn zvho, namely in the sentence, " Mr. Geo. Withers, than who no one has written more sensibly on this subject," and then it occurs in the book on The King' s English (p. 338) by Mr. Washing- ton Moon, who is constantly regulating his own and others' language by what in his view ought to be, rather than what really is the usage of the Enghsh nation. III. Anacoluthia. 60. (162) Of the different forms of anacoluthia we have here first to do with that which results when a speaker begins a sentence with some word which takes a prominent place in his thought, but has not yet made up his mind with regard to its syntactical connexion ; if it is a word inflected in the cases he provisionally puts it in the nominative, but is then often obliged by an after-correction ^ to insert a pro- noun indicating the case the word should have been in. This phenomenon is extremely frequent in the colloquial forms of all languages, but grammarians blame it and in literary language it is generally avoided. I shall first give some examples where the case employed is correct or the fault is at any rate not visible : — ^ I translate thus Wegener's expression, *• nachtragliche correctur " (see his Grundfragtn des Sprachlebens, Halle, 1885, p. 72, where he deals with such German sentences as " das haus, da bin ich rein gegangen," etc.). The opposite process of placing the pronoun first is also common ; see, for instance, Carlyle, Heroes, 19, " if is strange enough this old Norse view of nature ". 66 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. Ancren Riwie, 332, *']?e beste mon of al J?isse worlde 3if ure Louerd demde him al efter rihtwisnesse f nout efter merci, wo schulde him iwurden " | Chauc, B., 4268, " oon of hem, in sleping as he lay, Him mette a wonder dreem" | Sh.., As/w., i, yy, ** verie good orators when they are out, they will spit" I ibid., iv., i, 177, "that woman that cannot make her fault her husbands oc- casion, let her neuer nurse her childe ". Next I quote some instances in which the nom- inative (or, in the first sentence, ace.) might be also caused by relative attraction (§ 52) : — Oros., 78, 31, '' })(Et gewinn )?3et his faeder astealde he . . . for }ycBm V gear scipa worhte" | Cura P., 29, 2, " Se 5e god ne ongit, ne ongit god hine "^ | ibid., 31, 16, " S^ 5e aenigne Sissa ierminga besuicS, him waere betere," etc. | Chaucer, B., 4621, "For he that winketh, whan he sholde see, Al wilfully, God lat him never thee ! " | Chaucer, Morris, iii., 165, *' for certes he that . . . hath to gret pre- sumpcioun, him schal evyl bitide " | ibid., iii., 196, " He that most curteysly comaundeth, to him men most obeyen" | Malory, 150, ^'ye that be soo wel borne a man . . ., there is no lady in the world to good for yow " | ^ This is the regular O. E. construction in relative clauses ; compare the modern translation, '* H(Bt folc him gej^uhte" | Sh., Meas., v., 134, " But yesternight my lord, she and that fryer I saw them at the prison " | Sh., Wint. T., iii., 2, 98, " My second ioy. And first fruits of my body, from his presence I am bar'd ".^ Sometimes no corrective pronoun follows : — Sh., Meas., v., 53 1, " She Claudio that you wrong'd, looke you restore" | Sh., Wives, iv., 4, 87, " and he my husband best of all affects " | Sh., Tim., iv., 3, 39, " Shee, whom the spittle- house and vlcerous sores Would cast the ^ In the appendix to the next chapter I shall have occasion to mention these and similar ways of expressing the genitive of word-groups ; see especially § 147. 6S CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH gorge at, this embalmes " [her ; in the first folio a different punctuation is used] | R Browning, Tauchn., i., 235, '^ She, men would have to be your mother once, Old Gandolf envied me, so fair she was ! " 61. (163) When two or more words are in apposi- tion to each other it often happens that the appositum does not follow the case of the first word ; the speaker forgets the case he has just employed and places the appositum loosely without any connexion with the preceding. M. Sohrauer ^ gives some O. E. examples (to Nichodeme, an Saera Judeiscra ealdra), to which may be added : — Chron., 984 A, " seo halgung pcEs (Bfterfilgendan bisceopes ^Ifheages, se Se oSran naman waes geciged Godwine " (rel. attraction !) | Sweet, A, 5. Reader, 15, 7, " fram ^xyXXd^ cyninge , Ceadwalla geciged'' \ ibid., 1. 45, ^^ sumne arwur&ne bisceop, Aidan gehaten " | ibid., 1. 101, *' to Westseaxan kyninge, Cynegyls gehaten" \ ibid., 1. 144, "on serine, of seolfre asmi}?od'\ This is extremely common in O. E. with parti- ciples ; in more recent periods it is found in many other cases as well : — Chauc, B., 1877, " P^^y ^^k for us, we sinful folk unstable " I Chauc, M. P., 5, 421, " Be- seching her of mercy and of grace. As she ^ Kleine Beitrdge ziir Altengl. Grammatik, p. 29; see also Matzner, Gramm., iii., 343 ff. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUN^. 69 that is my lady sovereyne " | Chauc, Morn's, iii., 12, 325, "to folwe kin;, as s/ie that is goddesse" ] Sh., i H. IV., I, 2, 16, '* by Phoebus, hee,\h2X wand'ring knight" | Sh., Lovers L.y iv., 3, 7, "this loue . . . kils sheep ; it kils mee, I a sheep " | Sh., Wint. Z!, v., I, 86, "Prince Florizell . . . with his princesse {she The fairest I haue yet beheld) '* I Sh., I H. IV., ii., 4, 1 14, " I am not yet of Percies mind, the Hotspurre of the North, he that killes me some sixe or seauen dozen of Scots"! I Shelley, Poet. W., 250, "Know ye not me. The Titan ? he who made his agony the barrier to your else all-conquering foe ? " Relative attraction may, of course, have also been at work in some of these sentences ; and the following example (which I quote from A. Gil, Logonomia, 1 619, p. J'j) might be accounted for in no less than three of my paragraphs (52, 54, 61). This illus- trates the complexity of the mutual relations of grammatical categories : — "Sic etiam casus inter duo verba, nunc cum hoc, nunc zwni illo construitur: vt, Let Tomas cum in, J men hf Sat kam yisterdai : aut I men him ". What is the reason of the accusative in Sh., Cy^nb., v., 4, 70, " we came, our parents and vs twaine " ? 62. (164) There is a peculiar form of anacoluthia, ^ Compare, for a fuller treatment of nominatives in apposi- tion to genitives, ^ 120 fif. below. ^6 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. which for want of a better name I shall term uncon- nected subject. In English this phenomenon is not confined to those exclamations of surprise or remon- strance in which it is common in many languages (Dan., "Du gore det ! Han. i Paris?" French, " Toi faire ga ! Lui avare ? " Italian, ** lo far questo ! " Latin, ** Mene incepto desistere victam ? " etc.), but is found in other cases as well, especially after and, by which the subject is more or less loosely connected with a preceding sentence.^ I shall here in the first place give some quotations in which the case employed is the same as would have been used had the thought been expressed fully and in more regular forms : — Sh., Z^i/^'jZ., iii., 191,*' What? /loue! /sue! /seeke a wife ! " | ibid., 202, ** And /to sigh for her, to watch for her," etc. | Meas., ii., 2, 5, " all ages smack of this vice, and he To die for't" | As, iii., 2, 161, " Heauen would that shee these gifts should haue, and / to Hue and die her slaue " ( = I should) | Tim., iii., I, 50, " Is't possible the world should so much differ. And we aliue that liued ? " | Macb., i., 7, 58 (455), *' If we should faile?— We faile ! " (Here, however, the best reading seems to be *' We faile." with a full stop, the verb being taken as an indicative) | R. II., iv., I, 129, "And shall the figure of God's Maiestie ... Be iudg'd by subiect, and in- * The phenomenon was more frequent from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century than it is now. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. n ferior breathe, And he himself not present?" I Milton, 5. A., 1480, "Much rather I [Manoa] shall choose To live the poorest in my tribe, than richest. And he in that cala- mitous prison left " [ = if Samson is left . . .] I Field., T.J., ii., 85, '' A young woman of your age, and unmarried, to talk of inclina- tions ! " I G. Eliot, Mill, ii., 149, " /say any- thing disrespectful of Dr. Kenn ? Heaven forbid ! " | ibid., ii., 307, " Could anything be more detestable ? A girl so much indebted to her friends ... to lay designs of winning a young man's affections away from her own cousin ? " But in the following instances the nom. is used, although the construction, if regularly completed, would have led to the use of an accusative : — Chaucer, E., 105, "I dar the better aske of yow a space Of audience to shewen our requeste, Andjj/^, my lord, to doon ryghtas yow leste" I Malory, 71, "hym thought no worship to have a knyght at suche auaille, he to be on horsback and he on foot" | Sh., As, i., 2, 279, "What he is indeede. More suites you to conceiue, then / to speake of" (Kellner ^ quotes from Sh. also Er7'., i., i, 33 ; Alls^ ii., I, 186 ; Timon, iv., 3, 266) | Cor., iii., 2, 83, " the soft way which . . . Were fit for ^ Introd. to Blanchardyn, p. Ixvii. ff. ; Kellner's explanation does not seem very clear. fi CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. thee to vse, as tAey to clayme " (compare also Cor., iii., 2, 124, and ii., 2, 54). 63. (165) Similarly where no infinitive is used, but a participle or some other word : — [Chaucer, /^, 7CX), " What coude a sturdy husbond more deuyse To preue hir wyfhood and hir stedfastnesse. And ke continuing euer in sturdinesse?"] | Mai, 95, "whan Balen sawe her lye so with the fowlest knyghte that euer he sawe and ske a fair lady, thenne Balyn wente thurgh alle the chambers" | Marlowe, Tamb., 244, " Me thinks I see kings kneeling at his feet. And he with frowning browes and fiery lookes Spurning their crownes " | Sh., Romeo, 537, "good manners shall lie all in one or two men's hands and ///^j/ vnwasht too" | Lear, iii., 6, 117, "that which makes me bend makes the king bow, He childed as / fathered ! " | Field., T. /, ii., 249, " I thought it hard that there should be so many of them, all upon one poore man, and he too in chains " | Meredith, Trag. Co7n.j 165, "let her be hunted and I not by [and let me not be by ; when I am not by], beast it is with her " | Ward, David Grieve, iii., 133, "It made her mad to see their money chuckled away to other people, and they getting no good of it ". In some of these sentences the construction might be called a kind of apposition ; in others we have CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. tj something closely resembling the absolute participle, of which more will be said below, § 8i ; the use of an ''unconnected subject" may have favoured the substitution of the modern " absolute nominative " for the old ** absolute dative". 64. (i66) Sometimes the phenomenon mentioned in § 62, of an unconnected subject with an infinitive, corresponds very nearly to the Latin accusative with the infinitive, only the nominative is used : — ^ Malory, 40, " this is my counceill . . . that we lete puruey x kny3tes men of good fame, & t/iej/ to kepe this swerd " | ibid., 60, " for it is better that we slee a coward than thorow a coward alle we to be slayne" | ibid.^ 453 (quoted by Kellner), '* Thow to lye by our moder is to muche shame for vs to suffre " | ibid.^ 133, "And thenne hadde she me deuysed to be kyng in this land, and soo to regne, and she to be my quene ". But this use of a nominative with the infinitive does not occur often enough to be a permanent feature of the English language. ^ Where the subject is a noun it is impossible to see which case is used ; comp. Ancr. R., 364, *'is hit nu wisdom mon to don so wo him suluen ? " | Malory, 67, " it is gods wyll youre body to be punysshed " | ibid., 92, ** it is the customme of my countrey a knyghte alweyes to kepe his wepen with hym " | Sh., Wint. T., v., 142, "Which ... Is all as monstrous . . . As my Antigonus to breake his graue ". Modern Engl, here has /or ; " it is wisdom for a man to do ..." ; compare the full and able treatment of this use of /or, in C. Stoffel's Studies in English, p. 49 ff. 74 CHAPTERS ON ENGLlSt^. IV. Influence from the Nouns. 65. (167) The absolute absence of any formal distinction between the nominative and the objective cases in the nouns and adjectives, as well as in the neuter pronouns zt, t/iaf, and zv/iat, must of course do a great deal towards weakening the sense of case distinctions in general. 66. (168) This is especially seen to be the case where the pronouns are themselves taken substan- tively, for then the normal case-inflexion is naturally suspended. This happens in two ways : either a pronoun is plucked from its context and quoted by itself, as in these examples : — Sh., A//'s, ii., I, 81, "write to her a loue-line. What Aer is this?" | Tennyson, Becket, act i., sc. I, " It much imports me I should know her name. What her? The woman that I followed hither " | Frank Fairlegh, ii., 19, *'so he left her there. 'And who may her be?' inquired Freddy, setting grammar at defiance" ; or else a pronoun is used exactly like a noun, he or she signifying a male or a female respectively. This is extremely common in Shakespeare (see Al. Schmidt's Sh, Lex.) ; a few examples will here suffice : — Bale, Three Lawes, I439, " I am non other, but even the very he" \ Sh., Tw. N., i., 5, 259, *' Lady, you are the cruell'st shee alive" | IVint. T., iv., 4, 360, "to load my shee with CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 7^ knackes" | As, iii., 2, 10, " carue on euery tree The faire, the chaste and vnexpressiue shee" I Love's L., v., 2, 469, "we . . . woo'd but the signe of she" \ Cymb., i., 3, 29, "the shees of Italy ". So also as the first part of a compound : a she angel, you she knight errant (Sh., Wint., iv., 4, 211 ; 2 H. IV., V. 4, 25) ; comp. : — Byron, v., 230, "The pardon'd slave of she Sardanapalus " | ibid,, v., 245, ** wearing Lydian Omphale's She-garb". But in the nineteenth century it is often the objec- tive case that is used thus substantively : — Troll., Duke's Ch., i., 94, " that other him is the person she loves " | ibid., 94, " reference to some him" \ Gilbert, Orig. Plays, 1884, 129 (vulgar), **Mr. Fitz Partington shall introduce him. — It ain't a him, it's a her" In philosophical language, the me and the thee are often used corresponding to the German das ich, das du : — Carlyle, Sartor, 35, *' Who am I; what is this ME?" I ibid., 37, "our ME the only reality" I i'^^K 39, "that strange THEE of thine" | ibid., 92, " a certain orthodox Anthromorph- ism connects my Me with all Thees in bond of Love" I ^\x^\w,Selections,\., 503, " But this poor miserable Me ! " \ Meredith, Egoist, 489, " the miserable little me to be taken up and loved after tearing myself to pieces ! " 76 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH, Yet the nom. is sometimes found : — Carlyle, Sartor, 132, "the THOU" | Mrs. Ward, Dav. Grieve, iii., 86, " Was there any law— any knowledge — any 7?" | L. Morris, Poet. Works, 121, "And the /is the giver of light, and without it the master must die". An English friend of mine once told me about a clergyman who in one of his sermons spoke con- stantly of your immortal /, but v/as sadly misunder- stood by the congregation, who did not see why the eye should be more immortal than any other part of the body. It is perhaps to avoid such misinter- pretations that the Latin form is sometimes used, as in Thack., Pend., iii., 363, "every man here has his secret ego likely ". 67. (169) When the pronoun is preceded by an adjective, it is sometimes inflected in the usual way (" poor / had sent a hundred thousand pounds to America; would you kill poor me?'"* and similar examples are quoted by Storm, E. Philol., 208, note) ; but in other places we find it treated like a substantive : — Sh., Sonn. 72, ''upon deceased/" | ibid., Cor., v., 3, 103, " to poore we. Thine enmities most capitall ". In exclamations me is always used : — Sh., Sonn. 37, "then ten times happy mef' | Thack., Van. F., 120, "Poor Utile me. f" Compare the use of 7ne in other exclamations : 0(/i) me ! Woe me ! Ah me ! Ay me ! (Milt., P. /., iv., CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. yy 86, etc.), ^jye me detested ! (Sh., Tiv. N., v., 142), Alas me ! (Keats, Eve of St. Agnes, xii.), Me miserable ! (Milt., P. Z., iv., Ji), etc. The use of me in dear me ! gracious me I and other apologies for oaths is probably due to the analogy of the corresponding use of the pronoun as an object after a verb, as in bless me ! etc. So perhaps also in Shak., i H. IV., ii., 3, 97, ''Gods me, my horse ". V. Position. 68. (170) Word-order is to no small extent instrumental in bringing about shiftings of the original relation between two cases. In Old English prose the subject is already placed before the verb in nearly every sentence ; the exceptions are almost the same as in Modern German or Danish ; thus inversion is the rule after adverbs such as ]ja (while, curiously enough, the subject precedes the verb where the clause is introduced by hwcet pa or efne Jya). By-and-by these exceptions disappear or are reduced to a minimum, so that in Modern English the order, subject, verb, object, is practically invari- able.^ Cooper defines the difference between the nom. and the ace. in the pronouns in the following manner: 2 '* /, thou, he, she, we, ye, they, verbis ante- ponuntur, me, thee, him, her, us, you, them, postponuntur verbis & praepositionibus ". However naive the grammarian may find this definition, it contains a 1 Also in sentences like Does he love her ? so far as the real verb is concerned. "See his Gramm. Lingua Anglicance^ 1685, p. 121. 78 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. good deal of truth; this is the perception of the distinc- tion between the two forms which in the popular instinct often overrides the older perception according to which the use of / and 7ne was independent of position. 69. (171) Before the verb the nom. comes to be used in many cases where the ace. was required by the rules of the old language. Besides a few isolated instances, that may be more or less doubtful/ this is the case with who, as the natural position of this pro- noun is always at the beginning of the sentence, the verb, as a rule, following immediately after it. For Middle English examples of z£//26> and wJioni see below, § 76 ; it would be an easy matter to find hundreds of examples from the Modern English period ; I shall here print only a few selected from my own collections to supplement the numerous examples adduced by Storm {Engl. Philol., 211 ff.) : — Marl., Tafnb., 4190, " UUho haue ye there, my Lordes? " | Greene, Friar B., i, 143, " Espy her loves, and who she liketh best " | Sh., Tw. N., ii., 5, 108, ** loue knowes I loue, but whoy Lips do not mooue, no man must know" I ibid., Wint.,v., I, 109, " [she might] make proselytes of z£//^ the fifth {Temp., v., 76) is an anacoluthia, which was corrected by Rowe. CASE-SHtFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. St generally placed immediately before the impersonal verb ; the reason of this position was undoubtedly the greater interest felt for the person, which caused the word indicating him to take a prominent place in the sentence as well as in the consciousness of the speaker. And so this '' psychological subject," as it has been termed, eventually became the grammatical subject as well. But other circumstances favoured the same tendency. Some verbs in O. E. admitted of both a personal and impersonal construction, e.^:, recan, "to care"; compare from the thirteenth century the Ancr. Riwle, p. 104, where one MS. has "3 if heo beoS feor, me ne recched," and another *' ]?ach ha beon feor, naut / ne recche ". In one case, two origin- ally distinct verbs grew to be identical in pronuncia- tion by a purely phonetic development, namely O. E. Jjyncafiy "seem" (German dunken)^ impersonal, and pencan^ *' think " (Germ, denken), personal. In the former the vowel y by the usual process lost its lip- rounding and so became i ; in the latter e was raised to i before the back nasal consonant, as in O. E. streng. Mod. string, O. E. hlence, mod. link, O. E. Englaland, Mod. England, pronounced with [i] ; compare also the history of the words mingle, wing, cringe, singe, etc. The number of verbs that have passed from the im- personal to the personal construction is too great for me here to name them all ; I shall refer to the lists given by Koch, Gram., ii., § 109 ; Matzner, ii., p. 198 fif . ; Einenkel, Streifziige, p. 114 ff . ; and Kell- ner, Blanchardyn, p. xlvii. ff. But I shall supple- 82 CHAPTERS ON INGUSH. ment the remarks of these scholars by attempting to analyse the psychological agencies at work in the tran- sition ; I shall for this purpose print those examples from my own collection which seem to be the most illustrative, confining myself generally to only a few of the most usual verbs coming under this head. 72. (174) The original construction will be seen from the following quotations : — Ancr. R,, 238, '^ me luste slepen " | Chauc, ^., 1048, ** /«> liste nat to daunce'' | Bale, Three L., 1264, "And maye do what /??