Language Part 9

How is it with the alternation of subjective and objective in the p.r.o.noun? Granted that _whom_ is a weak sister, that the two cases have been leveled in _you_ (in _it_, _that_, and _what_ they were never distinct, so far as we can tell[141]), and that _her_ as an objective is a trifle weak because of its formal ident.i.ty with the possessive _her_, is there any reason to doubt the vitality of such alternations as _I see the man_ and _the man sees me_? Surely the distinction between subjective _I_ and objective _me_, between subjective _he_ and objective _him_, and correspondingly for other personal p.r.o.nouns, belongs to the very core of the language. We can throw _whom_ to the dogs, somehow make s.h.i.+ft to do without an _its_, but to level _I_ and _me_ to a single case--would that not be to un-English our language beyond recognition?

There is no drift toward such horrors as _Me see him_ or _I see he_.

True, the phonetic disparity between _I_ and _me_, _he_ and _him_, _we_ and _us_, has been too great for any serious possibility of form leveling. It does not follow that the case distinction as such is still vital. One of the most insidious peculiarities of a linguistic drift is that where it cannot destroy what lies in its way it renders it innocuous by was.h.i.+ng the old significance out of it. It turns its very enemies to its own uses. This brings us to the second of the major drifts, the tendency to fixed position in the sentence, determined by the syntactic relation of the word.

[Footnote 141: Except in so far as _that_ has absorbed other functions than such as originally belonged to it. It was only a nominative-accusative neuter to begin with.]

We need not go into the history of this all-important drift. It is enough to know that as the inflected forms of English became scantier, as the syntactic relations were more and more inadequately expressed by the forms of the words themselves, position in the sentence gradually took over functions originally foreign to it. _The man_ in _the man sees the dog_ is subjective; in _the dog sees the man_, objective. Strictly parallel to these sentences are _he sees the dog_ and _the dog sees him_. Are the subjective value of _he_ and the objective value of _him_ entirely, or even mainly, dependent on the difference of form? I doubt it. We could hold to such a view if it were possible to say _the dog sees he_ or _him sees the dog_. It was once possible to say such things, but we have lost the power. In other words, at least part of the case feeling in _he_ and _him_ is to be credited to their position before or after the verb. May it not be, then, that _he_ and _him_, _we_ and _us_, are not so much subjective and objective forms as pre-verbal and post-verbal[142] forms, very much as _my_ and _mine_ are now pre-nominal and post-nominal forms of the possessive (_my father_ but _father mine_; _it is my book_ but _the book is mine_)? That this interpretation corresponds to the actual drift of the English language is again indicated by the language of the folk. The folk says _it is me_, not _it is I_, which is "correct" but just as falsely so as the _whom did you see_? that we have a.n.a.lyzed. _I'm the one_, _it's me_; _we're the ones_, _it's us that will win out_--such are the live parallelisms in English to-day. There is little doubt that _it is I_ will one day be as impossible in English as _c'est je_, for _c'est moi_, is now in French.

[Footnote 142: Aside from the interrogative: _am I?_ _is he?_ Emphasis counts for something. There is a strong tendency for the old "objective"

forms to bear a stronger stress than the "subjective" forms. This is why the stress in locutions like _He didn't go, did he?_ and _isn't he?_ is thrown back on the verb; it is not a matter of logical emphasis.]

How differently our _I_: _me_ feels than in Chaucer's day is shown by the Chaucerian _it am I_. Here the distinctively subjective aspect of the _I_ was enough to influence the form of the preceding verb in spite of the introductory _it_; Chaucer's locution clearly felt more like a Latin _sum ego_ than a modern _it is I_ or colloquial _it is me_. We have a curious bit of further evidence to prove that the English personal p.r.o.nouns have lost some share of their original syntactic force. Were _he_ and _she_ subjective forms pure and simple, were they not striving, so to speak, to become caseless absolutives, like _man_ or any other noun, we should not have been able to coin such compounds as _he-goat_ and _she-goat_, words that are psychologically a.n.a.logous to _bull-moose_ and _mother-bear_. Again, in inquiring about a new-born baby, we ask _Is it a he or a she?_ quite as though _he_ and _she_ were the equivalents of _male_ and _female_ or _boy_ and _girl_. All in all, we may conclude that our English case system is weaker than it looks and that, in one way or another, it is destined to get itself reduced to an absolutive (caseless) form for all nouns and p.r.o.nouns but those that are animate. Animate nouns and p.r.o.nouns are sure to have distinctive possessive forms for an indefinitely long period.

