"Cits and citesses raise a joyful strain."—DRYDEN: Joh. Dict.
[162] "But in the English we have no Genders, as has been seen in the foregoing Notes. The same may be said of Cases."—Brightland's Gram., Seventh Edition, Lond., 1746, p. 85.
[163] The Rev. David Blair so palpably contradicts himself in respect to this matter, that I know not which he favours most, two cases or three. In his main text, he adopts no objective, but says: "According to the sense or relation in which nouns are used, they are in the NOMINATIVE or [the] POSSESSIVE CASE, thus, nom. man; poss. man's." To this he adds the following marginal note: "In the English language, the distinction of the objective case is observable only in the pronouns. Cases being nothing but inflections, where inflections do not exist, there can be no grammatical distinction of cases, for the terms inflection and case are perfectly synonymous and convertible. As the English noun has only one change of termination, so no other case is here adopted. The objective case is noticed in the pronouns; and in parsing nouns it is easy to distinguish subjects from objects. A noun which governs the verb may be described as in the nominative case, and one governed by the verb, or following a preposition, as in the objective case."—Blair's Practical Gram., Seventh Edition, London, 1815, p. 11. The terms inflection and case are not practically synonymous, and never were so in the grammars of the language from which they are derived. The man who rejects the objective case of English nouns, because it has not a form peculiar to itself alone, must reject the accusative and the vocative of all neuter nouns in Latin, for the same reason; and the ablative, too, must in general be discarded on the same principle. In some other parts of his book, Blair speaks of the objective case of nouns as familiarly as do other authors!
[164] This author says, "We choose to use the term subjective rather than nominative, because it is shorter, and because it conveys its meaning by its sound, whereas the latter word means, indeed, little or nothing in itself."—Text-Book, p. 88. This appears to me a foolish innovation, too much in the spirit of Oliver B. Peirce, who also adopts it. The person who knows not the meaning of the word nominative, will not be very likely to find out what is meant by subjective; especially as some learned grammarians, even such men as Dr. Crombie and Professor Bullions, often erroneously call the word which is governed by the verb its subject. Besides, if we say subjective and objective, in stead of nominative and objective, we shall inevitably change the accent of both, and give them a pronunciation hitherto unknown to the words.—G. BROWN.
[165] The authorities cited by Felch, for his doctrine of "possessive adnouns," amount to nothing. They are ostensibly two. The first is a remark of Dr. Adam's: "'John's book was formerly written Johnis book. Some have thought the 's a contraction of his, but improperly. Others have imagined, with more justness, that, by the addition of the 's, the substantive is changed into a possessive adjective.'—Adam's Latin and English Grammar, p. 7."—Felch's Comp. Gram., p. 26. Here Dr. Adam by no means concurs with what these "others have imagined;" for, in the very same place, he declares the possessive case of nouns to be their only case. The second is a dogmatical and inconsistent remark of some anonymous writer in some part of the "American Journal of Education," a work respectable indeed, but, on the subject of grammar, too often fantastical and heterodox. Felch thinks it not improper, to use the possessive case before participles; in which situation, it denotes, not the owner of something, but the agent, subject, or recipient, of the action, being, or change. And what a jumble does he make, where he attempts to resolve this ungrammatical construction!—telling us, in almost the same breath, that, "The agent of a nounal verb [i. e. participle] is never expressed," but that, "Sometimes it [the nounal or gerundial verb] is qualified, in its nounal capacity, by a possessive adnoun indicative of its agent as a verb; as, there is nothing like one's BEING useful he doubted their HAVING it:" and then concluding, "Hence it appears, that the present participle may be used as agent or object, and yet retain its character as a verb."—Felch's Comprehensive Gram., p. 81. Alas for the schools, if the wise men of the East receive for grammar such utter confusion, and palpable self-contradiction, as this!
[166] A critic's accuracy is sometimes liable to be brought into doubt, by subsequent alterations of the texts which, he quotes. Many an error cited in this volume of criticism, may possibly not be found in some future edition of the book referred to; as several of those which were pointed out by Lowth, have disappeared from the places named for them. Churchill also cites this line as above; (New Gram., p. 214;) but, in my edition of the Odyssey, by Pope, the reading is this: "By lov'd Telemachus's blooming years!"—Book xi, L 84.
[167] Corpse forms the plural regularly, corpses; as in 2 Kings, xix, 35: "In the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses."
[168] Murray says, "An adjective put without a substantive, with the definite article before it, becomes a substantive in sense and meaning, and is written as a substantive: as, 'Providence rewards the good, and punishes the bad.'" If I understand this, it is very erroneous, and plainly contrary to the fact. I suppose the author to speak of good persons and bad persons; and, if he does, is there not an ellipsis in his language? How can it be said, that good and bad are here substantives, since they have a plural meaning and refuse the plural form? A word "written as a substantive," unquestionably is a substantive; but neither of these is here entitled to that name. Yet Smith, and other satellites of Murray, endorse his doctrine; and say, that good and bad in this example, and all adjectives similarly circumstanced, "may be considered nouns in parsing."—Smith's New Gram., p. 52. "An adjective with the definite article before it, becomes a noun, (of the third person, plural number,) and must be parsed as such."—R. G. Greene's Grammatical Text-Book, p. 55.
[169] Here the word English appears to be used substantively, not by reason of the article, but rather because it has no article; for, when the definite article is used before such a word taken in the singular number, it seems to show that the noun language is understood. And it is remarkable, that before the names or epithets by which we distinguish the languages, this article may, in many instances, be either used or not used, repeated or not repeated, without any apparent impropriety: as, "This is the case with the Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish."—Murray's Gram., i, p. 38. Better, perhaps: "This is the case with the Hebrew, the French, the Italian, and the Spanish." But we may say: "This is the case with Hebrew, French, Italian, and Spanish." In the first of these forms, there appears to be an ellipsis of the plural noun languages, at the end of the sentence; in the second, an ellipsis of the singular noun language, after each of the national epithets; in the last, no ellipsis, but rather a substantive use of the words in question.
[170] The Doctor may, for aught I know, have taken his notion of this "noun," from the language "of Dugald Dalgetty, boasting of his '5000 Irishes' in the prison of Argyle." See Letter of Wendell Phillips, in the Liberator, Vol. xi, p. 211.