Language Part 8

LANGUAGE AS A HISTORICAL PRODUCT: DRIFT

Every one knows that language is variable. Two individuals of the same generation and locality, speaking precisely the same dialect and moving in the same social circles, are never absolutely at one in their speech habits. A minute investigation of the speech of each individual would reveal countless differences of detail--in choice of words, in sentence structure, in the relative frequency with which particular forms or combinations of words are used, in the p.r.o.nunciation of particular vowels and consonants and of combinations of vowels and consonants, in all those features, such as speed, stress, and tone, that give life to spoken language. In a sense they speak slightly divergent dialects of the same language rather than identically the same language.

There is an important difference, however, between individual and dialectic variations. If we take two closely related dialects, say English as spoken by the "middle cla.s.ses" of London and English as spoken by the average New Yorker, we observe that, however much the individual speakers in each city differ from each other, the body of Londoners forms a compact, relatively unified group in contrast to the body of New Yorkers. The individual variations are swamped in or absorbed by certain major agreements--say of p.r.o.nunciation and vocabulary--which stand out very strongly when the language of the group as a whole is contrasted with that of the other group. This means that there is something like an ideal linguistic ent.i.ty dominating the speech habits of the members of each group, that the sense of almost unlimited freedom which each individual feels in the use of his language is held in leash by a tacitly directing norm. One individual plays on the norm in a way peculiar to himself, the next individual is nearer the dead average in that particular respect in which the first speaker most characteristically departs from it but in turn diverges from the average in a way peculiar to himself, and so on. What keeps the individual's variations from rising to dialectic importance is not merely the fact that they are in any event of small moment--there are well-marked dialectic variations that are of no greater magnitude than individual variations within a dialect--it is chiefly that they are silently "corrected" or canceled by the consensus of usage. If all the speakers of a given dialect were arranged in order in accordance with the degree of their conformity to average usage, there is little doubt that they would const.i.tute a very finely intergrading series cl.u.s.tered about a well-defined center or norm. The differences between any two neighboring speakers of the series[122] would be negligible for any but the most microscopic linguistic research. The differences between the outer-most members of the series are sure to be considerable, in all likelihood considerable enough to measure up to a true dialectic variation. What prevents us from saying that these untypical individuals speak distinct dialects is that their peculiarities, as a unified whole, are not referable to another norm than the norm of their own series.

[Footnote 122: In so far as they do not fall out of the normal speech group by reason of a marked speech defect or because they are isolated foreigners that have acquired the language late in life.]

If the speech of any member of the series could actually be made to fit into another dialect series,[123] we should have no true barriers between dialects (and languages) at all. We should merely have a continuous series of individual variations extending over the whole range of a historically unified linguistic area, and the cutting up of this large area (in some cases embracing parts of several continents) into distinct dialects and languages would be an essentially arbitrary proceeding with no warrant save that of practical convenience. But such a conception of the nature of dialectic variation does not correspond to the facts as we know them. Isolated individuals may be found who speak a compromise between two dialects of a language, and if their number and importance increases they may even end by creating a new dialectic norm of their own, a dialect in which the extreme peculiarities of the parent dialects are ironed out. In course of time the compromise dialect may absorb the parents, though more frequently these will tend to linger indefinitely as marginal forms of the enlarged dialect area. But such phenomena--and they are common enough in the history of language--are evidently quite secondary. They are closely linked with such social developments as the rise of nationality, the formation of literatures that aim to have more than a local appeal, the movement of rural populations into the cities, and all those other tendencies that break up the intense localism that unsophisticated man has always found natural.

[Footnote 123: Observe that we are speaking of an individual's speech as a whole. It is not a question of isolating some particular peculiarity of p.r.o.nunciation or usage and noting its resemblance to or ident.i.ty with a feature in another dialect.]

The explanation of primary dialectic differences is still to seek. It is evidently not enough to say that if a dialect or language is spoken in two distinct localities or by two distinct social strata it naturally takes on distinctive forms, which in time come to be divergent enough to deserve the name of dialects. This is certainly true as far as it goes.

