40 H. I.. BROOMALL : 



sive suffix s. The other case forms have been discarded. 

 " The boy hits the girl " and " the girl hits the boy " indicate 

 their respective distinctions of meaning by the relative position 

 of dor, girl and hits. Pronouns, however, retain some forms 

 of case. In "he hits her " and " she hits him," although the 

 case is shown as in nouns by the position of the words, yet we 

 must also select the proper case form of he or him and she or 

 her. In fact, the position and not the form expresses the case 

 relation. If the blunderer were to say "her hits he" we 

 should siill understand that he meant "she hits him," thus 

 submitting the grammatical interpretation of the expression 

 to the position formula. The grammarian, however, if he be 

 put to parsing the phrase according to his classic traditions, 

 must necessarily find that he is in the nominative case, subject 

 of the verb, and that her is in the objective case, object of the 

 verb, whence he would obtain a directly opposite meaning to 

 what would be understood by any English hearer of the 

 incorrect phrase. A few centuries ago ye as nominative and 

 you as objective were as correctly and carefully discriminated 

 as / and me and he and him are now. To have said you loved 

 them would have sounded just as uneuphonic as to say now 

 me loved them or him loved theui. But you, the case idea being 

 differentiated from the substantive idea of the pronoun and 

 fully expressed by position, suffices now for either use. An 

 error at first, it has become the standard use. The same 

 motive appears in the Quaker use of thee for both cases, now 

 sanctioned among people who would shudder at him for he or 

 her for she. The distinction between the speaker who now 

 says him loved for he loved and the speaker who, some genera- 

 tions ago, said you loved for ye loved, lies only in the fact that 

 the error of the latter is already made legitimate. 



We say he loves and they love. The y is explained as an 

 agreement in person and number with he. But this grammatical 

 notion has almost disappeared in the differentiative develop- 

 ment of English. This .<^ is now an exceptional form and a. 

 meaningless sound, but dulv imitated because it "sounds 