Meanwhile observe that the old alignment of case forms is being invaded by two new categories--a positional category (pre-verbal, post-verbal) and a cla.s.sificatory category (animate, inanimate). The facts that in the possessive animate nouns and p.r.o.nouns are destined to be more and more sharply distinguished from inanimate nouns and p.r.o.nouns (_the man's_, but _of the house_; _his_, but _of it_) and that, on the whole, it is only animate p.r.o.nouns that distinguish pre-verbal and post-verbal forms[143] are of the greatest theoretical interest. They show that, however the language strive for a more and more a.n.a.lytic form, it is by no means manifesting a drift toward the expression of "pure" relational concepts in the Indo-Chinese manner.[144] The insistence on the concreteness of the relational concepts is clearly stronger than the destructive power of the most sweeping and persistent drifts that we know of in the history and prehistory of our language.

[Footnote 143: _They_: _them_ as an inanimate group may be looked upon as a kind of borrowing from the animate, to which, in feeling, it more properly belongs.]

[Footnote 144: See page 155.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 144 refers to the paragraph beginning on line 4795.]

The drift toward the abolition of most case distinctions and the correlative drift toward position as an all-important grammatical method are accompanied, in a sense dominated, by the last of the three major drifts that I have referred to. This is the drift toward the invariable word. In a.n.a.lyzing the "whom" sentence I pointed out that the rhetorical emphasis natural to an interrogative p.r.o.noun lost something by its form variability (_who_, _whose_, _whom_). This striving for a simple, unnuanced correspondence between idea and word, as invariable as may be, is very strong in English. It accounts for a number of tendencies which at first sight seem unconnected. Certain well-established forms, like the present third person singular _-s_ of _works_ or the plural _-s_ of _books_, have resisted the drift to invariable words, possibly because they symbolize certain stronger form cravings that we do not yet fully understand. It is interesting to note that derivations that get away sufficiently from the concrete notion of the radical word to exist as independent conceptual centers are not affected by this elusive drift.

As soon as the derivation runs danger of being felt as a mere nuancing of, a finicky play on, the primary concept, it tends to be absorbed by the radical word, to disappear as such. English words crave s.p.a.ces between them, they do not like to huddle in cl.u.s.ters of slightly divergent centers of meaning, each edging a little away from the rest.

_Goodness_, a noun of quality, almost a noun of relation, that takes its cue from the concrete idea of "good" without necessarily predicating that quality (e.g., _I do not think much of his goodness_) is sufficiently s.p.a.ced from _good_ itself not to need fear absorption.

Similarly, _unable_ can hold its own against _able_ because it destroys the latter's sphere of influence; _unable_ is psychologically as distinct from _able_ as is _blundering_ or _stupid_. It is different with adverbs in _-ly_. These lean too heavily on their adjectives to have the kind of vitality that English demands of its words. _Do it quickly!_ drags psychologically. The nuance expressed by _quickly_ is too close to that of _quick_, their circles of concreteness are too nearly the same, for the two words to feel comfortable together. The adverbs in _-ly_ are likely to go to the wall in the not too distant future for this very reason and in face of their obvious usefulness.

Another instance of the sacrifice of highly useful forms to this impatience of nuancing is the group _whence_, _whither_, _hence_, _hither_, _thence_, _thither_. They could not persist in live usage because they impinged too solidly upon the circles of meaning represented by the words _where_, _here_ and _there_. In saying _whither_ we feel too keenly that we repeat all of _where_. That we add to _where_ an important nuance of direction irritates rather than satisfies. We prefer to merge the static and the directive (_Where do you live?_ like _Where are you going?_) or, if need be, to overdo a little the concept of direction (_Where are you running to?_).