>/ lust'' I Ancr, R., 338, *' hit mei lutel liken God [dative], and misliken ofte" | Chauc, M. P., 22, 6z, *'al that Mr list and lyketh'' I ibid., Morr., iii., 145, "whan him likeih" I Malory, 100, ** I shold fynde yow a damoysel . . . that shold lyke yow & plese yow " [the two verbs are synonymous] I Greene, Friar B., 4, 55, *' this motion likes me well " | Sh., Haml., ii., 2, 80, '' It likes vs well " I ibid., Troil, v., 2, 102, " I doe not like this fooling . . . But that that likes not you pleases me best" | Milton, Reason of Church Governm., ii., " much better would it like him to be the messenger of gladness " | Thack., Van. K, 89, '' Some [women] are made to scheme, and some to love : and I wish any respected bachelor . . . may take the sort that best likes him ".^ ^Like is here used in the old sense ot please ; this is now-a- CASE-SHIi^TINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. g^ Chauc, M. P., 3, 276 (and very often), "memetU [I dreamt] so inly swete a sweven " | Ancr, R,, 1^6/' hit schRlJjunckepe swete" \ Chauc, B., 4578, " /lem thoughte hir herte breke " | yi2Xoxy,6^{{oMx\Ames),''hymthoughte" \ Lati- mer (Skeafs Spec, xxi.,91), *'me thynketh I heare " | <* methinks, 7ne thought (s) ". 73. (175) In many cases it is impossible to de- cide whether the verb is used personally or imper- sonally, as, for example, when it stands with a noun or with one of the pronouns that do not distin- guish cases. It goes without saying that the fre- quency of such combinations has largely assisted in bringing about the change to modern usage. A few examples will suffice : — Ancr. R., 286, "hwon J?e heorte like^ wel, J>eonne cumeS up a deuocioun " | Chauc, Morr., iii., 147, "al that hir housbonde likede for to seye " | ibid., B., 477, " God list to shewe his wonderful miracle" | ibid., Morr., iii., 145, " hem that liste not to heere his wordes " I ibid., B,, 4302, "how Kenelm mette a thing ". The construction is similarly not evident in the case of an accus. with the infinitive : — days extremely rare. In Middle English like, was often used with to : Chauc, Morr., iii., 191, "what day that it like yow and unto yournoblesse " | ibid., E., 345, "It lyketh to your fader and to me ". Compare Chauc, Morr., iii., 172, " it displeseth to the jugges," but 183, "displese God". ^4 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. Chauc, M. P., 5, io8, "That made me to mete'' I ibid.^ 115, "[thou] madest me this sweven for to mete ". 74. (176) The transition to the new construction is shown by the possibility of joining two synonyms, of which one has always been a personal verb : — Prov. of Alfred {Specimens^ i., p. 148), " J?at ye alle a-drede vre dryhten crist, luuyen hine and lykyen'' \ Malory, 35, "the kynge lyked and loued this lady wel ". As early as Chaucer we find passages in which a nominative is understood from an impersonally constructed verb to a following verb of personal construction : — -^•j 373 1 > " For drede of this, him thoughte that he deyde, And [he] ran into a gardin, him to hyde" | M, P., 7, 200, ''her liste him ' dere herte ' calle And [she] was so meek " I M. P., 5, 165, "Yit lyketh him at the wrastling for to be. And [he] demeth yit wher he do bet or he ". Sometimes both constructions are used almost in a breath : — ^ Ch., Z. G. W,y 1985, "me is as wo For him as ever / was for any man " | Malory, 74, " Arthur loked on the swerd, and lyked ^ it ^ See also below, § 91. 2 This and the just mentioned are the only examples of personal (or rather half-personal) use of lyke I have noted in Malory, who generally uses the ace. (dat.) with it, e.g., 61, "it lyketh you " | 157, " yf hit lyke yow ". CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 85 passynge wel ; whether lyketh yow better, said Merlyn, the suerd or the scaubard ? Me lyketh better the swerd, sayd Arthur " | Gr^^n^, Friar B., 6, 138, "Peggy, how like you [nom.] this? — What likes my lord is pleasing unto me" | Sh., Troil.yOhovQ, § 72. In Ch., M, P., 5, 114, "[thou] dauntest whom thee lest," some of the manuscripts read thou, probably in order to avoid the two accusatives after each other. 75. (177) Sometimes the impersonal expression is followed by a connexion of words that is strictly appropriate only after a personal verb : — Ancr. i?., 332, " Ase ofte ase ich am ischriuen, euer me punched me unschriuen (videor mihi non esse confessus) " | ibid., ig6," sv^Qt^st hitn J)unche& ham [the nuns : they appear to him [God] most lovely] " | Chauc, E., 106," For certes, lord, so ^e\vs lyketh yow And all your werk and ever han doon ". The last quotation is of especial interest as showing a sort of blending of no less than three constructions : the impersonal construction with us lyketh as a third personal sg. with no object, the old personal con- struction, where like means " to please," us lyken ye} and finally the modern personal use, we lyken yow ; the continuation ** and ever han doon" ( = "and we have always liked you ") shows that the last construc- tion was at least half present to Chaucer's mind. * Not ws lyhdh ye, as Prof. Skeat would have it in his note to the passage. 86 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. Other blendings of a similar nature are found with tJiink ; me thinks and / tJiink are confused in me thinke, found, for instance, in a sermon of Latimer's {Skeafs Specijnens, xxi., 176);^ thinks thee? and thinkst thou ? give thinkst thee? in Shakespeare's Hamlet, w., 2,6'^ (folio; the old quartos have thinke thee ; some modern editors write thinks' t thee, as if con- tracted for thinks it thee ; but this is hardly correct, as this verb is very seldom used with it, at least when a personal pronoun is added). 76. (178) Note particularly who in the following sentences : — Ancr. R., 38, *' hwo se Jjunched^ to longe lete )?e psalmes" | Chauc, B., 3509, " Hir batailes, who so list hem for to rede . . . Let him vnto my maister Petrark go " | Ch., Troilus, i-j 39S, " and whoso liste it here ". These we may consider either the oldest examples of who as an accusative (centuries before any hitherto pointed out), or else the oldest examples of O. E. jpyncan and lystan used personally.^ I suppose, how- ^ Compare also Roister Dotsf^r, 71, "me thinke they make preparation . . . me think they dare not," where thinke seems to be in the plural on account of the following they. ^ The Chaucer quotations given by Einenkel (StreifzUge, p. 115) are too dubious to prove the personal use oilesten: iii., I (= F. 689), the Ellesm. MS. reads, "For he to vertu listneth notentende " [what is entende here ? a noun ? an adv. ? (in the ende ? ?). I understand it no more than did those scribes who placed listeth instead of listneth] ; iv., 136, has that, which may as well be ace. as dat.; finally, ii., 268, proves nothing, as some CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 87 ever, that the correct way of viewing these sentences is to say that the two tendencies, neither of which was strong enough to operate by itself, here combined to bring about a visible result. 77. (179) Here I shall finally give a few ex- amples of the prevailing personal use : — Sh., Rom., 37, " as t/iejy lisV \ Milton, P. L., iv., 804, "as he list" | Gesta Rom. (ab. 1440, quoted by Kellner), '' pou shalt like it " (in Elizabethan language also like of) \ Greene, Friar B., 10, 45, "if thou please" \ Sh., Shrew, iv., 3, 70, "as I please'' '^ \ Chauc, B., 3930, " And eek a sweuen vpon a nyghte he mette ". In some cases the personal construction has not become universal, as in the case of ail (O. E. eglan). Though Dr. Murray is able to show the personal use of the word in a quotation as early as 1425, and though Shakespeare never uses it impersonally (comp. also Marlowe, Jew, 1 193, " What ayl'st thou "), the old construction still survives. The reason is undoubtedly the fact that the verb is so very often used in the MSS. read "if the, list," natthou. KtWntr, Blanchard., xlix., quotes Einenkel's two examples, showing that he has found no more examples in Chaucer, while he has some from Caxton. Compare, however, M. P., 7, 200, quoted above, § 176. ^ Milton, P. L., vi., 351, shows the personal use of please and the impersonal use of like : " As they please, They limb them- selves, and colour, shape, and size, Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare ". Compare ibid., vi., 717, 88 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. common formula : W/iat ails him ? (her, etc.), where the personal pronoun is placed after the verb ; see, e.g., Sirith, 337; Chauc, B., 1170, 1975, 4080; H., 16; M. P., 3, 449, etc., etc. ; Tennyson, p. 132 : " What ail'd her then ? " G. Eliot, Mill, i., 80, " there's nothing ails her'\ With seem the shifting observable in the case of like^ etc., has not taken place, although there were formerly tendencies in this direction ; Kellner ^ gives two instances from old wills of the personal use (with the person to whom it seems, in the nom.), and in Somersetshire ^ / <3'/;?2 now means " it seems to me" exactly as the Danish jeg synes? The following examples of a corresponding use I give with some diffidence : — Malory, ^6, " So whan the kynge was come thyder with all his baronage and lodged as they semed best" ; comp., on the other hand, ibid., yy, " me semeth " | Spalding, Eng. Lit., 358, ''we seem often as if we were listening to an observant speaker". 78. (180) I must here mention the history of some peculiar phrases. When the universal tendency to use impersonal expressions personally seized upon the idiom me were liever (or me were as lief), the ^ L. c, p. 1. Kellner does not seem to be right in asserting that the O. E. verb means "think, believe". 2 Elworthy, Word-book (E.D.S.), p. 851. Danish offers a great many parallels to the English develop- ment of personal constructions out of impersonal. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 89 resulting personal construction came in contact with the synonymous phrase / /lad liever {ox I had as lief ) ^ and a considerable amount of confusion arose in this as well as in the kindred combinations with as good, better, best, rather. I give some instances of the various constructions found, starring those in which the case employed seems to run counter to logic : — Oros., 220, 26, '^ him leofre wees )?aet ..." | Ancr. R., 230, "ham was leoure uorte adrenchen ham sulf J^en uorte beren ham " | ibid,, 242, **asken Jjc hwat te were leouest" \ Sirith, 382, ^' Me were levere then ani fe That he hevede enes leien bi me " | Chauc, B., 1027, " she hadde [var. 1. * Hire hadde'] lever a knyf Thurghout hir brest, than ben a womman wikke" I ibid., C, 760, " if \hdXyow be so leef To fynde deeth " [two MSS. '^ye be, others to you be] \ ibid., E., 444, " al had *hir leuer haue born a knaue child " | Malory, 87, *' he had leuer kyng Lotte had been slayne than kynge Arthur " | ibid,, 92, " / had leuer mete with that knyght" | Sh., Cor., iv., 5, 186, " / had as line be a condemn'd man ". Chauc, M. P,, 5, 511, '^ hhn were as good be stille" I ibid,, 5, 571, "yet were it bet for the Have hold thy pees" | Bale, Three Z., 889, ^^*Thu were moch better to kepe thy pacience " | Udall, Roister, 46, *' *ye were best sir for a while to reuiue againe " | ^ He is dear to me = I have (hold) him dear. go CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. Marlowe, Jew, 1 798, " */te were best to send it" (cf. ibid., 869, 185 1, 1908) I Sh., Meas., iii., 2, 38, "*/^^ le^^r^ as good ^o a mile" | /<^//3^., ^j, iii., 3, 92, '' */ z£/^r^ better to bee married " | ibid., R. III., iv., 4, 337, '' What 2£^^r^ */ best to say ? " I ibid., Shrew, v., i, 108, **Then *thou wert best saie that I am not Lucentio " I ibid., Cyrnb., iii., 6, 19, '' */ 2i/^r^ ^^j-/ not call" I Milton, 5. A., 1061, ''^w^ had we best retire?" | Field., T. Jones, ii., no, "Your La'ship had almost as good be alone " | Thack., Pend., iii., 131, ''you had much best not talk to him ". Marlowe, Jew, 147, ''Rather had 1 a Jew be hated thus, Then pittied " | Sh., R. II., iii., 3, 192, "*Me rather had, my heart might feele your loue ". * ^ Those who object to the form had in "/ had rather speak than he silent,^' etc. (see for instance a letter from Robert Browning in Mrs. Orr's Handbook, 6th ed., p. 14), seem wrongly to take rather as an adverb instead of an adjective ; it is incorrect to urge that the omission of the adverb would " alter into nonsense the verb it qualifies," for had rather is to be taken as a whole, governing the following infinitive. Had rather is used by the best authors, by Shakespeare at least some sixty times, while would rather is comparatively rare in his writings and generally confined to such cases as Two Gent., v., 4, 34, *' I would haue beene a breakfast to the Beast, Rather then have false Protheus reskue me," where, of course, rather belongs only indirectly to would. In an interesting paper, " Had Rather and Analogous Phrases," in the Dutch periodi- cal Taalstudie (viii., 216), C. Stoffel shows that so far from CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 91 79. (181) I must here also mention the pecuh'arity of the Enghsh language by which not only what would be the direct object of the active verb but other parts of the sentence may be made the subject of a passive verb. As I have not collected sufficient materials to give an exhaustive treatment of this inter- esting subject, I shall confine myself to a few remarks. There can be little doubt that nouns were employed had rather being an " incorrect graphic expansion " of Vd rathev instead of / would rather, the had form historically is the better of the two. Stoffel is undoubtedly right in his conclusions; still it is interesting to notice how the feeling of the etymological connexion has been lost on account of the phonetic identity of the unstressed forms of had and would [9d] ; the change in the popular instinct is already seen in Shakespeare's Rich. III. (iii., 7, 161), where the folio emends the had rather of the old quartos into would rather. A further step in the gradual forgetting of the old idiom is shown by the occasional introduction of should, as in Conan Doyle, Adv. of Sherlock Holmes, i. 228, " Or should you rather that 1 sent James off to bed ? " Nor are signs wanting that in other cases as well as before rather the feeling of the difference between had and would has become obscured; I shall give two quotations, one from Tennyson's Becket (act iii., sc. 3), " You had safelier have slain an archbishop than a she-goat," and the other from a little Cockney, who writes, " If anybody else had have told me that, I wouldn't have beleeved it" (see Original English, as Written by our Little Ones at School, by H. J. Baker, Lond., 1889). A. Trollope writes {Old Man's Love, 263), " Had you remained here, and have taken me, I should certainly not have failed then," where, by a singular confusion, had seems first to have its proper meaning, and then to be taken as an equivalent of [ad] = ze/ow/^. 92 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. in this way as *' free subjects " of passive verbs at an earlier time than pronouns in which the nom. and the ace. had distinct forms. I shall arrange my examples under four heads. ^ (i) The verb originally governs the dative case, but has no direct object in the accusative. Such an in- stance as {Ancren Riwle, 82) God beo iffonckedis not quite beyond question, as the form God is used in that text in the dative as well as in the nominative ; but the following is indubitable, as Louerd is not used as a dative : — ^ Ancr. R., 8, "vre Louerd beo i^oncked " | Chaucer, L. G. W., 1984, " He shall be hoi- pen " I tdz'd., Morr., in., 1 1 (compare Einen- kel, III), " I may be holpe" | Malory, 125, "he myght neuer be holpen " | tdzd., 36, "youre herte shalbe pleasyd** | zdid., 463, " he was answerd ". ^ (2) The verb is combined with a preposition ; then the word governed by the latter is considered as the object of the composite expression (verb and prep.), and can therefore be made the subject of a passive proposition. Maundev., 22 (quoted by Koch), *' Thei ben sent ^ Cf. Koch, Gram., ii., § 147 ff. 2 The dative is louerde; see pp. 160, 168, also p. 58, where the MS. has louerde according to Kolbing, and not louerd as Morton prints it. 3 This is given by Kellner (Blanchard., Iv.) as the only instance found in Malory. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 93 fore " I Malory, 35, "we were sent for"; similarly, though with a noun as the subject zdid., 47, twice, p. 6y, p. 38, " lete hym be sent for" | Latimer, Spec, iii., 21, 46, " they wyl not be yl spoken of" | I'dz'd., 251, ** that whiche I can not leaue vnspoken of" I Sh., I H. I v., ill. ,2, 141, "your vnthought- of Harry " | t'di'd., i., 2, 225, " Being wanted, he may be more wondred at " (see z'dzd., i., 3, 154; iii., 2,47; R. //., i., 3, 155, etc.) | Meredith, Tra^. Com., 76, " The desire of her bosom was to be run away with in person ". Compare the somewhat analogous phenomenon in Ancr. R., 6, "sum is old & atelich & is ^e leasse dred of " {is dred of is a sort of passive of habben dred of) ; here, however, we have rather a continuation of the old use of of as an adverb = "thereof". (3) The verb governs both an accusative and a dative ; in this case there is a growing tendency to make the dative the subject when the verb is made passive. The oldest examples are : — Ancr, R., 112, "he was J?us ileten blod " | ibid., 260, '' swinkinde men & blod-letene " | ibid., 258, "heo beoS ileten blod"; similarly, 262 (he), 422 (ge, twice). It should, however, be remarked that let blood, more than most of these combinations, is felt as one notion, as is seen also by the participle being used attributively (p. 260) and by the verbal noun blod- 94 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. lettunge (14, 114). Something approaching the in- direct passive construction is found in the following passage : — A7zcr. R., 180, "3ir me'^ is iluued more J>en anoSer, & more ioluhned, more idon god, od'er menske,' from which it would perhaps be rash to conclude that the author would have said, for instance, ''he is idon god o^er menske,'' if these expressions had not been preceded by the direct passives iluued (loved) and ioluhned (caressed). At any rate these con- structions do not become frequent till much later ; in Chaucer I have found only one instance {L. G. W., 292, " And some were brend, and some wer ait the hals ") ; Matzner quotes one from the Towneley Mys- teries (" alle my shepe are gone ; / am not left one ") ; Kellner knows none in the whole of Caxton,^ which may be explained by the fact that Caxton's transla- tions closely follow the original French in most syntactical respects. For examples from Shakespeare and recent authors I may refer to Koch, ii., § 153, and Matzner, ii., p. 229. The following passage shows the vacillation found to a great extent even in our own century : — Sh., Macb., i., 5, 14-17 (305-308), "ignorant 1 Mt is the indefinite pronoun (w^«, man), corresponding to French on. 2 The dative is used for instance in Malory, 89, " there was told hym the adventure of the swerd " | "therefore was gyuen hym the pryse". CASB-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 95 of what greatnesse is promis' d thee (in Mac- beth's letter) . . . Glamys thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be what thou art promis d'' (comp. Wint. T.y iv., 4, 237, " I was promis'd them "). To this category belongs also such a phrase as the following : — Shak., As, i., i, 128, "/ am giuen sir secretly to vnderstand that your younger brother . . .". (4) The verb beside a direct object has attached to it a preposition and a word governed properly by the preposition, but coming to be taken as the object of the composite expression, verb -f object + pre- position : — " I was taken no notice of^' \ Carlyle, Sartor^ 29, "new means must of necessity be had re- course to ". Here, too, I am able to point out a sentence in the Ancren Riwle containing, so to speak, a first germ of the construction : — Ancr. R,, 362, *' Nes Seinte Peter & Seinte Andreu istreiht o rode . . . and lo^lease meidenes ]?e tittes ikoruen ^ and to-hwi5ered o hweoles, & hefdes bikoruen ? " 80. (182) This extension of the passive construc- tion is no doubt in the first place due to the efface- ment of the formal distinction between the dative and the accusative ; but a second reason seems to be the same fact which we met with before in the case of verbs originally impersonal : the greater interest felt for the 96 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. person makes the speaker place the noun or pronoun by which the person is indicated before the direct object, as in the sentence : " He gave the girl a gold watch". This makes it natural that in the passive voice the dative should be placed at the very beginning of the sentence: "The girl was given a gold watch". But this position immediately before the verb is generally reserved for the subject ; so the girl, though originally a dative, comes to be looked upon as a nominative, and instead of ''her was given a gold watch," we say, ''she was given a gold watch". On the other hand, the nature of these constructions reacts on the feeling for case-distinctions in general ; for when " I was taught grammar at school " comes to mean the same thing as " me was taught grammar," or " she was told " as " her was told," etc., there is one inducement the more to use the two cases indiscrimi- nately in other sentences as well, or at least to distinguish them in a different way from that which prevailed in the old language. 