Let us further illustrate this point by a brief consideration of a subject which is very perplexing to the learners of a foreign language, and which is not less so to the historical students of language in general; a subject which, I believe, has never been explained by the latter with any semblance of satisfaction—gender. All other languages are infested with gender; in English there is no such distinction in words as that of gender. English, it should be needless to say, has words to express difference of sex; that no language can fail to do, for failing in that, it would not communicate the facts and thoughts of every-day life. But grammatical gender has no relation to sex, no relation to the essential characteristics of things. Gender, grammatical gender, is an attribute of words. He creatures are male, she creatures female, and the words which are their names are generally (but not universally) masculine and feminine in all languages. Things neither male nor female are neuter, which means merely, neither. But this is not gender. Gender, as I have said before, is an attribute of words; of words only. For example, the Latin word penna—a pen, or quill, is feminine; in French the word table—table, is also feminine. It is needless to say that there is no question as to the sex of a pen, or of a table; nor is there any quality in either of those objects which has a sexual trait or characteristic. In each case it is the word which is of the feminine gender; and in all, or almost all, languages but English all or almost all words are afflicted with this mysterious pest of gender. How annoying and perplexing it is, and how it complicates the use of language, and makes the acquisition of foreign languages difficult, no student needs be told. For it creates an ever present and far-reaching perplexity. It dominates the construction of the sentence and binds it up in bonds of iron. For every adjective, and in French and other languages having articles, every article which is applied to a noun must be of the gender of that noun. You can not say in Latin bonus penna, a good pen, without “bad grammar,” you must say bona penna. You can not say in French un mauvais table, a bad table, but must say une mauvaise table; nor le table, but la table—although both mean the table, nothing more nor less. The absurdity of this is made very apparent when a feminine word is applied to a male object. Thus majesté—majesty, is feminine; but when a king is called your majesty, the words sa majesté (her majesty) are used because the word majesty is feminine; and instead of saying he (il) did thus or so, we must say she (elle) did it, although the she was a man; the reason being that the word majesté is feminine.[1] All this has been swept clean away in English, in which language there is no distinction of gender but only that of sex: male creatures, or those so personified, are masculine, female, feminine; those which have no sex are neuter; and there an end. English is eminently a language of common sense; and one marked evidence of this trait is its freeing itself entirely from the nuisance of grammatical gender along with other grammatical trammels.[2]

It has freed itself from those trammels; for at one time it was hampered by them sorely. Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, was an inflected speech, and was tied up in the bonds of gender and other grievous grammatical tetherings. This was long ago; but it was after Britain had become England, or Engle-land, the land of the English people and of English speech. When our English forefathers were little better than semi-savages, bloody, barbarous, heathen, worshiping Thor and Woden, and in a state of benighted ignorance of which it would be difficult for those of my readers who have not tried to pierce the darkness of that historical past to form even an approximate notion—at this time, and in this social and intellectual condition of the speakers of the English language, it was copiously provided with grammar. Even Greek had not much the better of it in this respect. It had not only forms for person and number, but gender forms, and cases galore.[3] Take, for example, a word which was English a thousand years ago, just as it is to-day, man. This simple word has undergone no change in all the thousand years, unless by losing a little breadth of sound; it having probably been pronounced mahn, of which sound the rustic mon of provincial England is a relic and representative. But man could not be used pure and simple, under all circumstances and in all cases, in the English of that day any more than, as we have seen, mater and bonus could be so used in Latin. There was the nominative singular—man, simply; the genitive mannes—of a man; the dative men, to or for a man; accusative mannan—a man objectively; nominative plural men; genitive manna—of men, or men’s; and a dative mannum—to or for men.

Of all these various forms or cases of man, the language has freed itself, excepting the genitive singular, mannes, and the nominative plural, men. These have been retained, not by accident, or neglect, but at the dictate of common sense, because convenience and intelligibility required their use. It was found necessary to distinguish the plural from the singular; and the genitive or possessive idea from the simple and absolute; but man as a dative or accusative singular, and men as the same in the plural, were found quite as useful and convenient as the old inflected forms; and therefore (or therefore finally and in a great measure) the latter were discarded. The genitive or possessive has been retained; but it has slightly changed its form; by contraction only, however; mannes has become man’s. The old sign of the possessive was es; and it is this, and not the pronoun his (as once was supposed) that is represented in our possessive case, in which the apostrophe merely marks the elision of the old e. There is really no good reason for the use of the apostrophe, none which would not apply equally to many other cases in which no elision is marked. In the Elizabethan era it was not used, and with no consequent confusion. Mans folly, the boys hat, Johns coat, are as clear in meaning as they would be with the apostrophe; and the possible confusion of the possessive with the plural, as in that fancy of the girls, and that fancy of the girl’s is so remote and so very unlikely as to be worthy of little consideration.

As to English in its earliest form (Anglo-Saxon) suffice it here to say in this regard that it was so largely an inflected language, that is, it varied the forms of its words so numerously to express time of action, mode of action, person, number, case, and gender, that it is in this respect almost as unlike modern English as Greek is, and is little less difficult of acquirement to the English speaking student of to-day than Latin. Its very articles had gender forms as well as case forms; and, moreover, like the Mæso-Gothic and like the Greek it had preserved the old dual number (for the expression of a plural of two) although only in the personal pronoun. A comparative examination of the pronoun of the first person and of the present tense of the verb to have in their ancient and modern forms will show the mode and the reason of the changes by which English has assumed its present character.

OLD ENGLISH PRONOUN OF THE FIRST PERSON.

SINGULAR.DUAL.PLURAL.
N.ic, I.wit, us two.we, we.
G.min, of me.uncer, of us two.ure, of us.
D.me, to, for, with me.unc, to or for us two.us, to, for, with us.
A.me, me (objectively).unc, us two.us, us.

The dual form has been swept away entirely as needless, and worse, cumbrous and perplexing; but it will be seen that we have retained every one of the other forms. Ic has become I; mine is still the possessive of I; me is still not only the objective form of the first person, but the dative, “make me a hat,” or “buy me a horse,” being merely “make a hat to or for me,” or “buy to or for me a horse.” We and us will be recognized at sight, and ure has only changed its pronunciation from oor to our. These forms have been retained in our modern English partly because a pronoun is the most ancient of indestructible parts of speech,[B] but chiefly because of their usefulness, their convenience. A brief consideration of them by the intelligent reader will make this so plain that more need not be said on the subject.

Now let us see the unlike fate of the verb to have. This will be more readily apparent if we look at it in Latin, in French, and in English (it is actually the same word in all these languages, with slight phonetic variation); and we shall thus also have another demonstration of the manner in which English differs from other languages.

SINGULAR.PLURAL.
Latin.French.English.Latin.French.English.
1.habeo.J’ai.I have.habemus.nous avons.we have.
2.habes.tu as.thou hast.habetis.vous avez.you have.
3.habet.il a.he has.habent.ils ont.they have.

It will be seen at once that the Latin and the French have each a special plural form, and also three forms for the three persons of that number. English has swept away this plural form entirely, and uses for the plural in all its persons the simple have of the first person singular. The form of the second person singular has also virtually disappeared; the simple have appearing in its substitute, you have. Whether the form of the third person singular will ever follow the other is doubtful; but it is certain that our language has lost nothing in clearness, and has gained much in simplicity by the doing away with all the formal superfluity by which the old numbers and persons were distinguished.