Dialects do belong, in the first instance, to very definitely circ.u.mscribed social groups, h.o.m.ogeneous enough to secure the common feeling and purpose needed to create a norm. But the embarra.s.sing question immediately arises, If all the individual variations within a dialect are being constantly leveled out to the dialectic norm, if there is no appreciable tendency for the individual's peculiarities to initiate a dialectic schism, why should we have dialectic variations at all? Ought not the norm, wherever and whenever threatened, automatically to rea.s.sert itself? Ought not the individual variations of each locality, even in the absence of intercourse between them, to cancel out to the same accepted speech average?

If individual variations "on a flat" were the only kind of variability in language, I believe we should be at a loss to explain why and how dialects arise, why it is that a linguistic prototype gradually breaks up into a number of mutually unintelligible languages. But language is not merely something that is spread out in s.p.a.ce, as it were--a series of reflections in individual minds of one and the same timeless picture.

Language moves down time in a current of its own making. It has a drift.

If there were no breaking up of a language into dialects, if each language continued as a firm, self-contained unity, it would still be constantly moving away from any a.s.signable norm, developing new features unceasingly and gradually transforming itself into a language so different from its starting point as to be in effect a new language. Now dialects arise not because of the mere fact of individual variation but because two or more groups of individuals have become sufficiently disconnected to drift apart, or independently, instead of together. So long as they keep strictly together, no amount of individual variation would lead to the formation of dialects. In practice, of course, no language can be spread over a vast territory or even over a considerable area without showing dialectic variations, for it is impossible to keep a large population from segregating itself into local groups, the language of each of which tends to drift independently. Under cultural conditions such as apparently prevail to-day, conditions that fight localism at every turn, the tendency to dialectic cleavage is being constantly counteracted and in part "corrected" by the uniformizing factors already referred to. Yet even in so young a country as America the dialectic differences are not inconsiderable.

Under primitive conditions the political groups are small, the tendency to localism exceedingly strong. It is natural, therefore, that the languages of primitive folk or of non-urban populations in general are differentiated into a great number of dialects. There are parts of the globe where almost every village has its own dialect. The life of the geographically limited community is narrow and intense; its speech is correspondingly peculiar to itself. It is exceedingly doubtful if a language will ever be spoken over a wide area without multiplying itself dialectically. No sooner are the old dialects ironed out by compromises or ousted by the spread and influence of the one dialect which is culturally predominant when a new crop of dialects arises to undo the leveling work of the past. This is precisely what happened in Greece, for instance. In cla.s.sical antiquity there were spoken a large number of local dialects, several of which are represented in the literature. As the cultural supremacy of Athens grew, its dialect, the Attic, spread at the expense of the rest, until, in the so-called h.e.l.lenistic period following the Macedonian conquest, the Attic dialect, in the vulgarized form known as the "Koine," became the standard speech of all Greece. But this linguistic uniformity[124] did not long continue. During the two millennia that separate the Greek of to-day from its cla.s.sical prototype the Koine gradually split up into a number of dialects. Now Greece is as richly diversified in speech as in the time of Homer, though the present local dialects, aside from those of Attica itself, are not the lineal descendants of the old dialects of pre-Alexandrian days.[125] The experience of Greece is not exceptional. Old dialects are being continually wiped out only to make room for new ones. Languages can change at so many points of phonetics, morphology, and vocabulary that it is not surprising that once the linguistic community is broken it should slip off in different directions. It would be too much to expect a locally diversified language to develop along strictly parallel lines.

If once the speech of a locality has begun to drift on its own account, it is practically certain to move further and further away from its linguistic fellows. Failing the r.e.t.a.r.ding effect of dialectic interinfluences, which I have already touched upon, a group of dialects is bound to diverge on the whole, each from all of the others.

[Footnote 124: It is doubtful if we have the right to speak of linguistic uniformity even during the predominance of the Koine. It is hardly conceivable that when the various groups of non-Attic Greeks took on the Koine they did not at once tinge it with dialectic peculiarities induced by their previous speech habits.]

[Footnote 125: The Zaconic dialect of Lacedaemon is the sole exception.

It is not derived from the Koine, but stems directly from the Doric dialect of Sparta.]