Now it is highly symptomatic of the nature of the drift away from word cl.u.s.ters that we do not object to nuances as such, we object to having the nuances formally earmarked for us. As a matter of fact our vocabulary is rich in near-synonyms and in groups of words that are psychologically near relatives, but these near-synonyms and these groups do not hang together by reason of etymology. We are satisfied with _believe_ and _credible_ just because they keep aloof from each other.

_Good_ and _well_ go better together than _quick_ and _quickly_. The English vocabulary is a rich medley because each English word wants its own castle. Has English long been peculiarly receptive to foreign words because it craves the staking out of as many word areas as possible, or, conversely, has the mechanical imposition of a flood of French and Latin loan-words, unrooted in our earlier tradition, so dulled our feeling for the possibilities of our native resources that we are allowing these to shrink by default? I suspect that both propositions are true. Each feeds on the other. I do not think it likely, however, that the borrowings in English have been as mechanical and external a process as they are generally represented to have been. There was something about the English drift as early as the period following the Norman Conquest that welcomed the new words. They were a compensation for something that was weakening within.

VIII

LANGUAGE AS A HISTORICAL PRODUCT: PHONETIC LAW

I have preferred to take up in some detail the a.n.a.lysis of our hesitation in using a locution like "Whom did you see?" and to point to some of the English drifts, particular and general, that are implied by this hesitation than to discuss linguistic change in the abstract. What is true of the particular idiom that we started with is true of everything else in language. Nothing is perfectly static. Every word, every grammatical element, every locution, every sound and accent is a slowly changing configuration, molded by the invisible and impersonal drift that is the life of language. The evidence is overwhelming that this drift has a certain consistent direction. Its speed varies enormously according to circ.u.mstances that it is not always easy to define. We have already seen that Lithuanian is to-day nearer its Indo-European prototype than was the hypothetical Germanic mother-tongue five hundred or a thousand years before Christ. German has moved more slowly than English; in some respects it stands roughly midway between English and Anglo-Saxon, in others it has of course diverged from the Anglo-Saxon line. When I pointed out in the preceding chapter that dialects formed because a language broken up into local segments could not move along the same drift in all of these segments, I meant of course that it could not move along identically the same drift. The general drift of a language has its depths. At the surface the current is relatively fast. In certain features dialects drift apart rapidly. By that very fact these features betray themselves as less fundamental to the genius of the language than the more slowly modifiable features in which the dialects keep together long after they have grown to be mutually alien forms of speech. But this is not all. The momentum of the more fundamental, the pre-dialectic, drift is often such that languages long disconnected will pa.s.s through the same or strikingly similar phases. In many such cases it is perfectly clear that there could have been no dialectic interinfluencing.

These parallelisms in drift may operate in the phonetic as well as in the morphological sphere, or they may affect both at the same time. Here is an interesting example. The English type of plural represented by _foot_: _feet_, _mouse_: _mice_ is strictly parallel to the German _Fuss_: _Fusse_, _Maus_: _Mause_. One would be inclined to surmise that these dialectic forms go back to old Germanic or West-Germanic alternations of the same type. But the doc.u.mentary evidence shows conclusively that there could have been no plurals of this type in primitive Germanic. There is no trace of such vocalic mutation ("umlaut") in Gothic, our most archaic Germanic language. More significant still is the fact that it does not appear in our oldest Old High German texts and begins to develop only at the very end of the Old High German period (circa 1000 A.D.). In the Middle High German period the mutation was carried through in all dialects. The typical Old High German forms are singular _fuoss_, plural _fuossi_;[145] singular _mus_, plural _musi_. The corresponding Middle High German forms are _fuoss_, _fuesse_; _mus_, _muse_. Modern German _Fuss_: _Fusse_, _Maus_: _Mause_ are the regular developments of these medieval forms. Turning to Anglo-Saxon, we find that our modern English forms correspond to _fot_, _fet_; _mus_, _mys_.[146] These forms are already in use in the earliest English monuments that we possess, dating from the eighth century, and thus antedate the Middle High German forms by three hundred years or more. In other words, on this particular point it took German at least three hundred years to catch up with a phonetic-morphological drift[147]

