HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE 213 



excellent book by H. G. Wiwel, 1 in which the same kind of work has 

 been done with regard to Danish and in which the growth of the 

 traditional grammatical system is, moreover, elucidated in a masterly 

 manner. As Danish resembles English more than any other language 

 in grammatical structure we have here another instance of a research 

 in one language being useful to students of a cognate tongue. But 

 it should not be forgotten that in England one of the foremost scholars 

 of our day has done excellent work in this respect, for Henry Sweet's 

 ingenious essay Words, Logic, and Grammar of 1873 2 really not 

 only anticipates such works as Wiwel's, but on some points even goes 

 further in doing away radically with traditional notions and gram- 

 matical prejudices. 



The exaggerated importance attached to Latin is also injurious to 

 the study of English if it causes forms and constructions to be valued 

 according to a Latin standard. Some authors, Milton and Dryden 

 among them, have impaired their English prose by thinking too much 

 of Latin syntax instead of trusting to their natural linguistic instinct, 

 and similarly some grammarians are apt to despise such English 

 idioms as are contrary to Latin rules. The omission of relative 

 pronouns, a preposition placed at the end of a question or of a relative 

 clause, the passive construction with a so-called dative turned into 

 the subject, all these eminently English idioms have not been valued 

 according to their merits. That the ordinary schoolmaster should 

 persecute these things is perhaps only what might be expected so 

 long as a rational course of modern linguistic science as applied to 

 English does not enter into the ordinary school curriculum, but what 

 concerns us more here is that the same underrating of a great number 

 of pithy and expressive constructions is found even in works dealing 

 with historical English grammar. In the same manner, instead of 

 examining impartially the rise and spreading of the past indicative 

 in conditional clauses ("if he was caught, he would be punished") 

 and after such a verb as wish (" I wish he was dead ") , many gram- 

 marians dispose of the use by simply branding it as careless or slip- 

 shod English, precluding themselves from the correct point of view 

 by considering came in "if he came" as necessarily subjunctive. If 

 people would not blink the fact that in modern English " if he came " 

 and "if we were" and "if I do" and a thousand other sentences are 

 no longer either in the indicative or in the subjunctive, they would 

 see how natural it is that the indicative should come to be used in 

 the comparatively very rare instances in which the indicative and 

 subjunctive forms are still distinct, and then we should, probably, 

 soon see an investigation, which is now nowhere found, of the ques- 



1 H. G. Wiwel, Synspunkter for dansk sproglcere. Copenhagen, 1901. 



2 Henry Sweet, Words, Logic, and Grammar, in Transactions of the Philological 

 Society. London, 1873. 



