Owen — Revision of Pro7iouns. 65 



As a matter of historical fact a subject sign was so de- 

 veloped. A word meaning active was used with the subject 

 of the active verb. Activity being, however, but an indirect and 

 probably subconscious means for suggesting subjectivity or use 

 as first term, the original meaning was lost ; and the word at 

 one time meaning ^'active" came to mean "used as subject."^ 



At the outset, no doubt, "activity" was used as an actual part 

 of the speaker's thought; but "subjectivity" regarded merely the 

 putting together of thought factors. The value of the word for 

 "activity" sank accordingly from the structural to the instruc- 

 tional rank, from that of a sign of meaning to that of a sign 

 of function. Morphologically speaking, it was "emptied of its 

 meaning," or became "an empty word," that is, in the present 

 case, a function-sign. 



ITow the number of such signs is in lingnistic practice small. 

 Each mav therefore reduce its acoustic bulk or shrink in vol- 

 ume, becoming even a single letter, without material danger of 

 confusion with its fellows. Such a sign, moreover, would natur- 

 ally stand beside the name of the idea whose place in thought- 

 structure it determines. I^aturally, also, the order of the two 

 would be, first, the name of the idea ; second, the sign of what 

 to do with it. These two, again, the idea and what to do with 

 it, marking a single stage of expressional progTcss, would nat- 

 urallv combine in a sinsrle sentence-member or word. Such, in 

 fact, is the history of an Indo-European subject-sign, the "s" 

 ending of the nominative case, first a separate word naming an 

 idea or thought-element, later the indication of another idea's 

 function, afterward reduced in volume, at last united to the 

 name of the subject-idea.^ 



^That such is the fact appears conspicuously when the subject-sign is used 

 with the eminently inactive subject of the passive voice. 



2 That this same 's' may also have the idea-naming value of singular number 

 and masculine gender, is no derogation to its value as a function-sign ; it is a mere 

 illustration of what may be known at pleasure as linguistic economy or linguistic 

 poverty. Separate inflections might uniformly have been used for number, gen- 

 der and case ; but as a matter of fact they were not. 



It is notev-'orthy also that the nominative and the subjective categories do 

 not exactly coincide, as appears in the occasional use of the last term or predi- 

 cate in the nominative, that is, the case peculiarly appropriate to a subject or 

 first-term case. The grounds of this inconsistency do not here require examin- 

 ation, attention being invited merely to the general fact that language does pos- 

 sess a method, somewhat clumsy, very inconsistent and quite incomplete, yet an 

 available method for distinguishing idea-function. 