In course of time each dialect itself splits up into sub-dialects, which gradually take on the dignity of dialects proper while the primary dialects develop into mutually unintelligible languages. And so the budding process continues, until the divergences become so great that none but a linguistic student, armed with his doc.u.mentary evidence and with his comparative or reconstructive method, would infer that the languages in question were genealogically related, represented independent lines of development, in other words, from a remote and common starting point. Yet it is as certain as any historical fact can be that languages so little resembling each other as Modern Irish, English, Italian, Greek, Russian, Armenian, Persian, and Bengali are but end-points in the present of drifts that converge to a meeting-point in the dim past. There is naturally no reason to believe that this earliest "Indo-European" (or "Aryan") prototype which we can in part reconstruct, in part but dimly guess at, is itself other than a single "dialect" of a group that has either become largely extinct or is now further represented by languages too divergent for us, with our limited means, to recognize as clear kin.[126]

[Footnote 126: Though indications are not lacking of what these remoter kin of the Indo-European languages may be. This is disputed ground, however, and hardly fit subject for a purely general study of speech.]

All languages that are known to be genetically related, i.e., to be divergent forms of a single prototype, may be considered as const.i.tuting a "linguistic stock." There is nothing final about a linguistic stock.

When we set it up, we merely say, in effect, that thus far we can go and no farther. At any point in the progress of our researches an unexpected ray of light may reveal the "stock" as but a "dialect" of a larger group. The terms dialect, language, branch, stock--it goes without saying--are purely relative terms. They are convertible as our perspective widens or contracts.[127] It would be vain to speculate as to whether or not we shall ever be able to demonstrate that all languages stem from a common source. Of late years linguists have been able to make larger historical syntheses than were at one time deemed feasible, just as students of culture have been able to show historical connections between culture areas or inst.i.tutions that were at one time believed to be totally isolated from each other. The human world is contracting not only prospectively but to the backward-probing eye of culture-history. Nevertheless we are as yet far from able to reduce the riot of spoken languages to a small number of "stocks." We must still operate with a quite considerable number of these stocks. Some of them, like Indo-European or Indo-Chinese, are spoken over tremendous reaches; others, like Basque,[128] have a curiously restricted range and are in all likelihood but dwindling remnants of groups that were at one time more widely distributed. As for the single or multiple origin of speech, it is likely enough that language as a human inst.i.tution (or, if one prefers, as a human "faculty") developed but once in the history of the race, that all the complex history of language is a unique cultural event. Such a theory constructed "on general principles" is of no real interest, however, to linguistic science. What lies beyond the demonstrable must be left to the philosopher or the romancer.

[Footnote 127: "Dialect" in contrast to an accepted literary norm is a use of the term that we are not considering.]

[Footnote 128: Spoken in France and Spain in the region of the Pyrenees.]

We must return to the conception of "drift" in language. If the historical changes that take place in a language, if the vast acc.u.mulation of minute modifications which in time results in the complete remodeling of the language, are not in essence identical with the individual variations that we note on every hand about us, if these variations are born only to die without a trace, while the equally minute, or even minuter, changes that make up the drift are forever imprinted on the history of the language, are we not imputing to this history a certain mystical quality? Are we not giving language a power to change of its own accord over and above the involuntary tendency of individuals to vary the norm? And if this drift of language is not merely the familiar set of individual variations seen in vertical perspective, that is historically, instead of horizontally, that is in daily experience, what is it? Language exists only in so far as it is actually used--spoken and heard, written and read. What significant changes take place in it must exist, to begin with, as individual variations. This is perfectly true, and yet it by no means follows that the general drift of language can be understood[129] from an exhaustive descriptive study of these variations alone. They themselves are random phenomena,[130] like the waves of the sea, moving backward and forward in purposeless flux. The linguistic drift has direction. In other words, only those individual variations embody it or carry it which move in a certain direction, just as only certain wave movements in the bay outline the tide. The drift of a language is const.i.tuted by the unconscious selection on the part of its speakers of those individual variations that are c.u.mulative in some special direction. This direction may be inferred, in the main, from the past history of the language. In the long run any new feature of the drift becomes part and parcel of the common, accepted speech, but for a long time it may exist as a mere tendency in the speech of a few, perhaps of a despised few. As we look about us and observe current usage, it is not likely to occur to us that our language has a "slope," that the changes of the next few centuries are in a sense prefigured in certain obscure tendencies of the present and that these changes, when consummated, will be seen to be but continuations of changes that have been already effected. We feel rather that our language is practically a fixed system and that what slight changes are destined to take place in it are as likely to move in one direction as another. The feeling is fallacious. Our very uncertainty as to the impending details of change makes the eventual consistency of their direction all the more impressive.

[Footnote 129: Or rather apprehended, for we do not, in sober fact, entirely understand it as yet.]