81. (183) No doubt the position before the verb has also been instrumental in changing the old abso- lute dative (as seen, for instance, in Chron.^ ygy, " Gode fultomiendum, God helping ") into the modern nominative. A few instances will show that the modern construc- tion was fully established in Shakespeare's time : — ^ ^See also Matzner, iii., 75 fF. ; Koch, ii., 130 ff. I have not had access to Ross's dissertation, The. Absolute Participle in Middle and Modern English (Johns Hopkins Univ., 1893). CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. gy Sh., Venus, 1019, " For /le being dead, with him is beauty slain " | zdzW., Cymb., ii., 4, 8, ** they [the hopes] fay ling, I must die" | ibid,, iii., 5, 64, " S/z^^ being dovvne, I haue the plac- ing of the British crowne " | ibid., Te77tp., v., i, 28, '* they being penitent, the sole drift of my purport doth extend Not a frowne further " I ibid., Cor., v., 4, 37, " and he returning to breake our necks, they respect not vs " | ibid., R. III., iv., 2, 104, " How chance the prophet could not at that time Haue told me, /being by, that I should kill him " | ibid.. Errors, iii., 2, 87, " not that / beeing a beast she would haue me". Gill, in his Logonomia, 1619, p. 69, mentions the modern construction only, showing thereby that the old one was completely forgotten at that time, even by learned men : — " Nominatiuus absolutus apud Anglos ita vsurpa- tur, vti apud Latinos Ablatiuus : vt I biing prezent, hi' durst not have dun it. . . . Hi' biing in trubl, hiz frindz forsiik him." We are, therefore, astonished to find Milton using the old dative towards the end of that century : — P. L., ix., 130, "and him destroyed ... all this will soon follow" | ibid., vii., 142, "by whose aid This inaccessible high strength, the seat of Deity supreme, us dispossessed. He trusted to have seized" | Sams., 463, "Dagon hath pre- sum'd, Me overthrown, to enter lists with God ". 7 98 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. But this peculiar use of Milton's is undoubtedly due rather to an imitation of Latin syntax than to a survival of the Old English construction, and Milton in other places employs the nominative : — P. L., ix., 312, "while shame, t/iou looking on . . . Would utmost vigour raise " | zdid., ix., 884, " Lest, t/iou not tasting, different degree Disjoin us ". I have already mentioned that the phenomenon I termed " unconnected subject " may have contributed something towards the growth of the absolute nomi- native, see § 63 ; I shall here call attention to another circumstance that may have favoured this construction, namely, that in such sentences as the following an apposition (in the nominative) is practically not to be distinguished from the absolute construction : — Field., Tom Jones, ii., 42, "The lovers stood both silent and trembling, Sophia being unable to withdraw her hand from Jones, and he al- most as unable to hold it " | C. Doyle, SJierl. Holmes, i., 36, " they separated, he driving back to the Temple, and she to own house ". It is true that these sentences are modern and penned long after the absolute nom. had been settled ; but although I have no old quotations ready to hand, similar expressions may and must have occurred at any time. 82. (184) Having dealt (in §§ 68-81) with the substitution of the nominative for an original accusa- CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 99 tive or dative before the verb, we shall now proceed to the corresponding tendency to use an objective case after the verb where a nominative would be used in the old language. This is, of course, due to the preponderance of the instances in which the word immediately following the verb is its object.^ The most important outcome of this tendency is the use of me after it is. I have already had occasion to men- tion a few connexions in which the accusative will naturally come to be used after it is (see §§52 and 55); to these might be added accusatives with the infinitive, as in Greene, Friar Bacon, 10, 57, ''Let it be me ". But even where there is no inducement of that kind to use me, this form will occur after it is by the same linguistic process that has led in Danish to the exclusive use of det er mig, where some centuries ago the regular expression would have been det erjeg, and which is seen also in the French c'est, used in Old French with the oblique form of nouns and then also of pronouns, c'est moi, etc. ^ With regard to the English development from O. E., ic hit eom, through the Chaucerian it am I {Cant., B., 1 109, M. P., 3, 186, etc.) to it is I^ and it is me, I shall refer to a letter from A. J. Ellis, printed in ^When Trollope writes (Duke's Ch., ii., 227), "There might be somebody, though I think not her,'' her is viewed as a sort of object of T think". 2 On the French development see, for instance, Lidforss in Ofversikt of Filologiska salskapets i Lund Forhandliiiger, 1881-88 P- 15. * Malory, 36, " I am he ". 100 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. Alford's T/ie Queen's English^ p. 115, and to Storm, Engl. PhiloL, 1881, pp. 209-10, 234 ff. ; the latter author gives a great many modern examples of the accusative in familiar speech. Ellis goes so far as to say that ** the phrase it is / is a modernism, or rather a grammaticism, that is, it was never in popular use, but was introduced solely on some grammatical hypo- thesis as to having the same case before and after the verb is, . . . The conclusion seems to be that it's me is good English, and it^s / is a mistaken purism." The eminent author of Early English Pronunciation is no doubt right in defending ifs me as the natural form against the blames of quasi-grammarians : but I am not so sure that he is right when he thinks that it is 1 is due only to the theories of schoolmasters, and that ''it does not appear to have been consonant with the feelings of Teutonic tribes to use the nominative of the personal pronouns as a predicate ". He seems to have overlooked that it was formerly used so often Vv^ith the nom. that we cannot ascribe the usage ex- clusively to the rules of theorists ; see, for instance : — Chaucer, B., 1054, " it was she'' \ Malory, i^, " it was / myself that cam" | Roister Bolster, 21, " that shall not be /" | ibid., 58, ''it was / that did offende " | ibid., 26, "this is not she" I Marlowe, /^«/, 656, "'tis/" | S\\3k.,Macb., 877, 1009, 1014 (and at other places), " it was he," or'^Wshee", 83. (185) The nom. accordingly seems to have been the natural idiom, just as det er jeg was in CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. loi Danish a few centuries ago, and as det dr jag is still in Sweden ; but now it is otherwise, and it is me must be reckoned good English, just as det er mig is good Danish. In Shakespeare (besides the passages ac- counted for above) we find the accusative used in three passages, and it is well worth noting that two of them are pronounced by vulgar people, viz., Two Gent., ii., 3, 25, "the dogge is me'' (the clown Launce), and Lear, i., 4, 204, "I would not be thee'' (the fool ; comp. Pericl., ii., I, 68, " here's them in our country of Greece gets more," spoken by the fisher- man) ; the third time it is the angry Timon who says : " [I am proud] that I am not thee'' (iv., 3, 277). The stamp of vulgarity would have disappeared com- pletely by now from the expression had it not been for grammar schools and school grammars ; even to the most refined speakers it's m,e is certainly more natural than it's 1} And Shelley has consecrated the construction as serviceable in the highest poetic style by writing in his Ode to the West Wind : "Be thou, spirit fierce, my spirit ! Be thou me, impetuous one ! " Latham, Ellis, Sweet and Alford defend it is me as the only natural expression ; the reason of their not extending this recognition of the objective case equally to the other persons will be found below 1 Trollope makes a young lord say : " I wish it were me " {Duke's Childr., iii,, 118); comp. ibid., ii., 64, "It is you. . . • * Me! ' said Miss Boncassen, choosing to be ungrammatical in order that he might be more absurd." Many other examples in Storm. t02 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. (§ 92); yet in Thackeray's Vanity Fair^ p. 163, a young lady says Ifsher; and in Cambridge Trifles, p. 96, an undergraduate says // couldn't be them — to mention only two examples. 84. (186) Not only the predicate but also the subject itself is liable to be put in the accusative after the verb. SJialVs (= shall us) for shall we is found six times in Shakespeare. As four times it means exactly or nearly the same thing as let us {Cor., iv., 6, 148, "Shal's to the Capitoll"; Wint., i., 2, 178 ; Cymb.^ v., 5, 228 ; Pericl., iv., 5, 7), it is probable that this idiom is originally due to a blending of let us and shall we (compare the corresponding use of a nom. after let, § 54). But it has been extended to other cases as well: Tim., iv., 3, 408, "How shal's get it?" | Cymb., iv., 2, 233, "Where shall's lay him ? " Towards the end of the last century shall us was common in vulgar speech according to Sam. Pegge,^ who adds : ^ See his Anecdotes of the Engl. Language (1803 ; re-edited 1814 and 1844, with additions by the editors ; Pegge himself died in 1800). This is a very remarkable work, excellent alike for the power of observation it displays and for the author's explanations of linguistic phenomena, by which he is often many years ahead of his time, and often reminds one of that eminent philologist who was to take up the rational study of vulgar English about eighty years later : Johan Storm. Of course, it is no disparagement to Pegge to remark that many of the phenomena he deals with are now explained otherwise than was possible to him, before the birth of comparative philology. I shall here quote an interesting remark of his: "Before I undertook this investigation, I was not aware that we all speak so incorrectly in our daily colloquial language as we do ". This CASG-SiilFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 103 " The Londoner also will say — " Can us," " May us," and " Have us ". Storm quotes (p. 209) from Dickens some instances of vulgar s/ia// us, cant us, do us,hadiitus; is this phenomenon still living in the mouth of uneducated people ? I do not call to mind a single instance from the Cockney literature of the last ten years or so. 85. (187) I find a further trace of the influence of position in Shakespeare, Macb., 2044 (v., 8, 34), "And danind be him ^ that first cries hold, enough 1 " DanifCd be is here taken as one whole meaning the same thing as, and therefore governing the same case as, damn or God damn. The person that should properly be the subject of the verb is sometimes even governed by a to : — Field., T. Jones, i., 297, *' Are not you ashamed, and be d — n'd to you, to fall two of you upon one?" I ibid., ii., 118, ''be d — ned to you'' I ibid., iv., 87, "" You my son-in-law, and bed — n'd to you!'' \ Thack., Van. F., 158, ^' be hanged to them" ; similarly, /<^/^., 274, 450; Pendennis, ii., 146, 314, 317^! Dar- win, Life a7id Lett., iii., 76, " I went to will no doubt express the sentiment of every serious student of any living language ; but does it not suggest a doubt as to the truth of most current ideas of what constitutes correctness in language ? 1 Of course, Pope and most later editors " emend " him into he. ^ Peudemtis, ii., 321, " Field of honour be hanged ! " m CHAPTERS ON ENGLtsM. Lubbock's, partly in hopes of seeing you, and, be hanged to you, you were not there" I Mrs. Ward, D. Grieve, i, 220, ''be d — d to your Christian brotherhood ! " Here the phrase be damned, or its substitute be hanged, has become an exclamation, and to you is added as if " I say " was understood ; compare also Hail to thee (Middle Engl, heil be pow) ; farewell to you ; welcome to you ; good-bye to you} An earlier form of the phrase Would to God is Would God, where God is the subject : — Chaucer, M. P.y 3, 814, ** God wolde I coude clepe her wers " | Malory, 66, " so wold god I had another" [hors] | ibid., 81, ''wolde god she had not comen in to thys courte " I Greene, Friar B., 6, 40, " would God the lovely earl had that ". But when people lost the habit of placing a subject after the verb, they came to take woidd as an equiva- lent of / would and God as a dative ; and the analogy of the corresponding phrase / wish to God (or, I pray to God) would of course facilitate the change of God into to God, 86. (1 88) The position after the verb has probably had no small share in rendering the use of thee (and you) so frequent after an imperative, especially in the ^ Hamlet, ii., 2, 575, qu. ; this phrase properly contains two yous; compare also Stevenson, Tr. Isl., 256, "I've got my piece o' news, and thanky to him for that " {thanky = thank ye, thank you). CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. lo^ first Modern English period ; the usage is still seen in the poetical phrase " Fare ihee welV\ Here we have, however, a concurrent influence in the use of a re- flexive pronoun (without the addition of self) which was extremely common in all the early periods of the language, and which did not perceptibly alter the meaning of the verb to which it was added. ^ This reflexive pronoun was sometimesoriginally added in the accusative case, e.g.y after restan (see Voges, p. 333), but generally in the dative ; this distinction, however, had obviously no significance for any but the very earliest stages of the language. As now it made no difference whatever whether the speaker said//^«r ox I fearnie (compare, for instance, Marlowe, Jew, 876, with mo), the imperative would be indifferently fear or fear thee (fear yow) \'^ but it was equally possible with the same meaning to say fear thou {fear ye), with the usual addition of the nominative of the pronoun to indicate the subject. Examples from Malory of the latter combination : 73, " go ye" | 74, " telle thow" | 75, "doubte ye not," etc. etc. ^ In other words : after an imperative a nominative and an accusative would ^See Voges, D&y reflexive dativ im Englischen, in Anglia, vi., 1883, p. 317, if. To supplement my own collections, I take the liberty of using those of his numerous quotations which seem best suited to illustrate the process of case- shifting, a subject which Voges deals with only in a cursory manner. 2 Chaucer, L. G. W., 1742, "dreed thee noght " | Malory 61 and 85, " drede yow not ". 5 Sometimes both cases are used in the same sentence: " Slep thou the anon " (Judas, quoted by Voges, 336). lo6 CHAPTERS ON kNGUsti. very often be used indiscriminately. Thus, Care ye not (Malory, 72) means exactly the same thing as care not yoiv {ibid., 135) ; stay thou (Sh., Cces., v., 5, 44) = stay thee (3 H. V/., iii., 2, 58) ; ^et ye g07i (Marlowe, Jezv, 1226) = get you gone (common, Sh.) ; stand thou forth (Sh., All, v., 3, 35) = stand thee by {Ado, iv., i, 24) ; turn ye unto him (Isaiah, xxxvi., 6 ; Ezek., xxxiii., 1 1) = turn you, at my reproof (Prov., i., 23) ; turn you to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope (Zech., ix., 12); turn thee unto me (Ps., xxv., 16) = turn thou unto me {ibid., Ixix., 16^); fare ye well (Sh., Merch., i., i, 58 and 103) = fare you well {ibid., ii., 7, 73) ; seldom as in Tim., i., i, 164, Well fare you, fare thou well {Temp., v., 318) = fartheewell {Tw. N., iii., 4, 183) ; far-thee-well {ibid., iii., 4, 236) ; far thee well {ibid., iv., 2, 61) ; sit thou by my bedde (Sh., 2 H. IV., iv., 5, 182) = sit thee downe vpon this flowry bed {Mids. N., iv., I, I ; also with the transitive verb set thee down. Love's L., iv., 3, 4, in some editions emended into i"//!). 87. (189) It will now be easily understood that thee (or you) would be frequently added to impera- tives where the thought of a reflexive pronoun would not be very appropriate ; in hear thee, hark thee, look thee and similar cases, Voges finds a reflexive dative, 1 The quotations from the Bible are taken from Washing- ton Moon's Ecclesiastical English, p. 170; this author blames the translators for their inconsistency and for their bad gram- mar; he does not know that Shakespeare is guilty of the very same "faults," and he does not suspect the historical reason of the phenomenon. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 107 whereas Al. Schmidt quotes them under the heading '* t/iee for t/iou " ; it is rather difficult to draw a line here. When Troilus says (act iv., 5, 115) : " Hector, thou sleep'st, awake thee" no less than three gram- matical explanations are applicable : awake may be intransitive, and thee the subject (AL Schmidt), awake is intransitive, but thee is a reflexive dative (Voges, /. c, p. 372), and finally, awake may be a transitive verb having thee as its object (comp. Murray's Diet.) ; but whichever way the grammatical construction is explained, the meaning remains the same.^ It is evident that all this must have contributed very much to impair the feeling of the case-distinc- tion, and it should be remarked that we have here a cause of confusion that is pecjiliar to the pronouns of the second person r ^ We may perhaps be allowed to conclude from the follow- ing passage that you after an imperative was at the time of Shakespeare felt as an accusative: As, i., 3, 45, " Mistris, dispatch you with your safest haste, And get you from our court. M& Vncle ? " * When in Living English a pronoun is added to an impera- tive, it is generally placed before it : " You try 1 You take that chair!" | "Never you mind!" | C. Doyle, Sh&rl. H., i., 63, " And now, Mr. Wilson, o^you go at scratch " | Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 30, " Now, you get a bit of paper and write down, J., andjyow get the grocery catalogue, George, and some- body give me a bit of pencil ". When the auxiliary do is used, the pronoun comes before the principal verb: ^^ Don't you stir ! " I C. Doyle, L c, 94, " I shall stand behind the crate, and do you conceal yourselves behind those " | ihid., ii., 71, ^^ Don't you dare to meddle with my affairs ". Compare from io8 CHAPTERS ON ENGUSM. 88. (190) In connexion with the reflexive ex- pressions mentioned just now I shall remind the reader that we have a still more radical change in the case of the reflexive pronoun when joined to self. Him self was originally added to the verb with the meaning of a dative, " to, or for, himself" ; but it came to be regarded as an emphatic apposition to the subject (he has done it himself ; he himself has done it), and finally it is sometimes used as a subject by itself {himself has done it). We see the first beginnings of this development in Old English phrases like these : — Oros., 194, 21, " J^a angeat Hannibal, & him self saede"^ | ibid., 260, 33, "[Nero] gestod him self ovi ]?3em hiehstan torre" | Ancr, R., 226, "5e beo5 tures oti sulf *ye yourselves are towers ' " I ibid., 258, " he him sulf hit sei5". It would be a waste of paper and ink to give examples from more recent times, as they abound everywhere ; I shall therefore only state the fact that in the modern use of himself and the^nselves (and last century Fielding, T. Jones, iv., 131, "Well then," said Jones, ^'■doyou leave me at present" | ibid., 157, ^^ Do you be a good girl " I ibid., 302, " Harkee, sir, do you find out the letter which your mother sent me". It will be seen that in this deviation from the position rules of former times we have an application of the rule laid down in § 68. 1 For this can hardly mean at this place : " he said to himself" ; the Latin original has : " Tunc Annibal dixisse fertur ". CASE-SHIFTINGS I^ THE PRONOUNS. 