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liberate his mind from their vitiating influence when dealing with 

 another language. His grammatical vision is too apt to be colored 

 by the Latin spectacles he has worn so long. He will look in English 

 for the same cases, the same tenses and moods as he is familiar with in 

 Latin, and it is surprising how often he finds them in places where a 

 man coming fresh to a grammatical investigation of English without 

 a previous training in Latin would probably have described the 

 actual phenomena in a totally different manner. I open one of the 

 best-known English grammars and find the following statement, 

 namely, "The name of Cases is given to different forms which a 

 noun (or pronoun) assumes to denote its relations to other words in 

 a sentence. Five Cases may be distinguished in English, the Nomin- 

 ative, Objective, Dative, Possessive, Vocative." The author does 

 not appear to have seen his own want of logic in making form the 

 distinguishing feature of cases and yet establishing five cases in 

 English, for in a note he goes on to add, quite unconcernedly, that 

 "with the exception of the Possessive all these have long since 

 lost their characteristic endings, but the use of the Case-names 

 serves to mark the relations formerly indicated by them." In the 

 grammar I quote, as well as in some other modern ones, such dis- 

 tinctions are referred not to Latin, but to Old English, but I think I 

 am right when maintaining that they are really made in deference to 

 Latin syntax rather than to Old English, as shown by the inclusion 

 of the vocative on the one hand and by the exclusion of the instru- 

 mental on the other. Such grammars also classify as accusatives of 

 description or of time, space, measure, or manner, a great many 

 instances where Old English and other cognate languages have the 

 dative or some other case. We should accustom ourselves in dealing 

 with such questions to take each language, and each stage of each 

 language Modern English for instance entirely on its own merits 

 and look the real facts in the face, without any regard to how other 

 languages express the same meanings. In a very able book on the 

 absolute participle in English, the author says that it is right to 

 parse the so-called nominative absolute as " a dative absolute in dis- 

 guise." Now this amounts to very much the same thing as saying 

 that a locomotive is a horse in disguise or to remain within the 

 sphere of language to say that in "he likes pears " he is a dative in 

 disguise, likes a plural in disguise, and pears the subject in disguise, 

 because in Old English the sentence would run "him liciaj? peran." 

 It is unhistorical to treat Modern English as Latin or Old English or 

 any other language in disguise. 



It is often urged that we should hi English distinguish a dative 

 from an accusative on the strength of meaning only, but then we 

 might with equal right say that the adjective is in three different 

 cases in the sentences "my father is old; my father has grown old; 