[Footnote 130: Not ultimately random, of course, only relatively so.]

Sometimes we can feel where the drift is taking us even while we struggle against it. Probably the majority of those who read these words feel that it is quite "incorrect" to say "Who did you see?" We readers of many books are still very careful to say "Whom did you see?" but we feel a little uncomfortable (uncomfortably proud, it may be) in the process. We are likely to avoid the locution altogether and to say "Who was it you saw?" conserving literary tradition (the "whom") with the dignity of silence.[131] The folk makes no apology. "Whom did you see?"

might do for an epitaph, but "Who did you see?" is the natural form for an eager inquiry. It is of course the uncontrolled speech of the folk to which we must look for advance information as to the general linguistic movement. It is safe to prophesy that within a couple of hundred years from to-day not even the most learned jurist will be saying "Whom did you see?" By that time the "whom" will be as delightfully archaic as the Elizabethan "his" for "its."[132] No logical or historical argument will avail to save this hapless "whom." The demonstration "I: me = he: him = who: whom" will be convincing in theory and will go unheeded in practice.

[Footnote 131: In relative clauses too we tend to avoid the objective form of "who." Instead of "The man whom I saw" we are likely to say "The man that I saw" or "The man I saw."]

[Footnote 132: "Its" was at one time as impertinent a departure as the "who" of "Who did you see?" It forced itself into English because the old cleavage between masculine, feminine, and neuter was being slowly and powerfully supplemented by a new one between thing-cla.s.s and animate-cla.s.s. The latter cla.s.sification proved too vital to allow usage to couple males and things ("his") as against females ("her"). The form "its" had to be created on the a.n.a.logy of words like "man's," to satisfy the growing form feeling. The drift was strong enough to sanction a grammatical blunder.]

Even now we may go so far as to say that the majority of us are secretly wishing they could say "Who did you see?" It would be a weight off their unconscious minds if some divine authority, overruling the lifted finger of the pedagogue, gave them _carte blanche_. But we cannot too frankly antic.i.p.ate the drift and maintain caste. We must affect ignorance of whither we are going and rest content with our mental conflict--uncomfortable conscious acceptance of the "whom," unconscious desire for the "who."[133] Meanwhile we indulge our sneaking desire for the forbidden locution by the use of the "who" in certain twilight cases in which we can cover up our fault by a bit of unconscious special pleading. Imagine that some one drops the remark when you are not listening attentively, "John Smith is coming to-night." You have not caught the name and ask, not "Whom did you say?" but "Who did you say?"

There is likely to be a little hesitation in the choice of the form, but the precedent of usages like "Whom did you see?" will probably not seem quite strong enough to induce a "Whom did you say?" Not quite relevant enough, the grammarian may remark, for a sentence like "Who did you say?" is not strictly a.n.a.logous to "Whom did you see?" or "Whom did you mean?" It is rather an abbreviated form of some such sentence as "Who, did you say, is coming to-night?" This is the special pleading that I have referred to, and it has a certain logic on its side. Yet the case is more hollow than the grammarian thinks it to be, for in reply to such a query as "You're a good hand at bridge, John, aren't you?" John, a little taken aback, might mutter "Did you say me?" hardly "Did you say I?" Yet the logic for the latter ("Did you say I was a good hand at bridge?") is evident. The real point is that there is not enough vitality in the "whom" to carry it over such little difficulties as a "me" can compa.s.s without a thought. The proportion "I : me = he : him = who : whom" is logically and historically sound, but psychologically shaky. "Whom did you see?" is correct, but there is something false about its correctness.

[Footnote 133: Psychoa.n.a.lysts will recognize the mechanism. The mechanisms of "repression of impulse" and of its symptomatic symbolization can be ill.u.s.trated in the most unexpected corners of individual and group psychology. A more general psychology than Freud's will eventually prove them to be as applicable to the groping for abstract form, the logical or esthetic ordering of experience, as to the life of the fundamental instincts.]