109 herself?) we have a dative used as a nominative (or rather as a common case), and that this was formerly the case with me self and us self (or us selue, seluen) as well, which have now been ousted by myself and ourselves} 89. (191) Sometimes we come across isolated uses of the objective for the nominative case, which are probably to be ascribed to analogical influence exercised by the j^^-combinations. Abbott quotes (§ 214) :— Sh., fohn, iv., 2, 50, "Your safety, for the which my selfe and them Bend their best studies " J and says : " Perhaps them is attracted by myself," which naturally suggests the objective *' myself and (they) them (selves) ". That this is the correct ex- planation seems to be rendered more likely by the parallel passage : — Marl., Tamb.y 433, " Thy selfe and them shall neuer part from me," and perhaps it is also applicable to these two sen- tences : — Sh., Wint., {., 2, 410, " Or both your selfe and me ^ It is with some hesitation that I place this use of him (self) in the section headed " Position," as it neither is nor ever was obligatory to place himself after the verb. As this position is, however, the most common, it may have had some influence in determining the form himself in preference to he self, which was used in O.E., and at any rate the arrangement followed in this section has the advantage of not sundering the two classes of reflexive datives. CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. Cry lost " I Ccus., i., 3, y6, " No mightier then thy selfe, or 7;ie " [N.B., than !]. 90. (192) In his book T/ie Kind's En^/ts/i, p. viii., Mr. Washington Moon writes : — " As a specimen of real ' Queen's English/ take the following, which was found written in the second Queen Mary's Bible : ' This book was given the king and / at our coronation ' ". How is this / to be explained ? Of course it might be referred to the passive constructions treated above, § 79, though then we should have expected were instead of was and a different word-order (" The king and I were given this book," or perhaps, " This book the king and I were given "). But I believe that another explanation is possible : / was preferred to f^ie after and, because the group of words fou and /, he and I, etc., in which this particular word-order was required by common politeness, would occur in every- day speech so frequently as to make it practically a sort of stock phrase taken as a v/hole, the last word of which was therefore not inflected. At all events, it cannot fail to strike one in reading Storm's in- stances of nominative instead of objective case {Engl. PhiloL, p. 210 f.) that the great majority of sentences in which- / stands for me present these combinations (seventeen from Shakespeare,^ Ben Jonson, Bunyan, Dickens, etc., against two, which are moreover hardly genuine). Abbott says : '^ ' Tween you and I seems to 1 Some of these, it is true, may be explained on the principle mentioned in § 54. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. m have been a regular Elizabethan idiom ". It is found for instance in Merck., iii., 2, 321, and is not yet extinct. I subjoin a few examples to supplement those given by Storm : — (Tom Brown, 3, see § 54) | Goldsmith, Mzst. 0/ a Night, i., "Won't you give papa and I a little of your company?" | S. Pegge, Anecd., 307, " To you and I, Sir, who have seen half a hundred years, it is refunding ". It will be seen that, if my explanation is the correct one, we have here an influence of word-position of quite a different order from that pointed out in the rest of this section. Dr. Sweet, ^ while accepting this explanation as far as the Elizabethan idiom is con- cerned, thinks that when between you and I or he saw John and I is said now-a-days, it is due to the grammatical reaction against the vulgar use of me for /. VI. Phonetic Influences. 91. (193) I now come to the last but by no means the least important of the agencies that have brought about changes in the original relations be- tween the cases of the pronouns. I mean the in- fluence of sound upon sense. If you glance at the list of pronominal forms printed in § 50 you will see that six of them rhyme together, the nominatives we, ye, he, she, and the accusatives me, thee. After the old case-rules had been shaken in different ways, instinctive feeling 112 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. seized upon this similarity, and likeness in form has partly led to likeness in function. As evidence of this tendency I shall first mention Malory's use of the impersonal verbs that in his times were ceasing to have an impersonal and adopting a personal construction (§ yi ff.). Malory has a manifest predilection for the ^-forms with these verbs without any regard to their original case-values. I note all the instances found in some hundred pages : — Malory, ii$,"now me lacketh an hors" | 127, "ye shallelackenone" | | 71,90,148, ";;/^lyst(e)" I 61, 114, 146, "j^e lyst " I I y6, ''ye nede not to pulle half so hard " | 115, ''ye shalle not nede " | | 1 53, " he shalle repente . . . me sore repenteth " | 59, Z2, 83, 84, 96, 106, 107, 117, i33,";;/^repenteth" | 78,80,"^/^ shalle repente hit" I 117, "7^ ou3t sore to repente it" | 79,82, ii8,"?;?^forthynketh"( = "Irepent") I | 121, " it were me leuer " | 46, "ye were better for to stynte" | 62, "ye were better to gyue" | d)^, "whether is me better to treate" | 69, "that is me loth " I 90, " that were 7ne loth to doo " | 100, " he wylle be lothe to returne " | 105, "we wolde be loth to haue adoo with yow " | 115, " he is ful loth to do wronge ". The following are the only exceptions : — 131," though / lacke wepen, / shalle lacke no wor- ship" I ioi,"//;/;;^nedethnone" | 82, "els wold /haue ben lothe" | 112, 131, "/am loth".i 1 Thynke and lyke are always impersonal in Malory; cf. above, § 74- CASE-SHIFTJNGS W THE PRONOUNS. 113 A century later the same holds good with the verb /usl in Roister Doister : ye (pp. 12 and ^\),me (12), he (42), sJie (87) ; there are two exceptions : hym (43), / (44). The phonetic similarity is used to mark the con- trast in Sh., Macb., iii., 4, 14 (1035), " 'Tis better thee without then he within " ; see W. A. Wright's note : "It [Banquo's blood] is better outside thee than inside him. In spite of the defective grammar, this must be the meaning." 92. (194) We now see the reason why me is very often used as a nominative even by educated speakers, who in the same positions would never think of using him or her. Thus after it is, see above, § 83, and compare the following utterances : — Latham (see Alford, p. 115): "the present writer . . . finds nothing worse in it [it is me] than a Frenchman finds in cest moi. ... At the same time it must be observed that the expression it is me = it is /, will not justify the use of it is him, it is her = it is he, and it is she. Me, ye, you are what may be called indifferent for Tits, i.e., nomi- native as much as accusative, and accusative as much as nominative." Ellis {ibid) : " ifs me is good English ". Alford : " * It is me ' ... is an expression which every one uses. Grammarians (of the smaller order) protest : schoolmasters (of the lower kind) prohibit and chastise; 8 It4 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. but English men, women and children go on saying it." Sweet ( Words, Log, and Gr., 26) : " it is only the influence of ignorant grammarians that pre- vents such phrases as * it is me ' from being adopted into the written language, and acknowledged in the grammars. . . . The real difference between *I' and *me' is that * I ' is an inseparable prefix used to form finite verbs [also a ' suffix ' : am I, etc.], while ' me ' is an independent or absolute pronoun, which can be used with- out a verb to follow. These distinctions are carried out in vulgar English as strictly as in French, where the distinction between the conjoint *je ' and the absolute *moi' is rigidly enforced." Sweet {Primer of Spoken Engl, 36): " The nom. / is only used in immediate agreement with a verb ; when used absolutely, me is sub- stituted for it by the formal analogy of he, we, she, which are used absolutely as well as dependently : its he, ifs ine ; who's there ? me". 93. (195) I shall give here a few quotations to show the parallelism of vie and he as unconnected subjects (see § 62) : — Thack., Pend., ii., 325, "Why the devil are you to be rolling in riches, and me to have none? Why should you have a house and CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. tt^ a table covered with plate, and me be in a garret?" | Black, Princess of Tlnile, ii., 89, ** What do you think of a man who would give up his best gun to you, even though you couldn't shoot a bit, and he particularly proud of his shooting?" | ibid., ii., 141, "I am not going to be talked out of my common- sense, and me on my death-bed ! " ^ The common answer which was formerly always Not I ! (thus in Shakespeare, see Al. Schmidt, Sh. Lex.y p. 565 a, bottom of the page) is now often heard as Not me ! while the corresponding form in the third person does not seem to be Not him ! even in vulgar speech, but always Not he ! At least, I find in the Cockney Stories, Thenks awf'lly^ London, 1890, p. 82, *'Not 'e!"2 1 Compare Thack., Pend., i., 295, "*Afe again at Oxbridge, Pen thought, 'after such a humiliation as thatl'" Fliigel quotes in his Dictionary, Sterne's Stnt. Journ.^ 314: "my pen governs me, not mc my pen ". 2 To avoid the natural use of w^, stamped as incorrect in the schools, and the unnatural use of / standing alone, English people add a superfluous verb more frequently than other nations in such sentences as : " he is older than I am ". Mr. G. C. Moore Smith writes to me: "I do not feel convinced that there is a difference between the vulgar (or natural) English, 'It's me— it's him'; 'not me— and not him'. I think the chief reason of him being less common is that while mt is distinctive, in the third person it is generally necessary to mention the name. It seems to me very familiar English, 'Is he goin' ? Not him' Of course such usages may differ in different parts of the country." 116 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISM. 94. (196) Me thus to a certain extent has become a common case under the influence of /le, etc., and we find some traces of a development in the same direc- tion beginning in the case of the other pronouns in e, only that it is here the nominative that has been generalised : — Sh., Wives, iii., 2, 26, " There is such a league be- tweene mygoodman and he'' \ Wint. T.^ ii., 3, 6, " But s/iee I can hooke to me " (compare § 162 f.) I Ol/i., iv., 2, 3, "You haue seene Cassio and sAe together " | {Love's L., iv., 2, 30, " Those parts that doe fructifie in vs more then ke " = in him) | Fielding, T. Jones, l, 200 (Squire Western), " It will do'n [do him] no harm with //^ " | zdid., ii., 50 {idem), "Be- tween your nephew and she " | Cowper, John Gilpin, "On horseback after we'' \ (? Art. Wardjiis Book, 95, " I've promist j^^ whose name shall be nameless . . ."). P. Greenwood, Graimnatica Anglicana} mentions among errors committed by plerosque haud mediocri eruditione praeditos : "He spake it to shee whose fountaines is dried up," and he adds : " Non mirum si vulgus barbarb omnino loquatur, cum qui docti, et sunt, et habentur, tam inscite,^t impure scribunt ". 95. (197) Phonetic influences may have been at iThis is the oldest English grammar (printed at Cambridge, 1594); on the title-page are the initials P. G. ; I give the author's name from a written note in the unique copy belonging to the British Museum. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. u; work in various other ways. If the vowel of the nominative Ipu was weakened when the word was unstressed the result would be J?e [Sa], exactly like a weakened form of the accusative J?e. This is, I take it, the explanation of the nominative J>e found so often in the Ayenbite of Inwit (A.D. 1340) in such combinations as ]pe wylt^ }je mi}t^ jye ssoldest. As u is undoubtedly weakened into e in Huannes comste, "whence comest thou" {Ayenb., 268), as te stands certainly for })u in Robert of Gloucester, 10792 seiste^ 3150 woste, 4917 -^ifsi^ us^ and as similarly to is weakened into te in the Ayenbite as well as in (parts at least of) the Ancren RiwlCy this phonetic explanation seems to me, as it did to Matzner,^ more probable than the two other explanations given by Gummere ^ and Morris.* As, however, this use of pe for })U is only found in a few texts (also in Sir Beues of Hamtoun, see Engl. Stiidien, xix., 264), we cannot ascribe to it any great influence on the later development. 96. (198) Similarly diyou pronounced with weak ^ F. Pabst, Anglia, xiii., 290. 2 Sprachproben, ii., 76. ^ American Journal of PhiM., iv., 286; according to him pe is here a dative that has become a nominative, as some centuries \sitev you became a nominative. 4 />e is a reflexive dative with the subject understood ; this is also the view of Voges (/. c, 336 ff.), who is then not able to offer any acceptable explanation of the reflexive dative being used in this text with quite other classes of verbs than elsewhere, li8 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. sentence-stress will be reduced tojv^ or even to the short vowel t, written jj/. This is especially the case in stock phrases like t J tank you {thanky), God be with you {Good-bye} the ^^-vowel is probably introduced from the other forms of salutation : good-morrow , good-nighty etc., the naming of God being thus avoided ; in Shakespeare it is also written God buy you)y God give you good even (in Shakespeare Godgigo- den, Godigoden, God dig you den). Harky {hark'ee) and look'ee may contain ye, weakened ^or you (§ Z6), or the nominative ye. I am inclined to think that this phonetic weakening oi you is the cause of the unstressed ye after verbs, which is found so very frequently from the beginning of the sixteenth century, although it is impossible in each single instance to distinguish the ye which originates in this way fromjj/^'s called forth by the other circumstances dealt with in this chapter. 97. (199) Further, we have here to take into account the elision of a final unstressed vowel before a word beginning with a vowel, which was formerly extremely common in English. As early as the thirteenth century we find in Orrm parrke for pe arrke, tunnderrgan for to unnderrgan ; ^ in Chaucer the phenomenon is very frequent indeed : sitt{e) on hors, t{o) entende, m{e) endyte, etc. ; ^ in more recent 1 Comp. Skeat, Principles of Engl. Etymology, i., 423. 2 See Kluge in Paul's Grundriss, i., 885. Comp. also Old English contractions : b{e)cBftan, b{e)ufan, b{e)utan, n{eh)abban, etc., Sievers, Ags. Gr., § no n. ' See Ten Brink, Chaucers Sprache, § 269. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. ug periods too you will often find tko/d written for tkg old, and so on. In the Elizabethan period there is plenty of evidence to show that elisions of this kind were of everyday occurrence. The phonetician Hart mentions them expressly, and in his Orthographie (1569) he constantly writes, e.g., 6o'n (the one), ^uder (the other), (5"' -ius (the use), f ani man (to any man), f iuz (to use), d' understand (do understand), tu b' asprrd (to be aspired ; the dot as a mark of a long vowel is in Hart under the 2), houb' it (how be it), 6" iuz (they use), etc. And everybody who is at all familiar with Shakespeare or his contemporaries will know that this elision was in those times of very frequent occurrence, and was very often indicated in the old editions where the modern editors do not choose to mark it. The words don for do on, doff for do off, dup for do up, show the same tendency, and do is also curtailed in the formula much good do it you, of which the pronunciations ^' muskiditti" and *' mychgoditio " are expressly mentioned.^ Similarly where the following word begins with an h : he has became has, written in the old editions has, h'as or ha's (see, for instance, Tw. N., v., 178, 201, 293 ; Cor., iii., I, 161, 162); so also he had became h'had (so 1 See Ellis, Early Engl. Pronunciation, i., 165 ; and iii., 744. Prof. Skeat explains Shak., Tim., i., 2, 73, " Much good dich thy good heart," by the frequent use of this d{o)it before yc and you ; the t was there naturally palatalised and assibilated and as the phrase was taken as an unanalysed whole, the ch sound was introduced before thee as well ; see Transact, Philol. Soc, 1885-7, P- ^95* I20 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. Marlowe, /^w, 25) ; f/ie}' have became th' haue {Cor.^ i., 2, 30). Now this elision seems to have disappeared from all forms of the language except (the artificially archaic language of the poets and) vulgar speech. In the Cockney Stories, Thenks awf'lly, I find among others the following instances : — the: th'air, th'ether (other), th'id (head), etc. | to : t'enlearn, t'enimels | my : m'arm | so : s'help me | you (ye) : ee y'are (here you are), w'ere y'are (where . . .), y'observe, the mowst crool menner y'ivver see. 98. (200) It will be noticed that these phonetic tendencies cannot possibly have had any influence on the case-relations of most pronouns ; weaken the vowel of 7ne as you like or drop it altogether, the remaining m' is not brought one bit the nearer to the nom. /. But in the pronouns of the second person there is this peculiarity, that the cases are distinguished by the vowel only ; if the vowel is left out it becomes impossible to tell whether the nominative or the accusative is meant — one more reason for the old distinction to become forgotten. In Chaucer thee is elided, see Cant. T., B., 1660, z'n thalighte. In Greene's Friar Bacon, 12, 'jZ, *'For ere thou hast fitted all things for her state," we must certainly read tJihast (see also the same play, 13, 37). In countless passages, where modern editions of Shakespeare read you're the old folio has y'are, which must no doubt be interpreted ye are. But when we find th'art (for instance, Cor.^ iv., 5, 17 and 100, mod. CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 121 edd. thotCrt), is this to be explained as thou art (thu art) or as tliee art? Similarly th'hast (mod. edd. thou' St), th'hadst (mod. edd. thou hadst) ; in Macb., iv., I, 62 (13 12), " Say if th'hadst rather heare it from our mouthes," it is specially difficult to decide in favour of one or the other form on account of the peculiar constructions of had rather (see above, § 180). 99. (201) There is one more thing to be noticed. Where the pronouns are combined with the verbal forms commencing with w, those forms are preferred that contain rounded vowels. The past subjunctive of y'are is in Shakespeare you're {Cymb., iii., 2, j6, " Madam, you're best consider ") ; the second person, corresponding to Fie for / will, is not ye'le, ^ but you'le (M.3.r\ov/e, few, 708), or more frequently /^z^V/. Now I take it to be highly probable that these forms were heard in the spoken language at a much earlier period than they are recorded in literature, that is, at a time when you was not yet used as a nom., and that they are contracted not from you were, you will, but from ye were^ ye will (? ye wol), the vowel u being thus a representative of the w of the verb. ^ If this is so, ^According to Al. Schmidt's Lexicon, ye'le is found only once, in the first quarto of Lovers L., i., 2, 54, where, however, the second quarto and the folios have you'll. 2 Prof. Herm. Moller, in his review of my Danish edition, accepts this theory, and explains the phonetic connexion some- what more explicitly than I had done. I beg leave to translate his words: "The vowel e oi ye combined with the following 122 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. we have here yet another reason for the confusion of ye and }'ou, as the contracted ^orms you II dsid yoti re would be felt instinctively as compounds of you and will or were. For thou wert we find thourt ; ^ for thou wilt similarly thou' It {e.g., Ma.r\.,/ew, 1 144 ; often in Shakespeare, who also, though rarely, writes thou't). 