348 



GRAMMAR 



influence, ' man ' remained as the only singular 

 form, and ' men ' as the only plural ; so, for gram- 

 matical purposes, the plural might truly be said 

 to be made by changing a to e. Similar is the 

 history of 'mouse,' plur. 'mice;' 'goose,' plur. 

 ' geese/ &c. The verb-change, i, a, u, has a most 

 symmetrical look, and seems as though it must 

 have been devised to express the change of rela- 

 tion. As a fact, however, in this and all similar 

 cases, * and a represent in all Germanic languages 

 original e and o ; and these two vowels probably - 

 represent developments of a minute variation in 

 pitch-accent (e being higher than o), dating from 

 beyond the historic period of the parent-speech ; 

 and this variation marks indeed tense distinctions 

 e.g. in Greek, pres. derkomai, perf. dedorka ; 

 but it is also found in nouns such as genos, 

 gonos, and it seems to have had nothing to do 

 with tenses at first. The second change, that in 

 'drank,' 'drunken,' has quite a different origin, 

 but one equally removed from tense-formation. 

 Like the first variation, it represents a very 

 ancient change due to the fact that in the 

 parent language the syllables immediately pre- 

 ceding or following that which bore the stress- 

 accent were weakened : no language shows better 

 than English how to slur a syllable immediately 

 preceding or following a stressed one e.g. in 

 ' alone ' ( where the last syllable is stressed ) the a, 

 originally the full a of 'all,' is sounded like the u 

 of ' but, or the o of ' son ; ' the same sound is 

 commonly heard e.g. in such a word as ' liberty,' 

 instead of the er of the middle syllable, the stress 

 being on the first. Now in the past participle the 

 stress was on the suffix -no (seen as -en in 

 ' drunken'), and hence the vowel-change in the root. 

 But it oddly happens that just the same change 

 took place in the plural of the perfect itself, owing 

 to the plural personal suffixes being stressed in the 

 parent language ; and so the Old English singular 

 third person was 'drank,' but the third plural 

 was ' druncon ' ( a precisely parallel case is the 

 Greek sing, oida, plur. idmen, orig. idm6n). So 

 there was a time when it was right to say ' I 

 drank ' and ' we drunk ; ' but a meaningless dis- 

 tinction like this could not be maintained : one 

 form was bound to supplant the other, and ' drank ' 

 won ; but ' won,' the plur. of ' winnan,' supplanted 

 the sing. ' wann ; ' ' stung ' beat ' stang ; ' ' sprang ' 

 and ' sprung ' were used indifferently at the begin- 

 ning of this century, as by Scott and Byron, to 

 help their rhymes ; and here and in other verbs 

 there is still some fluctuation of use, even among 

 educated men. These examples may suffice to 

 show that vowel-change, though extremely useful 

 to mark grammatical distinctions, was not in any- 

 way designed for this end, which has been reached 

 by unconscious differentiation : for we may infer 

 from what we can observe in languages whose 

 history can be traced that the prehistoric dis- 

 tinctions in the earliest recorded languages had a 

 like accidental origin. 



The history of grammatical forms may then 

 be roughly sketched thus. They arose probably 

 always from composition. Such compounds were 

 subject to phonetic corruption, and the unstressed 

 syllables were slurred and lost their individuality ; 

 or one member of the compound ceased to be used 

 independently, some other word having superseded 

 it, the result being the same as in the first case 

 viz. the loss of special significance in one part of 

 the compound ; and when the part so generalised 

 is the final syllable, that syllable becomes a mere 

 suffix, and can express relation, as the -ly in 

 ' fatherly,' or the -s in ' fathers.' Furthermore, the 

 cases of the nouns and the persons of the verbs 

 thus formed were liable to variations of form in 

 the same noun or verb, due to the incidence of 



stress or the influence of one syllable on another. 

 The irregularities thus produced were again 

 levelled in process of time by the natural tendency 

 to do away with differences which are no longer 

 significant ; hence came symmetry of inflection, 

 which is not the earliest stage in grammar, but 

 rather the result of long unconscious play of 

 physical and mental forces. Again, inflections 

 constantly perished, either by simple phonetic 

 decay, or more commonly through change of 

 nationality, as, for example, when the Teutonic 

 and other races adopted the Latin of the conquered 

 Roman provinces, or when the descendants of the 

 Normans began to use the national speech of 

 England. Thus arises much simplification of what 

 is to the speakers a foreign grammar ; also there 

 is a great growth of hybrid forms, Norman-French 

 words combining with English suffixes, and vice 

 versd. With the dying out of inflections arises a 

 great growth of indeclinable words adverbs, con- 

 junctions, and prepositions : some cases, as the 

 locative or the ablative in Greek, or the instru- 

 mental in Latin, became almost extinct ; the few 

 surviving forms, as Greek locatives in -ei and abla- 

 tives in -5s, belonging to nouns of the o class, lost 

 their connection with those nouns ; they remained 

 isolated forms, freed from the levelling tendencies 

 which affected the other cases of the same noun, 

 because no longer felt to be in connection with 

 them. Thus they could become the origin each of a 

 new group of forms, extending (as did the so-called 

 Greek adverbs in -ei and -os) to many other classes 

 of nouns besides that which gave them birth. 

 Very commonly this isolation of some particular 

 form may arise while the case is still in full use, 

 through some accidental break of connection. In 

 English our one surviving case-form in the genitive 

 is -s, yet this very form has been the parent of 

 numerous adverbs: 'anes' (already mentioned) 

 was the genitive of 'an' (one): the connection 

 was lost, and the adverb ' once ' arose, and pro- 

 duced 'twice' (older form 'twi-es'), 'thrice' by 

 mere analogy, no such genitives having ever 

 existed; so, too, 'forward-s,' ' alway-s,' and many 

 others are analogical forms no true genitives, 

 but copies of the model set by an isolated genitive. 

 It has been well said by one of the greatest of 

 modern German philologists, Professor H. Paul, 

 that isolation is the essential condition of all 

 speech-development. 



Lastly, even while cases survive in use, it is 

 necessaiy to supplement them by prepositions, 

 because (except perhaps in languages which, like 

 the Finnish, nave fifteen cases) there are not 

 enough case-forms to express the numerous rela- 

 tions in space ('to,' 'from,' 'in,' 'upon,' 'by,' 

 'near,' 'with,' &c. ) in which one person or thing 

 may stand to another. As cases die out this need 

 increases, and modern European languages express 

 practically all relations by prepositions. This 

 principle is sometimes called analysis, as con- 

 trasted with the combinatory ' synthetic ' principle 

 of older forms of languages. Naturally no language, 

 is ever completely analytic : even in English words 

 like ' father's ' and ' love's ' still attest that the 

 language was once synthetic. 



Those who desire fuller insight into the principles of 

 grammar (as seen in languages of the Indo-European 

 type) may consult the well-known works of Prof. Max 

 Miiller; A. H. Sayce's Principles of Comparative Philology, 

 and his Introduction to the Science of Language, which 

 treat the subject from a different standpoint ; W. D. 

 Whitney's Life and Growth of Language, and his 

 Linguistic Studies; H. Paul's Principien der Sprach- 

 geschichte, an invaluable but difficult work, translated, 

 though not made materially easier, by Prt Strong. A 

 synoptic view of the relation of the Indo-J^f,ropean lan- 

 guages will be found in the still unfinished (!, "undriss der 

 vergleichenden Grammatik of Karl Brugm' nn (voL i. 



