This simplification of the forms of words is not absolutely confined to the English language. It appears to be a tendency of language; a modern tendency, using modern in its widest sense. For this movement toward simplification appears in the Latin, in the Romance tongues formed from it, and in the Gothic languages. In none, however, does this simplification, this destruction of superfluous forms, approach, even remotely, that which has taken place in English. So different, indeed, are the results, that the process seems, if not of another kind, at least as having another motive. For example, all the other languages retain the absurdity of gender. In this respect German is no better than French. And let me here remark that the common notion that English and German are most alike of all modern languages, and most nearly akin, is altogether wrong. On the contrary, English and German are very unlike; the most unlike of all the Gothic (or Teutonic) languages. English and French have much greater likeness, both in substance and in structure. There are more words now common to the English language and to the French than to English and German; and the syntax of the French language is very much more like that of the English, than German syntax is. A French sentence literally translated in the French order of the words is, in most cases, so like an English sentence that it requires little change to be correct English, while a similar translation of a German sentence produces an effect both harsh and ludicrous.
The simple form of the English language is the result of two causes. Of these the first in order of time was the conflict and subsequent mingling of the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and the Norman-French. When two languages are thus brought together and are both spoken by two peoples, all that is superfluous in the words of each soon begins to disappear. Each people grasps only the essential in the foreign words which it is obliged to use; each soon adopts the curtailed form of its speech used by the neighbors of another race and speech with whom it is obliged to live in daily communication; and ere long a composite speech of simpler forms takes the place of two tongues—each of which was more complex in structure, but less rich and varied in substance. By this process, out of Anglo-Saxon and Norman-French, came modern English. But not only thus. Other languages have mingled, but never before with such a result. Never was there in any other amalgamation, such an esurience of superfluous form; a devouring which has to all intents and purposes made English a language of one-formed words, and therefore a language practically without formal grammar. In this characteristic is its strength; from this comes its flexibility, its adaptation to all the needs of man, the highest and the lowest. Hence it is eminently the language of common sense as well as of the highest flights of poetry. The English mind saw that it was not necessary to have two words to express possession in the singular and in the plural; that good as clearly expressed the goodness of a woman as of a man, and that of a dozen men as well as that of one; that pens and tables needed no distinction of gender in their names; in fact that nothing was gained, and that much was lost by these grammatical excrescences; and therefore they were done away with very thoroughly, almost entirely. The process was pretty well completed some three hundred years or more ago; since when no noteworthy changes in this respect have taken place. But it is still going on, although so slowly as to be perceptible only on close examination. All the little specks of grammar that English has are mostly to be found in the pronouns, as I have before remarked. In the use of one of these a change is very gradually taking place. Whom has begun to disappear, began, indeed, a long time ago; but of late is fading somewhat more perceptibly. For example: all speakers of good English say, The man whom I saw, not The man who I saw; whom being the objective form of who.
But now-a-days not one person in a hundred of the best bred and best educated speakers of English asks, Whom did you see? but, Who did you see? Indeed, the latter form of the question may be regarded almost as accepted English. Yet in the latter phrase, as in the former, the pronoun is the object of the verb see, and should strictly have the objective form. But, Whom did you see? would now sound very formal and precise, almost priggish, like gotten instead of got. When, however, the pronoun is brought in direct contact with the verb, as in the phrase, The man whom I saw, we shrink from insult to the little semblance of grammar that our language possesses, and give the word its objective form. The time will probably come, although it may be remote, when whom will have altogether disappeared. As to gotten, its use is now so confined to the over-precise in this country as to make it almost an Americanism. Its disappearance from our language in England is also one of the evidences of the process of simplification which is still slowly going on. Another, which has taken place within the memory of the elder living generation, is the disappearance of the subjunctive mood, which is now obsolete, or so very obsolescent as to be met with very rarely. But thirty-five or forty years since correct writers used this mood, and wrote, for example, if he go instead of if he goes. Of the effect of this grammarless condition of the English language we may see something in a subsequent article.
FOOTNOTES
[A] “Every Day English,” chapter xvii.
[B] Certain uneasy manipulators of speech have lately set themselves at making an impersonal English pronoun. Vanity of vanities! Make a pronoun? As well undertake to build a pyramid. Better. There is not a pronoun in use that was not hoary with age before the first stone of Keops was laid.