It is worth looking into the reason for our curious reluctance to use locutions involving the word "whom" particularly in its interrogative sense. The only distinctively objective forms which we still possess in English are _me_, _him_, _her_ (a little blurred because of its ident.i.ty with the possessive _her_), _us_, _them_, and _whom_. In all other cases the objective has come to be identical with the subjective--that is, in outer form, for we are not now taking account of position in the sentence. We observe immediately in looking through the list of objective forms that _whom_ is psychologically isolated. _Me_, _him_, _her_, _us_, and _them_ form a solid, well-integrated group of objective personal p.r.o.nouns parallel to the subjective series _I_, _he_, _she_, _we_, _they_. The forms _who_ and _whom_ are technically "p.r.o.nouns" but they are not felt to be in the same box as the personal p.r.o.nouns. _Whom_ has clearly a weak position, an exposed flank, for words of a feather tend to flock together, and if one strays behind, it is likely to incur danger of life. Now the other interrogative and relative p.r.o.nouns (_which_, _what_, _that_), with which _whom_ should properly flock, do not distinguish the subjective and objective forms. It is psychologically unsound to draw the line of form cleavage between _whom_ and the personal p.r.o.nouns on the one side, the remaining interrogative and relative p.r.o.nouns on the other. The form groups should be symmetrically related to, if not identical with, the function groups.

Had _which_, _what_, and _that_ objective forms parallel to _whom_, the position of this last would be more secure. As it is, there is something unesthetic about the word. It suggests a form pattern which is not filled out by its fellows. The only way to remedy the irregularity of form distribution is to abandon the _whom_ altogether for we have lost the power to create new objective forms and cannot remodel our _which_-_what_-_that_ group so as to make it parallel with the smaller group _who-whom_. Once this is done, _who_ joins its flock and our unconscious desire for form symmetry is satisfied. We do not secretly chafe at "Whom did you see?" without reason.[134]

[Footnote 134: Note that it is different with _whose_. This has not the support of a.n.a.logous possessive forms in its own functional group, but the a.n.a.logical power of the great body of possessives of nouns (_man's_, _boy's_) as well as of certain personal p.r.o.nouns (_his_, _its_; as predicated possessive also _hers_, _yours_, _theirs_) is sufficient to give it vitality.]

But the drift away from _whom_ has still other determinants. The words _who_ and _whom_ in their interrogative sense are psychologically related not merely to the p.r.o.nouns _which_ and _what_, but to a group of interrogative adverbs--_where_, _when_, _how_--all of which are invariable and generally emphatic. I believe it is safe to infer that there is a rather strong feeling in English that the interrogative p.r.o.noun or adverb, typically an emphatic element in the sentence, should be invariable. The inflective _-m_ of _whom_ is felt as a drag upon the rhetorical effectiveness of the word. It needs to be eliminated if the interrogative p.r.o.noun is to receive all its latent power. There is still a third, and a very powerful, reason for the avoidance of _whom_. The contrast between the subjective and objective series of personal p.r.o.nouns (_I_, _he_, _she_, _we_, _they_: _me_, _him_, _her_, _us_, _them_) is in English a.s.sociated with a difference of position. We say _I see the man_ but _the man sees me_; _he told him_, never _him he told_ or _him told he_. Such usages as the last two are distinctly poetic and archaic; they are opposed to the present drift of the language. Even in the interrogative one does not say _Him did you see?_ It is only in sentences of the type _Whom did you see?_ that an inflected objective before the verb is now used at all. On the other hand, the order in _Whom did you see?_ is imperative because of its interrogative form; the interrogative p.r.o.noun or adverb normally comes first in the sentence (_What are you doing?_ _When did he go?_ _Where are you from?_). In the "whom" of _Whom did you see?_ there is concealed, therefore, a conflict between the order proper to a sentence containing an inflected objective and the order natural to a sentence with an interrogative p.r.o.noun or adverb. The solution _Did you see whom?_ or _You saw whom?_[135] is too contrary to the idiomatic drift of our language to receive acceptance. The more radical solution _Who did you see?_ is the one the language is gradually making for.

[Footnote 135: Aside from certain idiomatic usages, as when _You saw whom?_ is equivalent to _You saw so and so and that so and so is who?_ In such sentences _whom_ is p.r.o.nounced high and lingeringly to emphasize the fact that the person just referred to by the listener is not known or recognized.]

These three conflicts--on the score of form grouping, of rhetorical emphasis, and of order--are supplemented by a fourth difficulty. The emphatic _whom_, with its heavy build (half-long vowel followed by l.a.b.i.al consonant), should contrast with a lightly tripping syllable immediately following. In _whom did_, however, we have an involuntary r.e.t.a.r.dation that makes the locution sound "clumsy." This clumsiness is a phonetic verdict, quite apart from the dissatisfaction due to the grammatical factors which we have a.n.a.lyzed. The same prosodic objection does not apply to such parallel locutions as _what did_ and _when did_.