that had long been under way in English. The mere fact that the affected vowels of related words (Old High German _uo_, Anglo-Saxon _o_) are not always the same shows that the affection took place at different periods in German and English.[148] There was evidently some general tendency or group of tendencies at work in early Germanic, long before English and German had developed as such, that eventually drove both of these dialects along closely parallel paths.

[Footnote 145: I have changed the Old and Middle High German orthography slightly in order to bring it into accord with modern usage. These purely orthographical changes are immaterial. The _u_ of _mus_ is a long vowel, very nearly like the _oo_ of English _moose_.]

[Footnote 146: The vowels of these four words are long; _o_ as in _rode_, _e_ like _a_ of _fade_, _u_ like _oo_ of _brood_, _y_ like German _u_.]

[Footnote 147: Or rather stage in a drift.]

[Footnote 148: Anglo-Saxon _fet_ is "unrounded" from an older _fot_, which is phonetically related to _fot_ precisely as is _mys_ (i.e., _mus_) to _mus_. Middle High German _ue_ (Modern German _u_) did not develop from an "umlauted" prototype of Old High German _uo_ and Anglo-Saxon _o_, but was based directly on the dialectic _uo_. The unaffected prototype was long _o_. Had this been affected in the earliest Germanic or West-Germanic period, we should have had a pre-German alternation _fot_: _foti_; this older _o_ could not well have resulted in _ue_. Fortunately we do not need inferential evidence in this case, yet inferential comparative methods, if handled with care, may be exceedingly useful. They are indeed indispensable to the historian of language.]

How did such strikingly individual alternations as _fot_: _fet_, _fuoss_: _fuesse_ develop? We have now reached what is probably the most central problem in linguistic history, gradual phonetic change.

"Phonetic laws" make up a large and fundamental share of the subject-matter of linguistics. Their influence reaches far beyond the proper sphere of phonetics and invades that of morphology, as we shall see. A drift that begins as a slight phonetic readjustment or unsettlement may in the course of millennia bring about the most profound structural changes. The mere fact, for instance, that there is a growing tendency to throw the stress automatically on the first syllable of a word may eventually change the fundamental type of the language, reducing its final syllables to zero and driving it to the use of more and more a.n.a.lytical or symbolic[149] methods. The English phonetic laws involved in the rise of the words _foot_, _feet_, _mouse_ and _mice_ from their early West-Germanic prototypes _fot_, _foti_, _mus_, _musi_[150] may be briefly summarized as follows:

[Footnote 149: See page 133.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 149 refers to the paragraph beginning on line 4081.]

[Footnote 150: Primitive Germanic _fot(s)_, _fotiz_, _mus_, _musiz_; Indo-European _pods_, _podes_, _mus_, _muses_. The vowels of the first syllables are all long.]

1. In _foti_ "feet" the long _o_ was colored by the following _i_ to long _o_, that is, _o_ kept its lip-rounded quality and its middle height of tongue position but antic.i.p.ated the front tongue position of the _i_; _o_ is the resulting compromise. This a.s.similatory change was regular, i.e., every accented long _o_ followed by an _i_ in the following syllable automatically developed to long _o_; hence _tothi_ "teeth" became _tothi_, _fodian_ "to feed" became _fodian_. At first there is no doubt the alternation between _o_ and _o_ was not felt as intrinsically significant. It could only have been an unconscious mechanical adjustment such as may be observed in the speech of many to-day who modify the "oo" sound of words like _you_ and _few_ in the direction of German _u_ without, however, actually departing far enough from the "oo" vowel to prevent their acceptance of _who_ and _you_ as satisfactory rhyming words. Later on the quality of the _o_ vowel must have departed widely enough from that of _o_ to enable _o_ to rise in consciousness[151] as a neatly distinct vowel. As soon as this happened, the expression of plurality in _foti_, _tothi_, and a.n.a.logous words became symbolic and fusional, not merely fusional.

