Though I thus hold that the development towards shorter forms of expression is on the whole progressive, i.e. beneficial, I should not like to be too dogmatic on this point and assert that it is always beneficial: shortness may be carried to excess and thus cause obscurity or difficulty of understanding. This may be seen in the telegraphic style as well as in the literary style of some writers too anxious to avoid prolixity (some of Pope’s lines might be quoted in illustration of the classical: brevis esse laboro, obscurus fio). But in the case of the language of a whole community the danger certainly is very small indeed, for there will always be a natural and wholesome reaction against such excessive shortness. There is another misunderstanding I want to guard against when saying that the shortening makes on the whole for progress. It must not be thought that I lay undue stress on this point, which is after all chiefly concerned with a greater or smaller amount of physical or muscular exertion: this should neither be underrated nor overrated; but it will be seen that neither in my former work nor in this does the consideration of this point of mere shortness or length take up more than a fraction of the space allotted to the more psychical sides of the question, to which we shall now turn our attention and to which I attach much more importance.
XVII.—§ 9. Verbal Forms.
We may here recur to Schleicher’s example, E. had and Gothic habaidedeima. It is not only in regard to economy of muscular exertion that the former carries the day over the latter. Had corresponds not only to habaidedeima, but it unites in one short form everything expressed by the Gothic habaida, habaides, habaidedu, habaideduts, habaidedum, habaideduþ, habaidedun, habaidedjau, habaidedeis, habaidedi, habaidedeiwa, habaidedeits, habaidedeima, habaidedeiþ, habaidedeina—separate forms for two or three persons in three numbers in two distinct moods! It is clear, therefore, that the English form saves a considerable amount of brainwork to all English-speaking people—not only to children, who have fewer forms to learn, but also to adults, who have fewer forms to choose between and to keep distinct whenever they open their mouths to speak. Someone might, perhaps, say that on the other hand English people are obliged always to join personal pronouns to their verbal forms to indicate the person, and that this is a drawback counterbalancing the advantage, so that the net result is six of one and half a dozen of the other. This, however, would be a very superficial objection. For, in the first place, the personal pronouns are the same for all tenses and moods, but the endings are not. Secondly, the possession of endings does not exempt the Goths from having separate personal pronouns; and whenever these are used, as is very often the case in the first and second persons, those parts of the verbal endings which indicate persons are superfluous. They are no less superfluous in those extremely numerous cases in which the subject is either separately expressed by a noun or is understood from the preceding proposition, thus in the vast majority of the cases of the third person. If we compare a few pages of Old English prose with a modern rendering we shall see that in spite of the reduction in the latter of the person-indicating endings, personal pronouns are not required in any great number of sentences in which they were dispensed with in Old English. So that, altogether, the numerous endings of the older languages must be considered uneconomical.
If Gothic, Latin and Greek, etc., burden the memory by the number of their flexional endings, they do so even more by the many irregularities in the formation of these endings. In all the languages of this type, anomaly and flexion invariably go together. The intricacies of verbal flexion in Latin and Greek are well known, and it requires no small amount of mental energy to master the various modes of forming the present stems in Sanskrit—to take only one instance. Many of these irregularities disappear in course of time, chiefly, but not exclusively, through analogical formations, and though it is true that a certain number of new irregularities may come into existence, their number is relatively small when compared with those that have been removed. Now, it is not only the forms themselves that are irregular in the early languages, but also their uses: logical simplicity prevails much more in Modern English syntax than in either Old English or Latin or Greek. But it is hardly necessary to point out that growing regularity in a language means a considerable gain to all those who learn it or speak it.
It has been said, however, by one of the foremost authorities on the history of English, that “in spite of the many changes which this system [i.e. the complicated system of strong verbs] has undergone in detail, it remains just as intricate as it was in Old English” (Bradley, The Making of English 51). It is true that the way in which vowel change is utilized to form tenses is rather complicated in Modern English (drink drank, give gave, hold held, etc.), but otherwise an enormous simplification has taken place. The personal endings have been discarded with the exception of -s in the third person singular of the present (and the obsolete ending -est in the second person, and then this has been regularized, thou sangest having taken the place of þu sunge); the change of vowel in ic sang, þu sunge, we sungon in the indicative and ic sunge, we sungen in the subjunctive has been given up, and so has the accompanying change of consonant in many cases. Thus, instead of the following forms, cēosan, cēose, cēoseþ, cēosaþ, cēosen, cēas, curon, cure, curen, coren, we have the following modern ones, which are both fewer in number and less irregular: choose, chooses, chose, chosen—certainly an advance from a more to a less intricate system (cf. GS § 178).
An extreme, but by no means unique example of the simplification found in modern languages is the English cut, which can serve both as present and past tense, both as singular and plural, both in the first, second and third persons, both in the infinitive, in the imperative, in the indicative, in the subjunctive, and as a past (or passive) participle; compare with this the old languages with their separate forms for different tenses, moods, numbers and persons; and remember, moreover, that the identical form, without any inconvenience being occasioned, is also used as a noun (a cut), and you will admire the economy of the living tongue. A characteristic feature of the structure of languages in their early stages is that each form contains in itself several minor modifications which are often in the later stages expressed separately by means of auxiliary words. Such a word as Latin cantavisset unites into one inseparable whole the equivalents of six ideas: (1) ‘sing,’ (2) pluperfect, (3) that indefinite modification of the verbal idea which we term subjunctive, (4) active, (5) third person, and (6) singular.
XVII.—§ 10. Synthesis and Analysis.
Such a form, therefore, is much more concrete than the forms found in modern languages, of which sometimes two or more have to be combined to express the composite notion which was rendered formerly by one. Now, it is one of the consequences of this change that it has become easier to express certain minute, but by no means unimportant, shades of thought by laying extra stress on some particular element in the speech-group. Latin cantaveram amalgamates into one indissoluble whole what in E. I had sung is analysed into three components, so that you can at will accentuate the personal element, the time element or the action. Now, it is possible (who can affirm and who can deny it?) that the Romans could, if necessary, make some difference in speech between cántaveram (non saltaveram) ‘I had sung,’ and cantaverám (non cantabam), ‘I had sung’; but even then, if it was the personal element which was to be emphasized, an ego had to be added. Even the possibility of laying stress on the temporal element broke down in forms like scripsi, minui, sum, audiam, and innumerable others. It seems obvious that the freedom of Latin in this respect must have been inferior to that of English. Moreover, in English, the three elements, ‘I,’ ‘had,’ and ‘sung,’ can in certain cases be arranged in a different order, and other words can be inserted between them in order to modify and qualify the meaning of the sentence. Note also the conciseness of such answers as “Who had sung?” “I had.” “What had you done?” “Sung.” “I believe he has enjoyed himself.” “I know he has.” And contrast the Latin “Cantaveram et saltaveram et luseram et riseram” with the English “I had sung and danced and played and laughed.” What would be the Latin equivalent of “Tom never did and never will beat me”?
In such cases, analysis means suppleness, and synthesis means rigidity; in analytic languages you have the power of kaleidoscopically arranging and rearranging the elements that in synthetic forms like cantaveram are in rigid connexion and lead a Siamese-twin sort of existence. The synthetic forms of Latin verbs remind one of those languages all over the world (North America, South America, Hottentot, etc.) in which such ideas as ‘father’ or ‘mother’ or ‘head’ or ‘eye’ cannot be expressed separately, but only in connexion with an indication of whose father, etc., one is speaking about: in one language the verbal idea (in the finite moods), in the other the nominal idea, is necessarily fused with the personal idea.