The vowels of _what_ and _when_ are shorter and their final consonants melt easily into the following _d_, which is p.r.o.nounced in the same tongue position as _t_ and _n_. Our instinct for appropriate rhythms makes it as difficult for us to feel content with _whom did_ as for a poet to use words like _dreamed_ and _hummed_ in a rapid line. Neither common feeling nor the poet's choice need be at all conscious. It may be that not all are equally sensitive to the rhythmic flow of speech, but it is probable that rhythm is an unconscious linguistic determinant even with those who set little store by its artistic use. In any event the poet's rhythms can only be a more sensitive and stylicized application of rhythmic tendencies that are characteristic of the daily speech of his people.

We have discovered no less than four factors which enter into our subtle disinclination to say "Whom did you see?" The uneducated folk that says "Who did you see?" with no twinge of conscience has a more acute flair for the genuine drift of the language than its students. Naturally the four restraining factors do not operate independently. Their separate energies, if we may make bold to use a mechanical concept, are "ca.n.a.lized" into a single force. This force or minute embodiment of the general drift of the language is psychologically registered as a slight hesitation in using the word _whom_. The hesitation is likely to be quite unconscious, though it may be readily acknowledged when attention is called to it. The a.n.a.lysis is certain to be unconscious, or rather unknown, to the normal speaker.[136] How, then, can we be certain in such an a.n.a.lysis as we have undertaken that all of the a.s.signed determinants are really operative and not merely some one of them?

Certainly they are not equally powerful in all cases. Their values are variable, rising and falling according to the individual and the locution.[137] But that they really exist, each in its own right, may sometimes be tested by the method of elimination. If one or other of the factors is missing and we observe a slight diminution in the corresponding psychological reaction ("hesitation" in our case), we may conclude that the factor is in other uses genuinely positive. The second of our four factors applies only to the interrogative use of _whom_, the fourth factor applies with more force to the interrogative than to the relative. We can therefore understand why a sentence like _Is he the man whom you referred to?_ though not as idiomatic as _Is he the man (that) you referred to?_ (remember that it sins against counts one and three), is still not as difficult to reconcile with our innate feeling for English expression as _Whom did you see?_ If we eliminate the fourth factor from the interrogative usage,[138] say in _Whom are you looking at?_ where the vowel following _whom_ relieves this word of its phonetic weight, we can observe, if I am not mistaken, a lesser reluctance to use the _whom_. _Who are you looking at?_ might even sound slightly offensive to ears that welcome _Who did you see?_

[Footnote 136: Students of language cannot be entirely normal in their att.i.tude towards their own speech. Perhaps it would be better to say "nave" than "normal."]

[Footnote 137: It is probably this _variability of value_ in the significant compounds of a general linguistic drift that is responsible for the rise of dialectic variations. Each dialect continues the general drift of the common parent, but has not been able to hold fast to constant values for each component of the drift. Deviations as to the drift itself, at first slight, later c.u.mulative, are therefore unavoidable.]

[Footnote 138: Most sentences beginning with interrogative _whom_ are likely to be followed by _did_ or _does_, _do_. Yet not all.]

We may set up a scale of "hesitation values" somewhat after this fashion:

Value 1: factors 1, 3. "The man whom I referred to."

Value 2: factors 1, 3, 4. "The man whom they referred to."

Value 3: factors 1, 2, 3. "Whom are you looking at?"

Value 4: factors 1, 2, 3, 4. "Whom did you see?"

We may venture to surmise that while _whom_ will ultimately disappear from English speech, locutions of the type _Whom did you see?_ will be obsolete when phrases like _The man whom I referred to_ are still in lingering use. It is impossible to be certain, however, for we can never tell if we have isolated all the determinants of a drift. In our particular case we have ignored what may well prove to be a controlling factor in the history of _who_ and _whom_ in the relative sense. This is the unconscious desire to leave these words to their interrogative function and to concentrate on _that_ or mere word order as expressions of the relative (e.g., _The man that I referred to_ or _The man I referred to_). This drift, which does not directly concern the use of _whom_ as such (merely of _whom_ as a form of _who_), may have made the relative _who_ obsolete before the other factors affecting relative _whom_ have run their course. A consideration like this is instructive because it indicates that knowledge of the general drift of a language is insufficient to enable us to see clearly what the drift is heading for. We need to know something of the relative potencies and speeds of the components of the drift.