[Footnote 151: Or in that unconscious sound patterning which is ever on the point of becoming conscious. See page 57.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 151 refers to the paragraph beginning on line 1797.]

2. In _musi_ "mice" the long _u_ was colored by the following _i_ to long _u_. This change also was regular; _lusi_ "lice" became _lusi_, _kui_ "cows" became _kui_ (later simplified to _ku_; still preserved as _ki-_ in _kine_), _fulian_ "to make foul" became _fulian_ (still preserved as _-file_ in _defile_). The psychology of this phonetic law is entirely a.n.a.logous to that of 1.

3. The old drift toward reducing final syllables, a rhythmic consequence of the strong Germanic stress on the first syllable, now manifested itself. The final _-i_, originally an important functional element, had long lost a great share of its value, transferred as that was to the symbolic vowel change (_o_: _o_). It had little power of resistance, therefore, to the drift. It became dulled to a colorless _-e_; _foti_ became _fote_.

4. The weak _-e_ finally disappeared. Probably the forms _fote_ and _fot_ long coexisted as prosodic variants according to the rhythmic requirements of the sentence, very much as _Fusse_ and _Fuss'_ now coexist in German.

5. The _o_ of _fot_ became "unrounded" to long _e_ (our present _a_ of _fade_). The alternation of _fot_: _foti_, transitionally _fot_: _foti_, _fote_, _fot_, now appears as _fot_: _fet_. a.n.a.logously, _toth_ appears as _teth_, _fodian_ as _fedian_, later _fedan_. The new long _e_-vowel "fell together" with the older _e_-vowel already existent (e.g., _her_ "here," _he_ "he"). Henceforward the two are merged and their later history is in common. Thus our present _he_ has the same vowel as _feet_, _teeth_, and _feed_. In other words, the old sound pattern _o_, _e_, after an interim of _o_, _o_, _e_, reappeared as _o_, _e_, except that now the _e_ had greater "weight" than before.

6. _Fot_: _fet_, _mus_: _mus_ (written _mys_) are the typical forms of Anglo-Saxon literature. At the very end of the Anglo-Saxon period, say about 1050 to 1100 A.D., the _u_, whether long or short, became unrounded to _i_. _Mys_ was then p.r.o.nounced _mis_ with long _i_ (rhyming with present _niece_). The change is a.n.a.logous to 5, but takes place several centuries later.

7. In Chaucer's day (circa 1350-1400 A.D.) the forms were still _fot_: _fet_ (written _foot_, _feet_) and _mus_: _mis_ (written very variably, but _mous_, _myse_ are typical). About 1500 all the long _i_-vowels, whether original (as in _write_, _ride_, _wine_) or unrounded from Anglo-Saxon _u_ (as in _hide_, _bride_, _mice_, _defile_), became diphthongized to _ei_ (i.e., _e_ of _met_ + short _i_). Shakespeare p.r.o.nounced _mice_ as _meis_ (almost the same as the present c.o.c.kney p.r.o.nunciation of _mace_).

8. About the same time the long _u_-vowels were diphthongized to _ou_ (i.e., _o_ of present Scotch _not_ + _u_ of _full_). The Chaucerian _mus_: _mis_ now appears as the Shakespearean _mous_: _meis_. This change may have manifested itself somewhat later than 7; all English dialects have diphthongized old Germanic long _i_,[152] but the long undiphthongized _u_ is still preserved in Lowland Scotch, in which _house_ and _mouse_ rhyme with our _loose_. 7 and 8 are a.n.a.logous developments, as were 5 and 6; 8 apparently lags behind 7 as 6, centuries earlier, lagged behind 7.

[Footnote 152: As have most Dutch and German dialects.]