100. (202) We have not yet finished our considera- tion of those phonetic peculiarities which favour the case-shifting of the pronouns of the second person. The pronouns in question were pronounced by Chau- cer and his contemporaries as follows : — nom. "5u* je* ace. de* ju" Side by side with the long vowel forms we must suppose the existence of shortened forms whenever the pronouns were unstressed or half-stressed ; we should accordingly write 5u(') and ju(*) with wavering vowel quantity. A regular phonetic development of consonantal u or w to form the diphthong iu. This group of sounds (which might in those times be written iu, iw, eu, ew, u, etc.) was at a later period changed into ju (juw), the accent being here, as in the Norse diphthong, shifted from the first on to the second element, which was lengthened ; the consonant y + iu, too, could give no other result than ju (juw), written in the case before us^ow." ^The Shakespearian difference between thouWt and tKart (as well as that between _y'ay^ and^owVe) is totally obscured in modern editions, which give thouWt, you're indiscriminately. It is true that thouWt = thou art is found in the original editions of some of Shakespeare's plays. Thou'rt stands perhaps for thee wert in Temp., i., 2, 367, "and be cjuicke thou'rt best", CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 123 these pronunciations would have given the following modern forms (compare mod. cow [kau] , in Chaucerian English pronounced [ku*], etc.) : — nom. thou . . . thee' rt" \ 15, " 77^^^ works . . . thee hast never been " | 23, " Didn't thee say thee wanted work ? . . . thee need'st not be ashamed ... Hast thee any money ? " | 24, " Canst //2^^" I 26, "Canst thee drive? . . . thee can drive the cart . . . thee hasn't " | 28, '* Thee said thee had no money " | 49, ** Thee doesn't," ^ etc., etc. 107. (209) Here I end my survey of the various case-shifting agencies and of their operations. As already mentioned, it extremely often happens that in the same sentence two or more causes co-operate to make the speaker use a different case from what we should expect, or rather from what the grammar of an earlier stage of the language would require. The more frequently such concurrences occur, the greater the vitality of the new manner of using the * I do not know whether the inconsistencies in the use of the different persons of the verbs must be ascribed to the authoress, or if they really occur (or occurred) in the language as actually spoken by the Quakers. CASE.SHIFTJNGS IN THE PRONOUNS. i35 case in question. We saw in § 76 that two separate tendencies, whose effects do not appear properly till some two hundred years later, were powerful enough when co-operating to bring about a visible (that is, an audible) result. And on reading again the quotations used to illustrate the first sections of this chapter you will find that the forms in e supply a comparatively greater contingent than the other forms, showing thus the concurrence of the associations treated in § 91. The facts which have been brought to light will, more- over, have made it clear that with the pronouns of the second person more shifting agencies were at work than with the rest (§§ S6, 87, 91-102), the result being that the original case-relations have been completely revolutionised in these pronouns. In the case of / and me, too, some special causes of changes in the case-relations have been pointed out (§§ 90, 91); but they proved to be much less power- ful than those seen in the second person, and operated besides in opposite directions, so that the same sim- plicity as that found in j^ou was here impossible. Finally, we have seen that the invariable position of zu/w before the verb has caused it to become a com- mon case, whom being relegated to a very limited province which it did not properly belong to. 108. (210) There is one factor I have not taken into account, though it is nearly everywhere given as explaining the majority of case-shiftings in a great many languages, — I mean the tendency to let the object- ive case prevail over the stibjective case. My reason 136 CHAPTERS ON kN6UsM. is simply that this tendency cannot be considered as a cause of case-shiftings ; it does not show us how these are called forth in the mind of the speaker ; it indicates the direction of change and the final result^ bnt not its why and wherefore. Nay, in English, at least, it does not even exhaustively indicate the direction of change, as will be gathered from some points in the above exposition : the nominative carries the day in the absolute construction, in who and in the (vulgar) combination betweeii you and I ; note also the change of the case used with the old impersonal verbs. Still, it must be granted that the nominative generally has the worst of it ; this is a consequence of the majority of the case-shifting agencies operating in favour of the accusative ; thus, while it is only the position immediately before the verb that supports the nominative, the accusative is always the most natural case in any other position ; see, for instance, the treatment of than as a preposi- tion. 109. (211) This will afford an explanation of the fact that wherever we see the development of special emphatic or " absolute " pronouns as opposed to con- joint pronouns (used in direct conjunction with the verb), the former will as a rule be taken from the originally oblique cases, while the nominative is re- stricted to some sort of unstressed affix to the verb. Such a development is not carried through in Standard English, which has formed the principal subject of our investigations. But if we turn to the tASE-SHIFTlNGS IN THE PRONOUNS. iif dialects now existing in England, we shall find this distinction of absolute and conjoint pronouns made very frequently. A thorough examination of the case-relations of living dialects would present very great interest, although it would rather show the results of similar developments to those found in the literary language — with many deviations, it is true — than throw any fresh light on the agencies at work or the causes of the changes effected. These are best investigated in the literary language, because we there have materials from so many succeeding centuries that we are often enabled to discover the first germs of what living dialects would only present to us as a development brought to a definite (or pre- liminary) conclusion. For this reason, as well as for the obvious one that the dialects of our own days have not been so fully and reliably treated, especially with regard to syntax, as to render a satisfactory exposition possible, I shall content myself with a few remarks only on the pronouns in the dialects. 110. (212) In the dialect of the southern counties of Scotland, so admirably treated by Dr. Murray an emphatic form, originating in the old accusative, is used very much as the corresponding forms in French, e.g,^ Thaim 'at haes, aye geates mair ; mey, aa canna gang (moi je ne peux pas aller) ; yuw an' mey '11 gang ower the feild. *' He gave it to you " = hey g^ye'd; " he gave it to YOU " = hey ^^yuw'd ; " he gave IT to you" = hey gaej/^ hyt ; "he gave IT to YOU " = hey g^ yjiw hyt. 138 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISM. For the dialect of West Somerset, Elworthy gives no less than six series of forms, vz^., for the nonmia- tive : (i) "full" forms, used when the nominative stands before its verb with emphasis ; among these forms we notice the old objective forms dhee and yue ; perhaps also uur^ "her," if Dr. Murray is not right in considering it as the old nom. heo ; (2) un- emphatic forms used before the verb, generally the same forms as in the first series, only weakened \ee = ye ? ] ; (3) interrogative enclitic forms, among which \ees\ us is noticeable as being used exactly as the Shakespearian us in shalVs, see above, § 84 ; in the third person pi. um = O. E. keom is used in the same manner; and (4) unconnected forms, all of them old accusatives, except ke (ee), compare § 94, and dkaz. Then for the objective case we have two series of forms : (i) the unemphatic, of which we note the second person pi. ee = ye and the third person sg. masc, U7i, ;? = O. E. hine, see § 49 ; and (2) em- phatic or prepositional, among these aay concur- rently with mee^ and wee with uus (§ 94), and on the same principle also ee' (he) and sfiee' ; finally dhai. Whom has here as well as in Scotch been completely superseded by who. In the vulgar dialects of the town populations (especially of the London Cockney) the accusative has been victorious, except when the pronoun is used in immediate conjunction with the verb as its subject; a point of special interest is the use of them as an attribute adjective before a noun. As examples Case-shiftings in the pronouns. 139 abound everywhere, I shall give only a few, of which the first and third are peculiarly instructive for the distinction of absolute and conjoint forms : — ^ Dickens, M. Ck., 352, "'Don't t/iey expect you then ? ' inquired the driver. ' Who ? ' said Tom. 'Why, t/iem,' returned the driver" | Ort£: Engl., 140, ''Him and mother and baby and me could all go with him" | 123, " Them paddling steamers is the ones for goin'. Z^^j/ just begin to puff a bit first." Com- pare, however, 90, " Them'?, the two I see ". 111. (213) To return to Standard English. We see that the phenomena dealt with in this chapter bear on accidence {you, who), on syntax {himself 2iS the subject, the absolute nominative, the subject of passive verbs, etc.) and finally on word signification (the mean- ing of some of the old impersonal verbs now being changed ; the old like = " to be pleasant," the modern like = " to be pleased with "). I shall here call special attention to the latent though complete change which has taken place in the grammatical construction of more than one phrase while seemingly handed down unchanged from generation to generation. I am think- ing of such phrases as : — if you like, if you please, formerly : dat. (pi.) 3rd pers. sg. subjunct. now : nom. (sg. or pi.) 2nd pers. (sg. or pi.) indie. ^See also Miss Muloch, J. Halifax, 207: "Let us talk ol something else. Of Miss March ? She has been greatly bettei all day ? She ? No, not her to-day." MO CHAPTERS ON ENGLlSfi. Compare also }'ou were better do it, where you was a dative and is now the subject in the nominative, and where simultaneously were has changed imperceptibly from the third person singular {it being understood) to the second person pi. or sg. In handing some- thing to some one you will often say, " Here you are ! " meaning, " Here is something for you, here is what you want ". I think that this phrase too contains an old dative ; and perhaps, some centuries ago, in handing only one thing, people would say, " Here you is ! " ^ 112. (214) A scheme of the pronominal forms treated in the present chapter according to their values in the every-day language of the close of the nineteenth century would look something like this : — Subject, joined Nominative, when not Everywhere to the verb : joined to the verb : else : /, we me^ we me, us you you you he, she, they he, she, they hinty her^ them {hhnself, herself, himself, herself, himself, herself, themselves) themselves themselves who whofUy who who 113. (215) If now finally we ask : Are the changes described in this chapter on the whole progressive? ^ Another case in point is perhaps the obsolete combination \i\i\\ force; Chaucer has " no force" {fors) with the meaning "no matter, it does not matter": force is here the noun, Fr. force. If this was used with a dative (Sh., Love's L., v., 2, 440, ^^ you force not to forsweare ") it would look like a verb, and the next step would then be to use it as in Sh., Lucr., 1021, ^^ I force not argument a straw ". CASE-SHIFTINGS IN THE PRONOUNS. 141 the answer must be an affirmative one. Although for obvious reasons personal pronouns are more apt to preserve old irregularities than other classes of words, we find instead of the old four irregular forms, tkou, thee, ye and you, one form carried through uni- formly ; the same uniformity is, as far as case is con- cerned, observable in the self-{oxm?> as compared with the old he self, hine self, etc., and who shows almost the same indifference to cases. Then there is some progress in syntax which does not appear from the scheme just given. Many of the uncertainties in the choice of case exemplified in the early sections of the chapter are owing to a want of correspondence be- tween the logical and grammatical categories ; for in- stance, when a word might be logically, but not grammatically, the subject. Sometimes, also, one grammatical rule would require one case, and another equally applicable rule a different one. The incon- sistency was particularly glaring where the logical (and psychological) subject was to be put in quite another case than that generally used to denote the subject ; and here, with the old impersonal verbs and in the absolute construction, logic has completely con- quered the old grammar. The rule which is entirely incompatible with the old state of things, that the word immediately preceding the verb is logically and grammatically the subject of the sentence, has been carried through on the whole with great consistency. And in the great facility which the English have now acquired of making the real psychological subject 142 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. grammatically the subject of a passive sentence, the language has gained a decided advantage over the kindred languages, an advantage which Danish is even now struggling to acquire, in spite of the protests of the schoolmaster grammarians. Thus we see that many phenomena, which by most grammarians would be considered as more or less gross blunders or " bad grammar," but which are rather to be taken as natural reactions against the imperfections of tradi- tional language, are really, when viewed in their historical connexion, conducive to progress in lan- guage. CHAPTER III. THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 114. To a mind trained exclusively in Latin (or German) grammar such English constructions as " the Queen of England's power," or "he took somebody else's hat," must seem very preposterous ; the word that ought to be in the genitive case [QueeUy somebody) is put in the nominative or accusative, while in the one instance England^ whose power is not meant, and in the other even an adverb, is put in the genitive case. Similarly, in the case of" words in apposition," where it might be expected that each would be put in the genitive, as in " King Henry the Eighth's reign," only one of them takes the genitive ending. 115. In an interesting and suggestive article, " Die genetische erklarung der sprachlichen ausdrucks- formen " {Englische Sttidien, xiv., 99), H. Kling- HARDT makes an attempt to explain this as well as other peculiarities of English grammar (the passive, in " the request was complied with," "he was taken no notice of," " with one another," etc.), by the power of the accent. "In English," he says, "unstressed (143) 144 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. vowels are weaker than in German ; and the distinc- tion between stressed and unstressed syllables greater. So it is with the stressed words of a sentence in relation to the unstressed words sur- rounding them ; the action of stress therefore reaches farther than in German ; emphatic words are capable of gathering around them a greater number of weak words than in German. . . . The [German] pupil will now understand how easily and conveniently in English small groups of words, such as King Henry the Eighthy are joined together under one accent, and are inflected, put in the Saxon genitive, etc., exactly in the same manner as single words." 116. I do not think that this theory is the correct one, and I shall state my objections. In the first place, we are not told which word in the group is invested with that powerful accent that is said to keep the group together. Nothing hinders us from pronouncing a group like" King Richard the Second's reign " at one moment with strong stress on Richard (as opposed to, say, Edward II.) and at the next with great emphasis on the numeral (as opposed to Richard the Third) ; we may also pronounce the two words with even stress ; yet in all of these cases the gram- matical construction is the same. Next, if we adopt Dr. Klinghardt's theory, we must assume an historical change in English accent which seems to be supported by no other fact. And thirdly, the theory fails com- pletely to account for the difference between the final s in genitives like Queen of England s ox sister-in- THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 145 laws, and the internal s in plurals like the queens of England or sisters-in-law. Before venturing to propose a new explanation it will be well to look somewhat closely at the historical development of the several phenomena with which we are here concerned. I shall group my examples under six heads. 117. Attributive words (adjectives, articles) were in Old English and in the first period of Middle English inflected equally with the substantives to which they belonged. But as early as the beginning of the thirteenth century we find the modern con- struction used alongside with the old one : thus in the case of the definite article : — Ancren Riwle, 82, '' })es deofles beam, ];)es deofles bles " I 84, '' })es deofles corbin " | 1^2/' tes deofles puffes " | 188, '' tes deofles bettles," etc. I I 210, ^^ i<^e deofles seruise" | 212 and 216, '' iSe deofles kurt " | 212, '' i^e deofles berme " | 134, " of /?^ deofles' gronen," etc. I have not examined the matter closely enough to be positive, but it seems as if the uninflected form was chiefly used after prepositions, and it is not entirely improbable that the uninflected genitive of the article originates in those cases where the article belongs as properly or more properly to the noun following than to the genitive : in the (devil's) service^ 10 146 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. or in the devils-service} Examples of adjectives from the same text : — 402, *' of reades vaoviVi^s blod " | 1 10, "his moderes wop & J^e^^r^i- Maries" | 406, ";«z«^i-federes luue" I 48, ^' eueriches limes uelunge " | 180, "^2^m^^^i"flesches eise" | 194, "J?isses worldes figelunge" | 198, '' )?isses hweolpes nurice " I I 94, *' euerich ones mede " | 112/' eiierich monnesfleschs" | 6, **efter ^2/^/2 ones manere" I 134, " efter euerich ones efne ". 118. In Chaucer we find no single trace of an inflected genitive of any attributive adjective; the rapid disappearance of the s in the gen. may to a great extent be due to the analogical influence of the weak forms of the adjective, in which after the loss of the final n the endings were the same for the genitive as for all the other cases. In present-day English most adjectives are placed before their nouns, and then are never inflected ; an adjective put after its noun is only capable of assum- ing the genitive s in cases like Henry the Eighth's ; it is impossible to say, for example, the women present's opinions. Comp. Marlowe, Jew, 242, " That you will needs haue ten years [genitive !] tribute past'' (= the tr. of ten years past). II. 119. Two or more words in apposition. Examples of the old full inflexion : — ■'The same explanation holds good for the adj. in A. R., 190, " Uor al ]>e worldes golde ". THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 147 A. S, Chron., E., 853, '' JEc^elwulfes dohtor West Seaxna cininges" \ ibid.. A., 918, '' Oi Ead- weardes cyninges anwalde " | ibid.y D., 903, " AJjulf ealdorman, Ealhswy&e broSor, Ead- weardes moder cynges (brother of EalhswySe, the mother of King Edward) " | ^Ifric, Sweet's A. S. Reader^ 14 b, 7, "On H erodes dagum cyninges'' \ ibid.^ 136, ^^ lacobes wif ^CBs heakfcederes" \ ibid,^ 15, 231, " Aidanes sawle^^j" halgan bisceopes'' \ ^. i?., 312, " We beoS alle Godes sun^n pe kinges of heouene" I Ch., M., ii., 349 (102 1), "By my modres Ceres soule ". It will be observed that the two words in apposi- tion are frequently separated by the governing word ; in the following two instances we cannot decide by the form whether the last words are in the nomina- tive or in the genitive case, as neither of them formed the genitive in s at that period : — A, R., 146, *'' Hester es bone j^e cwene" \ ibid. ^^^12, " Seinte Marie dei Magdalene''. 120. But in a great many cases, where we have this word-order — and it is, indeed, the order most frequently used throughout the M. E. period ^ — there can be no doubt that the last word is put in the nominative (or common) case. The leaving out of the case-sign is rare in Old English, but extremely ^ Cf. Zupitza's note to Guy of Warwick, 1. 687, where many examples are collected (" on ]?e maydenys halfe Blanchdowe," etc.), and Kellner, Blanchardyny cvii. 148 CtJAPTURS ON ENGLtSM. common in Middle English ; in Modern English it is getting rarer again. The phenomenon is to be classed with those mentioned above, § 61. A. S. Chron.^ E., 855, '* To iw?r/^i- dohtor Francna dning'" \ A. R.^ 148, '' Moiseses hond, Godes prophete " | ibid., 244, " J?uruh lulianes heste })e amperur'' \ 352, *^lr\Q Jesu Cristes rode, mi louerd'' \ Ch., Hous of F., 142, ^' Seys body the king'' \ 282, "The kinges meting Pharao'' \ Ch., ^., 431, '' Kenulphus sone, the noble kingoi Mercenrike" | /^, 672, "The god Mercurius hous the slye'' \ L. G. W., 1468, " Isiphilee the shene, That whylom Thoas doghter was, the king'' \ Malory, 70, ** By my faders soule Vtherpendragon " | 91, " Gaweyn shalle reuenge \\\?> faders deth kynge Loth" \ 126, '* In his wyues armes Morgan lefay" \ Marl., Tamburl., 193, "In the circle of your fathers armes, The mightie Souldan of Egyptia " | Greene, Friar B., 2, 10, " To Bacon's secret cell, A friar newly stall'd in Brazennose" | Sh., i H. IV., ii., 4, 1 14, *' I am not yet oi Percies mind, the Hotspurre of the North, he that killes me some sixe or seauen dozen of Scots " I Matt., xiv., 3 (Auth. V.), " For Herodias' sake, his brother Philip's wife " | Wycherley (Mermaid Sen), 24, " He has now pitched his nets for Gripe's daughter, l\i^ rich, scrivener" \ Tennyson, ;^22,"M er/in's THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 149 hand, the Mag-e at Arthur's court " | Mth. Arnold, Poems, i., 191, "Doubtless thou fearest to meet Balder' s voice, Thy brother^ whom through folly thou didst slay".