It is hardly necessary to say that the particular drifts involved in the use of _whom_ are of interest to us not for their own sake but as symptoms of larger tendencies at work in the language. At least three drifts of major importance are discernible. Each of these has operated for centuries, each is at work in other parts of our linguistic mechanism, each is almost certain to continue for centuries, possibly millennia. The first is the familiar tendency to level the distinction between the subjective and the objective, itself but a late chapter in the steady reduction of the old Indo-European system of syntactic cases.

This system, which is at present best preserved in Lithuanian,[139] was already considerably reduced in the old Germanic language of which English, Dutch, German, Danish, and Swedish are modern dialectic forms.

The seven Indo-European cases (nominative genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative, instrumental) had been already reduced to four (nominative genitive, dative, accusative). We know this from a careful comparison of and reconstruction based on the oldest Germanic dialects of which we still have records (Gothic, Old Icelandic, Old High German, Anglo-Saxon). In the group of West Germanic dialects, for the study of which Old High German, Anglo-Saxon, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon are our oldest and most valuable sources, we still have these four cases, but the phonetic form of the case syllables is already greatly reduced and in certain paradigms particular cases have coalesced. The case system is practically intact but it is evidently moving towards further disintegration. Within the Anglo-Saxon and early Middle English period there took place further changes in the same direction. The phonetic form of the case syllables became still further reduced and the distinction between the accusative and the dative finally disappeared.

The new "objective" is really an amalgam of old accusative and dative forms; thus, _him_, the old dative (we still say _I give him the book_, not "abbreviated" from _I give to him_; compare Gothic _imma_, modern German _ihm_), took over the functions of the old accusative (Anglo-Saxon _hine_; compare Gothic _ina_, Modern German _ihn_) and dative. The distinction between the nominative and accusative was nibbled away by phonetic processes and morphological levelings until only certain p.r.o.nouns retained distinctive subjective and objective forms.

[Footnote 139: Better, indeed, than in our oldest Latin and Greek records. The old Indo-Iranian languages alone (Sanskrit, Avestan) show an equally or more archaic status of the Indo-European parent tongue as regards case forms.]

In later medieval and in modern times there have been comparatively few apparent changes in our case system apart from the gradual replacement of _thou_--_thee_ (singular) and subjective _ye_--objective _you_ (plural) by a single undifferentiated form _you_. All the while, however, the case system, such as it is (subjective-objective, really absolutive, and possessive in nouns; subjective, objective, and possessive in certain p.r.o.nouns) has been steadily weakening in psychological respects. At present it is more seriously undermined than most of us realize. The possessive has little vitality except in the p.r.o.noun and in animate nouns. Theoretically we can still say _the moon's phases_ or _a newspaper's vogue_; practically we limit ourselves pretty much to a.n.a.lytic locutions like _the phases of the moon_ and _the vogue of a newspaper_. The drift is clearly toward the limitation, of possessive forms to animate nouns. All the possessive p.r.o.nominal forms except _its_ and, in part, _their_ and _theirs_, are also animate. It is significant that _theirs_ is hardly ever used in reference to inanimate nouns, that there is some reluctance to so use _their_, and that _its_ also is beginning to give way to _of it_. _The appearance of it_ or _the looks of it_ is more in the current of the language than _its appearance_. It is curiously significant that _its young_ (referring to an animal's cubs) is idiomatically preferable to _the young of it_. The form is only ostensibly neuter, in feeling it is animate; psychologically it belongs with _his children_, not with _the pieces of it_. Can it be that so common a word as _its_ is actually beginning to be difficult? Is it too doomed to disappear? It would be rash to say that it shows signs of approaching obsolescence, but that it is steadily weakening is fairly clear.[140] In any event, it is not too much to say that there is a strong drift towards the restriction of the inflected possessive forms to animate nouns and p.r.o.nouns.

[Footnote 140: Should _its_ eventually drop out, it will have had a curious history. It will have played the role of a stop-gap between _his_ in its non-personal use (see footnote 11, page 167) and the later a.n.a.lytic of _it_.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 140 refers to Footnote 132, beginning on line 5142.]