9. Some time before 1550 the long _e_ of _fet_ (written _feet_) took the position that had been vacated by the old long _i_, now diphthongized (see 7), i.e., _e_ took the higher tongue position of _i_. Our (and Shakespeare's) "long _e_" is, then, phonetically the same as the old long _i_. _Feet_ now rhymed with the old _write_ and the present _beat_.

10. About the same time the long _o_ of _fot_ (written _foot_) took the position that had been vacated by the old long _u_, now diphthongized (see 8), i.e., _o_ took the higher tongue position of _u_. Our (and Shakespeare's) "long _oo_" is phonetically the same as the old long _u_.

_Foot_ now rhymed with the old _out_ and the present _boot_. To summarize 7 to 10, Shakespeare p.r.o.nounced _meis_, _mous_, _fit_, _fut_, of which _meis_ and _mous_ would affect our ears as a rather "mincing"

rendering of our present _mice_ and _mouse_, _fit_ would sound practically identical with (but probably a bit more "drawled" than) our present _feet_, while _foot_, rhyming with _boot_, would now be set down as "broad Scotch."

11. Gradually the first vowel of the diphthong in _mice_ (see 7) was retracted and lowered in position. The resulting diphthong now varies in different English dialects, but _ai_ (i.e., _a_ of _father_, but shorter, + short _i_) may be taken as a fairly accurate rendering of its average quality.[153] What we now call the "long _i_" (of words like _ride, bite, mice_) is, of course, an _ai_-diphthong. _Mice_ is now p.r.o.nounced _mais_.

[Footnote 153: At least in America.]

12. a.n.a.logously to 11, the first vowel of the diphthong in _mouse_ (see 8) was unrounded and lowered in position. The resulting diphthong may be phonetically rendered _au_, though it too varies considerably according to dialect. _Mouse_, then, is now p.r.o.nounced _maus_.

13. The vowel of _foot_ (see 10) became "open" in quality and shorter in quant.i.ty, i.e., it fell together with the old short _u_-vowel of words like _full_, _wolf_, _wool_. This change has taken place in a number of words with an originally long _u_ (Chaucerian long close _o_), such as _forsook_, _hook_, _book_, _look_, _rook_, _shook_, all of which formerly had the vowel of _boot_. The older vowel, however, is still preserved in most words of this cla.s.s, such as _fool_, _moon_, _spool_, _stoop_. It is highly significant of the nature of the slow spread of a "phonetic law" that there is local vacillation at present in several words. One hears _roof_, _soot_, and _hoop_, for instance, both with the "long" vowel of _boot_ and the "short" of _foot_. It is impossible now, in other words, to state in a definitive manner what is the "phonetic law" that regulated the change of the older _foot_ (rhyming with _boot_) to the present _foot_. We know that there is a strong drift towards the short, open vowel of _foot_, but whether or not all the old "long _oo_"

words will eventually be affected we cannot presume to say. If they all, or practically all, are taken by the drift, phonetic law 13 will be as "regular," as sweeping, as most of the twelve that have preceded it. If not, it may eventually be possible, if past experience is a safe guide, to show that the modified words form a natural phonetic group, that is, that the "law" will have operated under certain definable limiting conditions, e.g., that all words ending in a voiceless consonant (such as _p_, _t_, _k_, _f_) were affected (e.g., _hoof_, _foot_, _look_, _roof_), but that all words ending in the _oo_-vowel or in a voiced consonant remained unaffected (e.g., _do_, _food_, _move_, _fool_).

Whatever the upshot, we may be reasonably certain that when the "phonetic law" has run its course, the distribution of "long" and "short" vowels in the old _oo_-words will not seem quite as erratic as at the present transitional moment.[154] We learn, incidentally, the fundamental fact that phonetic laws do not work with spontaneous automatism, that they are simply a formula for a consummated drift that sets in at a psychologically exposed point and gradually worms its way through a gamut of phonetically a.n.a.logous forms.

[Footnote 154: It is possible that other than purely phonetic factors are also at work in the history of these vowels.]