^ 121. In Middle English the opposite word-order with the whole genitival group before the governing word, is sometimes found ; and in course of time it becomes more frequent ; the genitive sign is only added to the last word. This construction is especi- ally frequent when a proper name is preceded by a title, while it is generally avoided when the proper name is followed by a somewhat lengthy apposition. I have not thought it necessary to give many modern examples : — O, E. Homilies y ii., 3, ** After ure lauerd ihesu cristes tocume " | Ch., L. G.y 2247, '^ King Pandiones faire doghter " | F.^ 672, " The god Mercurius hous" \ Zupitza's Guj/, 1956, " Tke dewke Segwyns cosyn " | ibid.^ 8706, '' The kynge Harkes lande" | Malory, 232, ''My lady my susters name is dame Lyonesse '' I Roister, 6y^ " For my friende Goodluck's sake" I Marl., Tamb., 1168, ''By Mahomet my kinsmans sepulcher " | Thack., P., i., 18, " Miss Hunkle, of Lilybank, old Hunkle the Attorney s daughter ". ^ Mth. Arnold, Poems, i., 152, we have a closely connected phenomenon, namely, the repetition of a genitive in the common case, in order to tack on to it a relative clause : " And straight he will come down to Ocean's strand, Ocean whose watery ring enfolds the world ", 150 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. 122. When the governing word is not expressed, the j-ending is — or was — often added to the first noun exclusively ; Lindley Murray says {Grammar^ 8th edit, p. 262) that of the three forms, " I left the parcel at Smith's, the bookseller" : or "at Smith, the bookseller's": or ''at Smith's, the bookseller's," — the first is most agreeable to the English idiom ; and if the addition consists of two or more nouns, the case seems to be less dubious ; as, " I left the parcel at Smith's, the bookseller and stationer ". This does not now apply to a group consisting of a title and a proper name, as it did formerly, witness the first two of the following quotations, which would in modern speech be King Alexander's and Admiral Presane's. Even the last example does not seem to be now very natural ; and custom is perhaps more and more in favour of saying "at Smith, the bookseller's," or "at Smith's, the bookseller's," unless " the bookseller " is only part of a phrase, e.g., "at Smith's, the book- seller in Trinity Street ". At least, this is the opinion of Mr. G. C. Moore Smith. Guy of Warw., 7921, " Hyt [the helme] was Aly- sawndurs the kynge'' \ ibid., 8714, "Hyt [the cuntre] ys admyrals Presane" \ Sh., H. V., i., 2, 105, " Inuoke his warlike spirit, dind. your great vnckles, Edward the Black Prince " I I Thack., P., i., 259, ** He managed to run up a fine bill at Nine's, the livery stable- keeper" I ibid., ii., 199, " I remember at poor Rawdon Crawley s, Sir Pitt Crawley's THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 151 brother'" \ Beaconsf., Loth., 16, "Villas like my cousin's, the Duke of Luton ". 123. When one of the words in apposition is a per- sonal pronoun a special difficulty arises from the genitive proper being here replaced by a possessive pronoun. What is the genitive of " we, the tribunes " ? It would be a little awkward to say " our, the tribunes' power," and so most people would probably say with Shakespeare {Cor., iii., 3, 100), "the power of vs the tribunes ". The want of a comprehensive genitive is most fre- quently felt when all or both is subjoined to we, you, or they. Here O. E. had a fully inflected form, heora begra lufu, " the love of them both" ; heora begra eagan^ ''the eyes of them both" (in M. E. often with the gen. form, bather, bother), ealra ura. A few examples will show this combination in M. E. : — Lay., 5283 (quoted by Koch, ii., 240), ^^ Heore beire nome ich J>e wulle telle" | Leg. St. Kath., 1790, '' Hare badreluuQ " | Perc, 31, " At ther botheres wille" | \ A. R., ^,2, " Eue vre aire moder" | Ch., A., ygg, "At our aller cost" \ ibid., 823, " Up roos our hoste, and was our oiler cok " | M. P., i., 84, ''Oure alder foo" I L. G. W., 298, ''Our alder ^ns'' \ Mai., 134, "Kynge Arthur, our alther liege lord " | James I., King's Q., ''}Oure alter is frende " (in NED, all D. ii., 4, cf. ibid., both 4 b, and see also Matzner, Wb., '' all 2. 4, and be^en"). Note the excrescent -es in botheres and alleris, show- 152 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH, ing that the value of the old genitive ending had been forgotten. In a few cases we find the common gen. ending added to both : — Ch., M. P., I, 83, "But, {or your bothes peynes, I you preye" | Mai., 98, "To our bothes destruction"; but in the great majority of cases both and all are used without any ending ; the possessive is generally placed after the adjective, but the two first examples will show the opposite order : — Ch., B.^ 221, ^'Diversitee bitwene //^r /^(?///^ lawes " \M. P., 4, 52, ''by her bothe assent" | Mai., 71, ^' Both her swerdys met euen to gyders " | 79, " I haue both their hedes " | 151, " Layd the naked swerd ouerthwart bothe their throtes" | Roister, 31, "To both ^^^r heartes ease" | Marl., Tamb., 4644, ''Both their worths" I Greene, F.B.,S, no, ^' Both our ca.x- cases" I Sh., W. 7^., v., 3, 147, '' Both your pardons" | R. II., iii., 3, 107, " By the royal- ties o{ both your bloods " | Cor,, i., 6, 8, " Both our powers" | ibid., iii., 1,103, "'Both your voices" I R. III., i., 2, 191, "To both their deaths" | T.S.yV,,2,i^,''YoY bothmrssk^s'* I Milton, P. L., vi., 170, ''As both iheir deeds compared this day shall prove" | Thack., V, F., 258, ''Both their husbands were safe " I ibid., 507, " Both their lives " | Pend., i., 304, " That warmth belonged to both their natures " | R. Browning, iii., 306, " For both their sakes ". THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 153 124. It will be noticed that in most cases it is perfectly immaterial to the meaning of the passage whether we take dolk as qualifying the pronoun or the following substantive, as each of us has only one head, one throat, one life, etc. But in other instances the same consideration does not hold good ; when we read, for instance, in foAn Halifax, Gent, ii., 'j6, " the name set both our thoughts anxiously wandering," the meaning cannot be that each of them had only got one wandering thought, so that both must certainly here be taken as a genitive case. But the tendency goes undoubtedly in the direction of taking both as a nominative, the construction being avoided whenever that would be obviously impossible : I suppose it would be fruitless to search through the whole of the English literature for a connexion like " both our four eyes,'' although, indeed, Fielding writes {Tom fones, iii., 45) : " Both their several talents were ex- cessive " (each had several talents) ; compare ibid., iii., 66y "The two ladies who were riding side by side, looking steadfastly at each other ; at the same moment both their eyes became fixed ; both their horses stopt," etc. On the other hand, **the sb. often improperly took the plural form by attraction of the pronoun ; ^ this idiom is still in vulgar use, as ' It is both your faults ' iThe same sort of attraction may occasionally be found where there is no such word as both to assist in occasioning it; see Thack., 5a//«(fs, 80, "The ladies took the hint, And all day were scraping lint, As became their softer genders ". 154 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. ' she is do/k theu' mothers ' " (Murray, N. E. D.). This I take to be the reason of the pi. hopes in Marl., Jew J 879, " He loues my daughter, and she holds him dear. But I have sworn to frustrate both their hopes!' (They have one and the same hope.) So also in : — Sh., AWs, i., 3, 169, "You are my mother, Madam ; would you were (So that my Lord your sonne were not my brother) indeed my mother, or were you both our mothers . . ." | Ro., ii., 3, 51, ''Both our remedies Within thy helpe and holy phy- sicke lies (note the sg. of the verb) | Fielding, T. /., iii., 82, *' It was visible enough from both our behaviours ".^ Examples of the group genitive with all preceding a possessive pronoun : — 1 Mr. G. C. Moore Smith criticises the view expressed in the text, writing as follows : " I think you are right on ' both your faults'. But in 'both our mothers' and 'both their hopes ' I think the notion is plural, as well as the expression. She is — both our — mothers. That is, the mind conceives the two persons for a moment as having each a mother (or a hope of his own) — and then identifies these mothers and hopes, Even if you and I hope for the same end, there are two hopes. If you lost yours, I might keep mine. Of course it may be true, as you say, that the use of the plural is due to attraction from both : still it carries with it a sense of plurality, which is present to the speaker's mind. So with ' genders ' = as became the sex of each one, sex being looked on as an individual attribute like her name." THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 155 Ch., M. /*., 5,618, "I have herd al youre oi^imon" I F., sg6, ''Alle her hertes " | B., 4562, " Hir housbondes losten alle hir lyves " | Mai., 134, *M/M^z>harneis" | Marl., Z"^;;^^., 1877, 'M// our bloods" | Sh., Cor.^ iv., 6, 35, '^ All our lamentation" | Sheridan, Dr. W., 6Z, ''Tell her 'tis all our ways " | Dick., M. Ch., 400, " For all our sakes " | Stevenson, Tr, IsL, 283, '' It went to all our hearts " | Hood, *' He had drunk up all the stout to all their very good healths" | G. Eliot, Mill, ii., 210, *' All their hearts are set on Tom's getting back the mill ". 125. As the subject of the action expressed by a verbal noun in -ing is sometimes put in the genitive (I insist on your coming) and sometimes in the common case (I insist on all coming), a possibility arises of combining these two expressions ; note the different ways in which this is done in the following examples : — Sheridan, " I insist on your all meeting me here " I ibid,, Dram. Works, $6, ** The confusion that might arise from our both addressing the same lady" | Fielding, T. J,, iii., 71, " It cannot be wondered at that their retiring all to sleep at so unusual an hour should excite his curiosity" | Dick., quoted by Koch *' Our all three coming together was a thing to talk about" | Beaconsf., Lothair, 435, " I fancy the famous luncheons at Crecy House 156 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. will always go on, and be a popular mode of t/ietr all meeting " ; where, perhaps, of all of them meeting (or : for them all to meet) would be preferable ; but note that the order of the words all their, ordinary as it is in other cases, is here inadmissible. 126. Here I finally quote some passages where of is used to avoid all our : — Ch., G.y 192, " lesu Crist, herde of vs alle" \ Malory, 84, ** The names of them bothe" \ Greene, F. B., 10, 17, "The liking fancy of you both" I ibid., 10, 25, " To avoid dis- pleasure of you both" \ Thack., P., ii., 215, " The happiest fortnight in the lives of both of them " I ibid., 220, " The characters of both of you will be discussed" | ibid., 329, 337, etc. I Frank Fairl, i., 337, *' She was the life and soul of us all" \ Troll., Duke's Ch., i., 254, " For the happiness of them alV. For the genitive of both of you, some of you, etc., cf. below, § 130. 127. For the genitive of we two, etc., I am able to give four quotations : showing, first, the old genitive of two ; then the unchanged form ; thirdly, the rare j-'gen. ; and finally an evasion of the difficulty by an appositional construction : — A. R., 406, "I }?isse twelve monglunge " | Mai., no, ''What he your ii names?" | Bullokar, ^sof., 90, " Our twooz chand " | Miss Muloch, Halifax, ii., 209, " You must let me go . . . THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 157 anywhere — out of tkez'r sight — those two'' (= out of the sight of those two). III. 128. Two nouns are connected by a preposition, e.g., father-in-law, the Queen of England. In old times such word-groups were not felt as inseparable units, as they are now ; witness Chaucer, B., 3870, "Ageyn Pompeius, fader thyn in lawe ". Consequently, when they were to be used in the genitive, they were separated by the governing word ; this was the universal practice up to the end of the fifteenth century. Ch., B., 3442, " of kinges blood Of Perse is she descended" | B,, 3846, '■^ Philippes sone of Macedoyne " | E,, 1 170, " for the wyues loue of Bathe " | M., iv., 108, " That was the kynge Priamus sone of Troye'' \ \ Malory, 45, "The dukes wyf of Tyntagair \ 127, " I am the lordes doughter of this cast el'' \ 141, " The kynges sone of Irela?id" etc. The same construction is resorted to even in more recent times whenever the ordinary construction would present special difficulties. It is possible to denote a lady as '' she in the cap," but how about the genitive case of such a group ? Shakespeare says : " What's her name in the cap?'' {L. L. Z., ii., 209) — " For honour of former deeds' sake " would be rather heavy ; so Milton puts it {Sams. Ag, 372), " For ho?iour's sa.ke of former deeds ". Compare also Sh., i H. IV., iii., 2, 158 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISn. 119, " T/te Archbishops grace of York" = the Arch- bishop of York's grace = his Grace the Archbishop of York. 129. But as early as Chaucer we find occasional traces of the modern construction creeping in : at least, I venture to interpret the following passages as containing it : — M. P., 3, 168, ** Morpheus, and Eclympasteyre, That was the god of slepes heyre " (heir of the god of sleep) | Hous of Fame, ^gg, " Ovide, That hath ysowen wonder wide The grete god of loves name " (one MS. has " the god of loue hys ") | L. G, W., 206, " For deyntee of the newe sotjteres sake I bad hem strawen floures on my bed ".^ From the Elizabethan period the modern usage may be considered as settled and universal ; Ben Jonson mentions in his Grammar (printed 1640, p. 72) the construction ''for the Duke's men 0/ Mysia " as existing beside that of " the Duke of Mysids men " ; but this may be the ordinary con- servatism of grammarians, for the former construction seems to be practically never used at that time ; in Wallis's Gramm. Linguce Anglicance, 1653, p. 81, the only form mentioned is " The King of Spain' s Court'', I add here a few examples from the three last ^ In Malory, 108, I find, " My name is Gauayne, the kyng Lott of Orkeney sone "; s seems here left out by a misprint (Lots ? Orkeneys ?) ; immediately after that passage the ordinary way of putting it is found : " Kyng Lots sone of Orkeney ". THE ENGLISH GROUP GENtTtVE. 159 centuries to show the extent of the use of the modern construction : — Marl., Tamb.^ 645," The King of Perseas cvowwq'' I ibid.y 3298, " Blood is the God of Wars rich liuery" | Sh., R. ///., i., 4, 131, ''The Duke of Glousters purse" | Swift, Gull., 133, "To any village ox person of quality's house " I Field., T. /., iv., 291, "Signed with the son of a whore's own name" | The, P,, i., 20, " Mrs. Wapshot, as a doctor of divinity's lady" I ibid., i., 164, '' The member of Parlia- ments lady" I Carlyle, Her., 2, ''A man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man's or a nation of men's " | ibid., 87, " The man of businesses faculty " | Pattison, Milton, 44, "Agar, who was in the Clerk of the Crown's office " | G. Eliot, Life and L., ii., 190, '' I had a quarter of an hour's chat with him " | Ruskin, Select., i., 133, "In some quarter of a mile's walk" | Co. Doyle, Study in Sc, 88, "I endeavoured to get a couple of hours' sleep " | Christina Rossetti, Verses, " Lo, the King of Kings' daughter, a high princess". Sometimes, but very rarely indeed, an ambiguity may arise from this sort of construction, as in the well-known puzzle : " The son of Pharaoh's daughter was the daughter of Pharaoh's son". In ordinary language the construction is found only with the preposition of and in the words son-in- i6o CHAPTERS ON ENGUSM. law} etc., so also the Commander-in-Chiefs levees (Thack., Esmond, i,, 345) and perhaps: "for God in Heavens sake". But in dialects it is used with other prepositions as well ; Murray gives as Scotch {Dial of the Southern Counties, p. 166) : ''the m'hit-wui-the- quheyte-cuofs horse"; and Elworthy quotes from Somersetshire {Gramm. of the Dial, of W. Soms., P- 157)* fanSnhk uwt tu Langvurdz duung kee, "John Snook out of Langford's donkey"; Mr, Buurj tu Shoaldur u Muutuns paig, " Mr. Bridge of the Shoulder of Mutton's pig ". 130. What is the genitive of some of them, any of you, one of us ? There is some difficulty here, and the reason of it is the same as we met with before, viz,, the difference between a genitive proper and a pos- sessive pronoun, cf. § 123. In olden days, when a partitive relation could be expressed by the gen. pi., we occasionally find formations like these : A. R., 204, " hore summes nome " (the name of some of them), where the genitive ending is tacked on to the nom., or Orrm, 1. 2506, "& all onn ane wise fell till ^33)?^^ \ey;)ress herrte " (to the heart of either of them), where it is added to the old gen. pi. From more recent times, where the partitive re- lation has to be expressed by of, I have noted the 1 It is curious to note that the gen. pi. of these words, son-in- law, daughUr-in-law, etc., is avoided, although it would be one of the few instances in which there would be three different forms for the gen. sg., nom. pi. and gen. pi. : " I know all my "^sons-in-law's friends". THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. i6i following instances of the possessive pronoun being used where the genitive belongs properly to the whole combination ; it will be noticed that in most, though not in all cases, it does not affect the meaning of the clause whether we take the adjective, etc., as referring to the genitive or to the governing word (for " some of the men's heads " means either " some of the heads of the men," or "the heads of some of the men ") : — Malory, 79, " I maye not graunte neyther of her hedes"|Sh., Tw. N., iii., 4, 184, ''God haue mercie vpon one of our soules " (the soul of one of us) | R. II., i., 3, 194, "Had the king permitted vs, One of our soules had wand red in the ay re " \ 2 N, IV., ii., 4, 16, " They will put on two of our ierkins " (the jerkins of two of us) | T. S., v., 2, 171, " My mind has been as big as 07ze of yours " (as that of one of you) | Drayton, Love's Farewell, " Be it not seen in either of our brows That we one jot of former love re- tain " I Moore, Ir. Mel., " (And doth not a meeting like this) Though haply o'er some of your brows, as o'er mine, The snowfall of time may be stealing " | Black, Forttmatus, i., 183, "The hopeless resignation that had settled on some of their faces " | Thack., P., iii., 383, "A painful circumstance which is attributable to none of our faults " (to the fault of none of us) | Co. Doyle, Study in II i62 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. Sc, 141, '* Without meaning to hurt eit/ier of your feelings" | T. Hughes, T. Browns Schoold., 118, "I'm taking the trouble of writing this true history for all of your benefits" | Jerrold, Caudle, 17, "The brandy you've poured down both of your throats" I Stevenson, Catriona^ 29, " For all of our sakes". Dr. Murray once told me that it would be possible for a Scotchman to add the s to the whole of such a combination (" Is this ony of you' s? "),and that you might even, though rarely, in colloquial English hear "This must be some of you's". I have some sus- picion that this construction is a little less rare in colloquial language when there is a word added in apposition \.o you : "Is this any of you children's ?" IV. 131. In the case of a word defined by a following adYerb, the old practice was to add the s of the genitive to the former word, and this may be found even in our times, especially when there is no govern- ing word immediately following : — Latroon, Engl. Rogue, 1665, i., 53, '' I should devote myself to her service, and nones else " I Thack., P., i., 79, "They were more in Pendennis's way than in anybody's else"" \ Mark Twain, Mississ., 236, "The entire tur- moil had been on Lem's account and nobody's else'\ THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 163 But in most cases the s is tacked on to the end of the whole group : — "I took somebody else's hat" | Dick., M. Ch., 372, "■ Everybody else's rights are my wrongs " | Thack., V. /^, 244, " On a day when everybody else's countenance wore the appearance of the deepest anxiety " | Pend., i., 41, " Women are always sacrificing themselves or some- body for somebody else's sake" | ibid., 304, " Somebody else's name " | G. Eliot, Mill, ii., £3, " Somebody else's tradesman is in pocket by somebody else " | Fort Ji. Rev,, S&^t., 1877, 355, " Credulity is belief in somebody elses nonsense" | Ibsen, Master Builder, tr. by Gosse and Archer, 51, "Yes, who else's daughter should I be ? " Instead of the last mentioned form, some people would perhaps prefer "■ whose else " ; Dr. Murray told me he would say " who else's baby," but ''whose else" when the substantive was understood. In the following quotations both the pronoun and the adverb are inflected : — Dick., Christm. Books, 59 {Chr. Carol), "'Don't drop that oil upon the blankets, now'. ' His blankets ? ' asked Joe. ' Whose else's do you thinly ? '" | Sketchley, Cleopatra's Needle, 27 (vulg.), " As if it was easy for any one to find their own needle, let alone any one's elses ". The only adverb besides else where the same con- i64 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. struction might be expected is ever,^ but the genitive of whoever seems generally to be avoided. Mrs. Parr, however, writes (in a short story, Peter Trotfnan) : — *' The lovely creatures in my imagination took the form of the Matilda, Julia, Fanny, or whoever's image at that moment filled my breast ". But some English friends have corroborated my conjecture that it would be more natural to say, e.g., " It doesn't matter whose ever it is," than " whoever^s^'' which would indeed, according to some, be impossible in this connexion ; and if the elements of the word are separated, who of course is inflected, as in Sh., R. IILj iv., 4, 224, " whose hand soeuer". V. 132. When one word should properly govern two or more genitives, connected by and or some other conjunction, it makes some difference whether the governing word is placed after the first or after the last of the genitives. The former was the usual word-order in O. E., and 1 In answer to my question : " Is the s-genitive of words formed like a looker-on ever used ? " Mr. Moore Smith writes to me : " It would be possible to say, 'You've got the chucker- out's place,' but not 'the chucker's-out place' {chticker-out is slang for a man employed to turn noisy people out of a meet- ing) ; 'This is the whipper-in's chair'. Especially when the connexion is very close." fHE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 165 may still be used, especially when two distinct objects are denoted, while it is rare if the same object is meant, as in the David Grieve example below : — Oros., 18, 18, "J?aem sciprapum }?e h^o^ oi hwceles hyde geworht & of seoles" \ Ch^vn., A., 888, " Westseaxna aelmessan & ^Ifredes cyninges'' I ibid.