3 oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that " they have personal pronouns, but rarely use them." Among the 

 Chinese, also, this style of address descends into ordinary intercourse. 

 " If they are not intimate friends, they never say I and You, which 

 would be a gross incivility. But instead of saying, I am very sensible 

 of the service you have done me, they will say, The service that the 

 Lord or the Doctor has done for his meanest Servant, or his Scholar, 

 has greatly affected me." 



We come next to those perversions in the uses of pronouns which 

 serve to exalt the superior and abase the inferior. " * I ' and ' me ' are 

 expressed by several terms in Siamese ; as (1) between a master and 

 slave ; (2) between a slave and master ; (3) between a commoner and 

 a nobleman ; (4) between persons of equal rank ; while there is, lastly, 

 a form of address which is only used by the priests." Still more devel- 

 oped is this system among the excessively ceremonious Japanese. " In 

 Japan all classes have an ' I ' peculiar to themselves, which no other 

 class may use ; and there is one exclusively appropriated by the Mi- 

 kado . . . and one confined to women. . . . There are eight pronouns 

 of the second person peculiar to servants, pupils, and children." Though 

 in the West the distinctions established by abusing pronominal forms 

 have not been so much elaborated, yet they have been sufficiently 

 marked. In Germany " in old times ... all inferiors were spoken to 

 in the third person singular, as ' er ' : " that is, an oblique form by which 

 the inferior was not directly addressed, but merely referred to, as 

 though in speaking to another person served to disconnect him from 

 the speaker. And then we have the converse fact that " inferiors in- 

 variably use the third person plural in addressing their superiors: " a 

 form which, while dignifying the superior by pluralization, increases 

 the distance of the inferior by its relative indirectness ; and a form 

 which, beginning as a propitiation of those in power, has, like the rest, 

 spread till it has become a general propitiation. In our own speech, 

 lacking such misuse of pronouns as serves to humiliate, there exists 

 only that substitution of the " you " for the " thou," which, once a 

 complimentary exaltation, has now by diffusion through all ranks wholly 

 lost its ceremonial meaning. Evidently it retained some ceremonial 

 meaning at the time when the Quakers persisted in using " thou ; " 

 and that in still earlier times it was employed to ascribe dignity is 

 inferable from the fact that during the Merovingian period in France, 

 when the habit was but partially established, the kings ordered that 

 they should be addressed in the plural. Whoever fails to think that 

 calling him " you " once served to exalt the person addressed, will be 

 aided by contemplating this perversion of speech in its primitive and 

 more emphatic shape ; as in Samoa, where they say to a chief, " Have 

 you two come ? " or, " Are you two going ? " 



Since the}' state in words what obeisances express by acts, forms of 

 address, of course, have the same general relations to social types. The 

 parallelisms must be brieflv noted. 