^ 901, " Butan dcBs cyninges leafe & his witena'' \ Ch., L. G. W., 1086, "Be ye nat Venus sone and Anchises ? " | Thack., P., i., 16, ''Little Arthur's figure and his mother's'' I ibid., 159, "The empty goblets and now use- less teaspoons which had served to hold and mix the captain's liquor and his friend's " | ibid., 217, "Affecting Miss Costigan's honour and his own" \ Mrs. Humphrey Ward, D. Grieve, iii., 65, " In spite of her friendship and Ancrum's ". 133. As the arrangement of the words is analo- gous to that mentioned above, § 119 (of Herodes dagum cyninges), we cannot wonder at finding here again in M. E. a dropping of the genitive ending in the last word, parallel to that in " lulianes heste the amperur" . Prof. Zupitza quotes the following in- stances in his edit, of Guy of Warwick (note to 1. 688) ; " kyngys doghtur and emperowre " ( = a king and emperor's daughter) ; " dewkys doghtur and e7nperowre; for Gyes sowle and for hys zvyfe" (for Guy's soul and for that of his wife). From more recent times I have noted the following passages : — Marl., few, 278, " How, my Lord ! my mony ? i66 Chapters on English. Thme and the rest'' ( = that of the rest) | Sh., Lear, iii,, 6, loi, ''His life with thine, and all that offer to defend him " ( = and that of all) | L. L. L.J v., 2, 514, " Tis some policie To have one shew worse then the kings and his companie'' \ Byron, iv., 214, " Thy sires Maker, <2;^^ the earths and heavens a7id all that in them is " | Troll, Duke's Ch., i., 82, " It is simply self-protection then ? His own and his class (protection of himself and of his class) | Tennyson, Foresters, 43, " My mother, for whose sake and the blessed Queejt of heaven I reverence all women ". 134, Very nearly akin to these cases are other cases of leaving out the s of the last of two or more genitives ; the governing word is here also under- stood from the first genitive ; but this is farther off from the genitive without s than in the previous examples. Accordingly, there is more danger of ambiguity, and the construction is, therefore, now avoided. It is found in M. E. : — Ch., ^., 590, "His top was dokked lyk a preest biforn " (like that of a p.) | Guy of Warw., 8054, *' Hys necke he made lyke no man ". Al. Schmidt has collected a good many examples of this phenomenon from Shakespeare. He con- siders it, however, as a rhetorical figure rather than a point of grammar ; thus he writes {Sh. Lex., p. 1423) : " Shakespeare very frequently uses the name of a person or thing itself for a single particular THE ENGLISH GkOVP GENlflVM. 167 quality or point of view to be considered, in a manner which has seduced great part of his editors into needless conjectures and emendations ". I pick out some of his quotations, and add a few more from my own collections : — Sh., Pilgr., 198, '■'Her lays were tuned like the lark'' (like the lays of the lark) | W, J"., i., 2, 169, " He makes a July's day short as December'' (as a December's day) | 2 H. V/., iv., 2, 29, ''^ Iniquity' s throat cut like a calf" I John^ ii., 486, " Her dowry shall weigh equal with a queen" \ 2 H. VL, iii., 2, 318, '^ Mine hair be fixed on end as one distract" I Cor,, i., 6, 27, " I know the sound of Marcius' tongue from every meaner man " \ ibid., iii., 2, 1 14, " My throat of war be turned into a pipe small as an eunuch " \ Greene, Friar B., 3, 36, '' Whence are you, sir ? of Suffolk ? for your terms are finer than the common sort of men" \ ibid,, 12, 47, ^' Her beauty passing Mslvs's pa7'a?nour'* ,'^ 135. We now come to the second possible word- order, viz., that of placing the governing word after all the genitives belonging to it. In most cases the genitive ending is added to each of the genitives : ^ In combinations such as " his capacity as a judge " we have a somewhat similar phenomenon, in so far as the com- mon case "a judge" is referred to the genitive "his"; there is, however, the important difference that "a judge" does not stand for a genitive and cannot be replaced by " a judge's ", i68 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. " She came with Tom's and John's children " ; but, as a matter of fact, the s not unfrequently is added to the last word only, so that we have the formula (a 4- b) X instead of ax + bx. The earliest in- stance I know of is that recorded by Prof. Zupitza, Guy, 7715, "For syr Gye and Harrowdes sake". From more recent times : — Malory, 37, " It shal \iQyour worship & the childis auaille" | Marlowe, Tamb., 3901, '^ My lord and husbandes death'' \ ibid., 4123, '* Is not my life and state as deere to me, The citie and my natiue countries weale. As any thing of price with thy conceit?" (doubtful) | Sh. Mcb., v., 7, 16, " My wife and childrens ghosts will haunt me still " | R. II., iii., 62, " All my treasurie . . . shall be your loue and labours recompence " | Cor., v., 3, 118, " Thy wife and childrens blood " | Merch., iii., 4, 30, '' Vntill her husband and my lords returne " | H VIII., ii., 3, 16, " Sufferance, panging As soule and bodies seuering" | Sonn., 21, ''Earth and seas rich gems" | Milt, 5. A., 181, "From Eshtaol and Zords fruitful vale" | Spectator, No. 36, p. 60, " A widow gentle- woman, well born both by father and mother's side" | "A ship and a half's length" I *' An hour and a halfs talk" | Darwin, Life and L., i., 144, "The difference he felt between a quarter of an hour and ten mijiutes' work " | S. Grand, Twins, 65, THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 169 " Till the bride and bridegroom's return " | Thack., V. i^, 169, " The rain drove into the bride and bridegroom's faces" | tl?zd.y 530, *' One of the Prince and Princess Polonia's splendid evening entertainments" I** The Prince and Princess of Wales's pets " I G. Eliot, Mill, ii., 255, '* In aunt and uncle Glegg's presence " | Thack., P., i., 242, "■ Mr. and Lady Poker requested the pleasure of Major Pendennis and Mr. Arthur Pendennis' s company" | Browning, i., 118, " To pastor and flock's contention " | T. Brown's Sch.^ " The carpenter and wheel- wright's shop" I Waugh Tennyson, 91, "In Sir Theodore Martin and Professor Aytoun's * Bon Gaultier Ballads ' ". In the following quotation the ands are left out : — Byron, Ch, Har., iv., 18, "And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller, Shakespeare' s art ". Examples with or and nor (in the last one we have both or and and) : — Ch., G., 812, '' Cley maad with hors or mannes heer" (perhaps doubtful) | Sh., Cor., v., 3, 130, '■^ Nor childe nor womans face" | Byron, Mazeppa, 5, " Of vassal or of knight's degree " | Thack., V. F., 360, " When I see A. B. or W. T.'s insufficient acts of repent- ance" I Darwin, L. and L., ii., 41, "In a year or two's time " | Mrs. Ward, R. Elsm., i., 215, "Returning for an hour or two's tjo CHAPTERS ON BNGLtSM. rest " I ibid., ii., 287, " In a week or ten days time" I Stedman, Oxford, 190, " If only an hour or an hour and a halfs work is left till after lunch ". In view of all these examples, it will not be easy to lay down fully definite and comprehensive rules for determining in which cases the group genitive is allowable and in which the s has to be affixed to each member ; the group construction is, of course, easiest when one and the same name is common to two persons mentioned (Mr. and Mrs. Brown's compli- ments), or when the names form an inseparable group [Beaumont and Fletcher's plays ; Macmillan & Co.'s publications). On the whole, the tendency is towards using the group genitive, wherever no ambiguity is caused by it. 136. With personal (i.e., where the genitive case is spoken of, possessive pronouns) no such group inflexion is possible ; but some difficulty arises from the difference between conjoint pronouns like my and absolute pronouns like mine. I give the sentences I have collected without any commentary : — a. — {A. R., 406, " Min and mines federes luue") I Sh., Cor., v., 6, 4, " In theirs and in the commons eares " | Tp., ii., i, 253, "In yours and my discharge" \ Ham/., v., 2, 341, '' Mine^ and my father's death come not vpon thee " | Milt., Sams., 808, ** Mine and * Of course mint may here and in Ado, v., i, 249, be the old conjoint form before a vowel ; so also thine, Cor., i., 3, 25. THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 171 love's prisoner " | Browning, iii., 36, "Mine and her souls " | Thack., Esmond, ii., 144, " He was intended to represent yours and her very humble servant " | DdLVVJin, Life and Z., ii., 308, " Without Lyell's, yours, Hux- ley's, and Carpenter's aid ". b. — Carlyle, 5. R., 71, "To CMt your and each other's throat " | ibid.. Heroes, 4, " Our and all men's sole duty " | G. Eliot, Life, iii,, 112, "I enter into your and Cara's furni- ture-adjusting labours " I 2^2^., iv., 18, "I received your and your husband's valued letters" | ibid., i6y, "1 had heard oi your and the professor's well-being " | ibid., 266, "With a sense oi your and Emily's trouble" I Sharp, Brownijig, 143, " On the eve of her and her aunt's departure " | Hales, Longer E. Poems, 289, " One of their and Pope's friends ". c. — Carl., Heroes, 97, " Turn 2,yN2,y your own and others' face" | Thack., P., ii., 103, "Trifle with your own and others' hearts " | ibid., Hi., 34, "I will not forget my own or her honour". d. — Ch., G., 1 129, " In your purs or myn " | Mai., 92, ** That kny3te your enemy and myn " | Marl, Jew, 969, " For your sake and his 172 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. owne" I Thack., P., ii., 229, "As becomes one o{ your name and 7ny own " | G. Eliot, Mill, ii., 324, " I measured your love and his by my own ". e, — Ch., M., iii., 194, " The wille of^ne and of my wyf I Thack., V, F., 372, " For the ex- penses of herself and her little boy'' \ Mrs. Ward, R, Elsm., ii., 297, "The shortest way to the pockets of you and me'' \ Hardy, Tess, 411, "For the sake of me and my husband". VI. 137. Finally the genitive ending may be added to a relative clause. Dr. Sweet, in his New Engl. Gr., § 1017, mentions as an example of group-inflexion, ''the man I saw yesterday's son,"^ **in which the genitive ending is added to an indeclinable adverb, inflecting really the whole group, the-man-I -saw-yes- terday " . But this is generally avoided, at least in literary language ; the only example I have met with in print is from the jocular undergraduate lan- guage of Cambridge Trifes (London, 1881), p. 140 : — "It [a brick] went into the man who keeps below me's saucepan ". In English dialects the phenomenon seems to be very widely spread ; thus in Scotland (Murray, p. ^ In his Words, Logic, and Grammar, p. 24, " th^ fnan I saw yesterday at the theatre's father". THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 173 166), '' The-vidn-dt-ye-mcst-yesterday s dowchter"; in Cheshire (Darlington, E. D. S., xxi., p. 55), " I've just seen Jim DuUon, him as went to 'Meriky's weifel' = the wife of J. D., the man who went to America ; in Somersetshire (Elworthy, Gr., 15), ''That's the woman what was left behind' s child," i.e., that is the child belonging to the woman who was left behind. 138. After thus passing in review all the different kinds of group genitives,^ it remains for us to find an explanation that will account for all the facts mentioned. It is obvious that the reason of our phenomenon might ^ In Danish the group genitive is of very frequent occurrence in nearly the same cases where it is found in English {kongen af Danmarks magt, Adam og Evas born, etc.). In literary Swedish ^^ kimgens af Sverge makt," etc., is written, but the spoken language prefers " kungen af Sverges makt ". In German only very slight traces of the group genitive are found, even such names as Wolfram von Eschenbach being not inflected collectively (" die gedichte Wolframs von Eschenbach "). Still in modern family names, where the combination of von and a name is not felt as indicating birth-place or estate, the s is often, though not exclusively, tacked on to the latter name ; Steinthal, for instance, on one title-page writes : " Die Sprach- wissenschaft W. v. Humboldt's und die Hegelsche Philo- sophie " ; but on another, " Die Sprachphilosophischen Werke Wilhelm's von Humboldt". According to Grimm {Deutsche Gramm., ii., 960) the lower classes will sometimes say " des kaiser-von-Oestreich's armee," instead of " des kaisers von Oestreich armee," but it is " rare and ignoble". 174 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH, be sought either in the nature of the compound group, or in that of the ending and its function. It might perhaps be urged that the phenomenon was due to the natural instinct taking ^Ae Queen of England or King Henry the Eighth as one inseparable whole, that would allow of no case-ending separating its several elements. The case would then be a parallel to the German treatment of those word- groups which, like sack und pack, grund und boden, have been fused together to the extent of making it impossible to inflect the former word and say, e.g., mit sacke und packe or grundes und bodejts ; indeed, we here, though very rarely, may find something corresponding to the English group genitive ; thus, Wieland has '' des zu Abdera gehorigen grund und bodens''y But an inspection of the above collected examples will show that the explanation does not hold good ; for in the majority of cases we have not only group-compounds, but also free groups ^ inflected like single words. This feeling of connectedness may ^ Paul, Princ. d. Sprachgesch., 2nd edit., p. 280. ''For the distinction see Sweet, N. E. G., § 440: "Many word-groups resemble sentences in the freedom with which they allow one word to be substituted for another of like grammatical function, or a new word to be introduced. We call such word-groups free groups. Thus the free group for my sake can be made into for his sake. . . . But in such groups as son-in-law, man-of-war, bread-and-butter, cup-and-saucer, no such variation is possible, the order of the elements of these groups being as rigidly fixed as in a compound word. We call such combinations group -compounds,^' THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 175 have ^one for something in the development of the modern word-order where the genitive of ^/le Queen of England is placed before the governing noun, instead of the old *' the Queen's crown of England " ; and it undoubtedly plays some part in the cases mentioned in § 135 (A and B's) ; but it gives no satisfactory explanation of the difference between the plural the Queens of England and the genitive the Queen of England s. 139. As the nature of the group fails to give an answer to our question we turn our attention to the ending, and the first thing that strikes us is that we find no trace of the group genitive with any of the O. E. genitive endings -a, -ra, -an, -e, -re, etc. (cf. § 25) but only with -{e)s. It is not till this ending has practically superseded all the other ways of forming the genitive that our phenomenon begins to make its appearance. In other words, the first condition of forming genitives of whole groups as if they were single words is that the manner of formation of genitives should be on the whole uniform. Where the genitive is formed irregularly, as is now only the case with the personal pronouns, we have had until the present day only rudimentary and feeble attempts at group genitives. 140. Now, if we were to ask : What is the reason of this regularity in the formation of English noun genitives ? then any student that is at all acquainted with modern linguistic theories and methods would be out with the answer : " Why, it is due to analogy ; 176 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. the j-ending has gradually been extended to the whole of the vocabulary, the analogy of those nouns which had an j-genitive in O. E. prevailing over the others ". Very good ; the answer is obviously correct. And yet it is not entirely satisfactory, for it does not account for the difference observable in many words between the formation of the genitive and that of the plural. In the latter, too, the ^--ending has been analogically extended in pretty much the same way as in the former ; but how is it that we so often see the irregular plural preserved, whereas the genitive is always regular? We have the irregular plurals men, children, oxett, geese, etc., as against the regular genitives man's, child's, ox's, goose's, etc. In the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare the plural and the genitive of most words ending in /, eg., wife and life, were identical, wives and lives being said in both cases ; why has the analogy of the nom. sg. been more powerful in the genitive (modern wife's, life's) than in the plural ? The only explanation, as far as I can see, lies in the different function of the two endings ; if we put a singular word into the plural, the change affects this word only; its relation to the rest of the pro- position remains the same. But if, on the other hand, we put a word in the genitive case which was in the nominative, we change its syntactical relation completely ; for the function of a genitive is that of closely connecting two words. THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. tyy 141. There is yet another thing to be noted. The O. E. genitive had many different functions; we may broadly compare its syntax to that of the Latin genitive. We find in Old English possessive, partitive, objective, and descriptive genitives ; genitives governed by various adjectives and verbs, etc. And the position of the genitive is nearly as free as it is in Latin. But if you will take the trouble to read a few pages of any Old English prose book, of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, of King Alfred, or of ^Ifric, you will soon observe that where the Old English genitive might be rendered by a genitive in Modern English, it nearly always precedes its noun ; where the word-order is different, the old genitive construc- tion has, in the majority of cases, been abandoned. It is a significant fact that the only surviving use of the English genitive is a prepositive one ; the word- order "the books my friend's" for "my friend's books" is, and has been for many centuries, as impossible in English as it is frequent in German : " die biicher meines freundes ". 142. We are now in a position to draw our con- clusions. The s is always wedged in between the two words it serves to connect ; it is, accordingly, felt as belonging nearly as much to the word following it as to the preceding one. Nay, it is now more important that the s should come immediately before the governing word than that it should come immedi- ately after the noun which it turns into a genitive case. It is now partly a suffix as of old, partly a 12 iyS CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. prefix; if we were allowed to coin a new word we should term it an interposition. This peculiar development gives us the clue to the problems mentioned above. If the s of the genitive is more loosely connected with the word it belongs to than is the s (or other suffix) of the plural, that is the reason why it tolerates no change in the body of the word : the old plural wives may remain ; but the genitive (originally wives also^ must be made to agree with the nominative — and so it becomes wife's} And we now see clearly why such groups as the Queen of England, when put in the genitive, affix the s to the last word of the group, but when put in the plural, to the first. 143. Let us look again at some of the above examples ; they will enable us to formulate the following three rules : — When the governing word follows immediately after the genitive, the s is never left out ; But this is very frequently the case when the governing word is placed elsewhere (or is under- stood) ; Whenever the s is taken from the word to which it should properly belong (according to the old grammar) and shifted on to some other word, this ^ In the present orthography, too, the gen. is brought nearer to the spelling of the nom. sg. than the nom. pi. is: gen. lady's, church's, but pi. ladies, churches ; Shakespeare and Addison would write ladies and churches for both forms. THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 170 latter is always followed immediately by the govern- ing word. Compare, for instance : — heste ]?e meting (O. E.) anes reades monnes blod (M. E.) Julianes amp&rur (M. E.) the kinges Pharao at Smith's the bookseller['&] ... (Ch.) for your bothes peyne ... (Ch.) kinges blood of P^rsdi ... anybody's else (it does not matter whose ever it is) (M. E.) kyngys doghtur and emperowre (Sh.) Her lays were tuned like the lark ... (his father is richer than the man's we met yesterday ^) (Mod.) a red man's blood (Mod.) the Emperor Julian's command (Mod.) King Pharao's dream at Smith the bookseller's office for both your pains (Marlowe) the King of Perseas crowne anybody else's hat (whoever's image) (Mod.) a king and emperor's daughter they were tuned like the lark's lays (he is richer than the man we met yesterday's father) 144. Now, let us sum up the history of the genitive ending s. In the oldest English it is a case-ending like any other found in flexional languages ; it forms together with the body of the noun one indivisible whole, in which it is often impossible to tell where the kernel of the word ends and the ending begins (compare ^ I have placed those sentences within parentheses which have only a theoretical interest, as neither playing nor having played any noticeable part in natural speech. i«o CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. endes from ende and heriges from Jiere) ; the ending is only found in part of the vocabulary, many other genitive endings being found elsewhere. As to syntax, the meaning and the function of these genitive endings are complicated and rather vague ; and there are no fixed rules for the position of the genitive in the proposition. In course of time we witness a gradual development towards greater regularity and precision. The parti- tive, objective, descriptive and some other functions of the genitive become obsolete ; the genitive is invariably put immediately before the word or words it governs : irregular forms disappear, the i"-ending only surviving as the fittest, so that at last we have one definite ending with one definite function and one definite position. If the syntactical province of the genitive has been narrowed in course of time, the loss — if such it be — has been compensated, and more than compensated, as far as the ^--ending is concerned, by its being now the sole and absolute sovereign of that province ; its power is no longer limited to some masculine and neuter nouns nor to one number only ; it rules irrespective of gender and number. 145. In an Old English genitive the main (" full ") word and the case-forming element are mutually depen- dent on each other, not only in such genitives as lufe or suna or bee or dohtor^ but also in the more regular for- mations in -es ; one part cannot be separated from the other, and in the case of several words belonging THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. i8i together, each of them has to be put in the genitive case : anes reades mannes \ pcere godlican hife \ ealra godra ealdra mamia weorc, etc. In Modern English, on the other hand, the s is much more independent : it can be separated from its main word by an adverb such as else, by a preposi- tional clause such as of England or even by a relative clause such as / saw yesterday ; and one s is sufficient after such groups as a red man or all good old men. If, therefore, the chief characteristic of flexional lan- guages, such as Greek and Hebrew, is inseparableness of the constituting elements, it will be seen that the English genitive is in fact no longer a flexional form ; the s is rather to be compared with those endings in agglutinating languages like Magyar, which cause no change in the words they are added to, and which need only be put once at the end of groups of words ; ^ or to the so-called empty words of Chinese grammar. Our present nineteenth century orthography half indicates the independence of the element by separating it from the body of the preceding noun by an apostrophe ; there would be no great harm done if the twentieth century were to go the whole length and write, e.g.^ my father s house, ^ Professor Vilh. Thomsen, in his lectures on the Science ot Language some ten years ago, used to illustrate the principle of agglutination by a comparison with the Danish genitive ending s, which is in many respects analogous to the English ending. i82 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. the Queen of England s power, somebody else s hat, etc.^ Compare also Thackeray's lines {Ballads, p. 64) ; — He lay his cloak upon a branch, To guarantee his Lady Blanch* 's delicate complexion. It IS important to notice that here historically attested facts show us in the most unequivocal way a development — not, indeed, from an originally self- existent word to an agglutinated suffix and finally to a mere flexional ending, but the exactly opposite development of what was an inseparable part of a complicated flexional system to greater and greater emancipation and independence. APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VHI. "BILL STUMPS HIS MARK," ETC. 146. The tendency to turn the genitive ending into an independent word meets with, and is to a certain degree strengthened by, a phenomenon that has originally nothing to do with it ; I mean, the expression of a genitive relation by a common case plus a possessive pronoun. The best known instance of this is " iox fesus Christ his sake " in the Common Prayer Book. ^ It is true that this spelling would perhaps in some cases suggest a false pronunciation, for phonetically the ending still belongs to the preceding rather than to the following word, as its triple pronunciation [s, z, iz, § 151] is determined by the final sound of the former. THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 183 This peculiar idiom is not confined to English : it is extremely common in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish dialects, in Middle and Modern Low German, in High German (Goethe . " 1st doch keine menagerie So bunt wie meiner Lili ihre I "), in Magyar, etc. In English the phenomenon has been noticed by many grammarians ; ^ and if any one wishes to see other or more instances than those from which I have tried to form an idea of the origin and character of the idiom, it is to their works that I must refer him. 147. In most cases the phenomenon is a form of that anacoluthia which I have already had occasion to mention (see § 60)^ and which consists in the speaker or writer beginning his sentence without thinking exactly of the proper grammatical construc- tion of the word that fifst occurs to him, so that he is subsequently obliged to use a correcting pronoun. As this want of forethought is common everywhere and at all times, we find the grammatical irregularity in many languages, ^ and it is naturally very frequent when a lengthy clause is introduced : it is also often ^Matzner, Grammatik, iii., 236; Fr. Koch, Gramm., ii., 249; Abbott, Shak. Gr., § 217 ; Storm, Engl. Philol., 1881, 262 : Einenkel, StreifzHge, 109, and Paul's Grundviss^ i., 909; Kellner, Blanch,, xxxvi., and Hist. Outl. of Engl. Syntax, § 308 ; Franz, Engl. Studien, xvii., 388. 2 One French example from Bourget, Cruelle Enigme, 18: " Elles qui vivaient dans une simplicite de veuves sans esperance, et qui n'auraient pour rien au monde modifie quoique ce fut a I'antique mobilier de I'hotel, leur sentiment pour Hubert leur avait soudain revels le luxe et le comfort moderne ". i84 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. resorted to where a foreign name is introduced that does not conform to the native declensions. The possessive pronoun is often, for some reason or other, separated from its antecedent : — A. R., S2, " J?e J?et swuch fulSe speteS ut in eni ancre eare me schulde dutten h's mu5" | Ch., L. G. W., 2180, " T hi se false lovers, poison be hir bane ! " | J/. P., v., 99, " The wery hunter^ sleping in his bed, To wode again his mynde goth anon" | Sh., R. III., iii., 2, 58, and Wint. Z, iii., 2, 98, quoted in § 60 \ R. IIT./\., 4, 217, "Alas! for whose sake did I that ill deed ? For Edward, for my brother, for his sake." But we are here chiefly concerned with those cases in which the possessive pronoun followed immediately on its antecedent : — Oros.,%, ''Asia & Europe hiera landgemircutogaedre licgaS . . . Affrica & Asiahiera\^x\^^<^m\xcyi onginnaS of Alexandria" | ibid.^ 12, '' Nilus seo ea hire aewielme is neh J^aem clife J^aere Readan Saes" | Malory, 126, "This lord of this castel his name is syr Damas, and he is the falsest knyght that lyueth" | Sh., Tp., v., I, 268, " This mishapen knaue, his mother was a witch " | Scott, Lay of the Last Minst., i., 7, ** But he, the chieftain of them all. His sword hangs rusting on the wall " | Rossetti, Poet. IV., 164, ''For every man on Gods ground, O King, His death grows up from THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 185 his birth " | Tennyson, 616, " The great tra- gedian, that had quenched herself In that assumption of the bridesmaid, she that loved me, our true Edith, her brain broke with over acting ". ^ Ch., M., iii., 145, "For sothly he that precheth to hem that liste not to heere his wordes, his ser- mounhem anoyeth" | Num., xvii., 5 (Revised Version), "It shall come to pass, that the man whom I shall choose, his rod shall bud" (Auth. Vers. . . . "that the man's rod whom I shall choose, shall blossom "). The similarity between this sentence from the Revised Version and "the man I saw yesterday's father " is conspicuous. 148. There are, however, other sources from which this genitive construction by means of possessive pronouns may arise. First I shall mention what Einenkel thinks the sole origin of it, viz., the con- struction after some verbs meaning to take or rob, where a dative + a possessive pronoun very nearly amounts to the same thing as a gen., as will be seen in the following instances : — A. R., 286, "J>et tu wult . . . reauen God his strencSe " | ibid., 300, " Schrift reaueS }je ^ A curious example with the pronoun of the first person is Sh., Tp., i., 2, 109, " Mtf {pooY& man) my Librarie was dukedome large enough " ; if we do not here take me as a dative = to me, we have something like an apology for the missing genitive a of '^ I poor man,'' cf. § 123. i86 CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. ueonde his lond " | Malory, no, '* Syr Tor alyghte and toke the dwarf his g\diy\XQ'\ But even if we include in this rule other verbs of a kindred nature, as in : — A. S. Chron., A., 797, "Her Romane Leone pcem papan his tungon forcurfon & his eagan astungon," the instances of this particular construction are not numerous enough to account for the frequency of the his-gQuitivQ. Language is here, as elsewhere, too complex for us to content ourselves with discovering the source of one of the brooklets that go to forming a big river. Looking round for other sources we see that other verbs as well as " rob," etc., may be followed by a dative + his, nearly equivalent to a genitive {to ask a man his pardon is nearly equivalent to asking a man' s pardon) ; compare also the following examples, in none of which a substitution of a genitive for the dative + the possessive pronoun would involve a change in the meaning : — A. R., 84, " He mid his fikelunge & m.id his preisunge heleS & wrihS mon his sunne " (he with his flattery and with his praise con- cealeth and covereth from man (for a man) his sin = conceals a man's sin) | Byron, v., 260 (Sardanap., iv., i), "and there at all events secure Afy nephews and your sons their \wQs'' \ Hughes, Torn Br., 5, "There is enough of interest and beauty to last any reasonable man his life" | Tennyson, ^ji. THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. 187 " Merlin . . . had built fke king his havens, ships, and halls ". 149. In yet other instances it is a nominative that combines with his to form our quasi-genitive. When we read in Chaucer manuscripts, for instance : — " Heer beginnith the Chanouns yeman his tale!' Prof. Skeat finds it necessary to warn us: "The rubric means, * Here the Canons Yeoman begins his tale '. The word tale is not to be taken as a nomina- tive case." But it will be observed that it does not matter much for the understanding of the phrase as a whole whether we take it as a nominative or an accusative ; Prof. Skeat may be right in thinking that in these rubrics begin was originally a transitive verb ; but as in most other mediaeval rubrics begin was taken intransitively (the subject being the title of the book), an analogous interpretation would naturally present itself in instances like the above, and then yeman his would be the equivalent of a genitive before tale. That some, at least, of the old scribes were not of Prof. Skeat's opinion, appears from the rubric found in MS. Arch. Seld., B, 114:— " Here endith the man of lawe his tale. And nQxX, folwith the shipman his prolog." For it is here out of the question to construe, " And next the shipman follows his prologue ; " this, then, is undoubtedly an instance of the ^2>-genitive. 150. Sprung as it is, then, from various sources, this makeshift genitive now converges with and meets CHAPTERS ON ENGLISH. the originally totally different interpositional de- scendant from the old flexional j-genitive, so that the two formations become often practically indistinguish- able. ^ The similarity is of a purely phonetic nature ; kzs would, of course, be pronounced with weak stress, and in unstressed words in the middle of a sentence k is scarcely if at all audible (as in the rapid pro- nunciation of "he took /tts hat," etc. ; compare also tt for older kit, and 's for kas). Thus, J?e bissop his brojjer, etc., in the B-text of Layamon, may be only another way of writing bissopis or bissopes. ^ 151. When, in the fifteenth century or so, most of the weak es disappeared in pronunciation, the geni- tive ending -es [-iz] was differentiated into the three forms which it still has : — [s] after voiceless sounds (bishop's) ; [z] after voiced sounds (king's), and [iz] after hisses (prince's). But the same change happened with the possessive pronoun, as will be seen very frequently in Shake- speare : — A/l'Sy ii., 2, 10, "Put off's cap, kiss his hand" | Co7'., ii., 2, i6o, "May ^}i\^y perceiue's intent" | ibid., ii., 3, 160, '' At's heart" | iji,'' For s 1 Compare such accidental convergings of not-related words as that of sorrow and sorry. 2 Perhaps we have Vinus his written for Venuses in Ch., ^f. P., 4, 31, " The thridde hevenes lord (Mars) . . . hath wonne Venus his love " ; or is his love = " his beloved one,'' in apposi- tion to Venus ? THE BNGLiSH GROUP GENITIVE. i8g countrey" | v., 3, 159, " To's mother" | Meas.y i., 4, 74, 'Tors execution," etc. | | Marlowe, Jew, 165 1, ''on's nose" (cf. A. Wagner's note to his edit, of the same play, 294). Compare the treatment of the verbal form is: thafs, there's, this is. In Elizabethan English, it was treated similarly. I saw't, fort, do't, upont, done't, etc. So also us (comp. mod. let's) : upon's, amon^s, upbraid' s, behold' s, etc. 152. Here I add a few examples of the his- genitive from Chaucer down to the vulgar speech or burlesque style of our days : — Ch.,Z. G. IV., 2593, "Mars his venim is adoun" | Sh., Haml., ii., 2, 512, "Neuer did the Cyclop hammers fall On Mars his armours " | Tw, N., in., 3, 26, " 'Gainst the Cou?ithis gallies" | 2 H. IV., ii., 4, 308, "Art not thou Poines his brother?" | L. L, Z., v., 2, 528, "A man of God his making " (folio : God's) | Thack., Fend., ii., 6 (a housekeeper says), " In George the First his time" | Gilbert, Bab Ball.y 36, "Seven years I wandered — Pata- gonia, China, Norway, Till at last I sank exhausted At a pastrycook his door- way ". 153. To the popular feeling the two genitives were then identical, or nearly so : and as people could not take the fuller form as originating in the shorter one, they would naturally suppose the j to be a shortening igo CHAPTERS ON ENGLISiL of Ais ; this is accordingly a view that we often find either adopted or contested, as will appear from the following quotations, which might easily be aug- mented : — Hume, Orthographie, 1617, ed. by Wheatley, p. 29, "This s sum haldes to be a segment of his, and therfoer now almost al wrytes his for it as if it were a corruption. But it is not a segment of his : i. because his is the masculin gender, and this may be foeminin ; as, A mother's love is tender ; 2. because his is onelie singular, and this may be plural ; as, al men's vertues are not knawen." Maittaire, ^;^^. Gr., 1712, p. 28, "The geni- tive ... is expressed by -s at the end of the word : as, the childrens bread, the daughters husband, its glory. The s, if it stands for his, may be marked by an apostrophus : e.g., for Christ's sake : and sometimes his is spoken and written at length, ^.^.,y^;' Christ his sake'' Addison, Sped., No. 135, "The same single letter [s] on many occasions does the office of a whole word, and represents the his and her of our forefathers. There is no doubt but the ear of a foreigner, which is the best judge in this case, would very much dis- approve of such innovations, which indeed we do ourselves in some measure, by retain- THE ENGLISH GROUP GENITIVE. tgt ing the old termination in writing, and in all the solemn offices of our religion." ^ Enquire Within, 1885, § 208, "The apos- trophe (') is used to indicate the combining of two words in one, as Johns book, instead of John, his book ". In its struggle for an independent existence, the i"-interposition seemed likely to derive great assist- ance from the concurrence of the ^zV-construction. But the coincidence was not to last long. On the one hand, the contraction of the weak his seems to have been soon given up, the vowel being reintro- duced from the fully stressed form, even where the h was dropped {Jie took 'is hat) ; on the other hand, the limited signification of the possessive pronoun coun- teracted the complete fusion which would undoubtedly have taken place, if his had been common to all genders and to both numbers, instead of being con- fined to the masc. (and in former centuries the neuter) sg. A formation like " Pallas her glass " (quoted by Abbott from Bacon) does not fit in with the rest of the system of the language, and " Pallas his glass " would jar upon English ears because his is too much felt as a pronoun denoting sex. ^This remark of Addison's gives us the clue to the retention offer Jesus Christ his sake" in the Prayer Book; it is no doubt the old syllabic ending Christcs remained unaltered after the e had generally become silent, on account of the accustomed rhythmic enunciation ; a better way of spelling it would therefore be Christes as in blessed, etc. ABERDEEN : THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 14 srr^ ft ^ RETURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT TO"^ 198 Main Stacks LOAN PERIOD 1 HOME USE 2 3 4 5 6 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS. Renewls and Recharges may be made 4 days prior to the due date. Books may be Renewed by calling 642-3405. DUE AS STAMPED BELOW APR 1 ^ 1999 FORM NO. DD6 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY BERKELEY CA 94720-60(X) U.C. 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