This formal inseparability of subordinate elements is at the root of those rules of concord which play such a large rôle in the older languages of our Aryan family, but which tend to disappear in the more recent stages. By concord we mean the fact that a secondary word (adjective or verb) is made to agree with the primary word (substantive or subject) to which it belongs. Verbal concord, by which a verb is governed in number and person by the subject, has disappeared from spoken Danish, where, for instance, the present tense of the verb meaning ‘to travel’ is uniformly rejser in all persons of both numbers; while the written language till towards the end of the nineteenth century kept up artificially the plural rejse, although it had been dead in the spoken language for some three hundred years. The old flexion is an article of luxury, as a modification of the idea belonging properly to the subject is here transferred to the predicate, where it has no business; for when we say ‘mændene rejse’ (die männer reisen), we do not mean to imply that they undertake several journeys (cf. Madvig Kl 28, Nord. tsk. f. filol., n.r. 8. 134).
By getting rid of this superfluity, Danish has got the start of the more archaic of its Aryan sister-tongues. Even English, which has in most respects gone farthest in simplifying its flexional system, lags here behind Danish, in that in the present tense of most verbs the third person singular deviates from the other persons by ending in -s, and the verb be preserves some other traces of the old concord system, not to speak of the form in -st used with thou in the language of religion and poetry. Small and unimportant as these survivals may seem, still they are in some instances impediments to the free and easy expression of thought. In Danish, for instance, there is not the slightest difficulty in saying ‘enten du eller jeg har uret,’ as har is used both in the first and second persons singular and plural. But when an Englishman tries to render the same simple sentiment he is baffled; ‘either you or I are wrong’ is felt to be incorrect, and so is ‘either you or I am wrong’; he might say ‘either you are wrong, or I,’ but then this manner of putting it, if grammatically admissible (with or without the addition of am), is somewhat stiff and awkward; and there is no perfectly natural way out of the difficulty, for Dean Alford’s proposal to say ‘either you or I is wrong’ (The Queen’s Engl. 155) is not to be recommended. The advantage of having verbal forms that are no respecters of persons is seen directly in such perfectly natural expressions as ‘either you or I must be wrong,’ or ‘either you or I may be wrong,’ or ‘either you or I began it’—and indirectly from the more or less artificial rules of Latin and Greek grammars on this point; in the following passages the Gordian knot is cut in different ways:
Shakespeare LLL V. 2. 346 Nor God, nor I, delights in perjur’d men | id. As I. 3. 99 Thou and I am one | Tennyson Poet. W. 369 For whatsoever knight against us came Or I or he have easily overthrown | Galsworthy D 30 Am I and all women really what they think us? | Shakespeare H4B IV. 2. 121 Heauen, and not wee, haue safely fought to day (Folio, where the Quarto has: God, and not wee, hath....)
The same difficulty often appears in relative clauses; Alford (l.c. 152) calls attention to the fact of the Prayer Book reading “Thou art the God that doeth wonders,” whereas the Bible version runs “Thou art the God that doest wonders.” Compare also:
Shakespeare As III. 5. 55 ’Tis not her glasse, but you that flatters her | id. Meas. II. 2. 80 It is the law, not I, condemne your brother | Carlyle Fr. Rev. 38, There is none but you and I that has the people’s interest at heart (translated from: Il n’y a que vous et moi qui aimions le peuple).
In all such cases the construction in Danish is as easy and natural as it generally is in the English preterit: “It was not her glass, but you that flattered her.” The disadvantage of having verbal forms which enforce the indication of person and number is perhaps seen most strikingly in a French sentence like this from Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe (7. 221): “Ce mot, naturellement, ce n’est ni toi, ni moi, qui pouvons le dire”—the verb agrees with that which cannot be the subject (we)! For what is meant is really: ‘celui qui peut le dire, ce n’est ni moi ni toi.’
[CHAPTER XVIII]
PROGRESS
§ 1. Nominal Forms. § 2. Irregularities Original. § 3. Syntax. § 4. Objections. § 5. Word Order. § 6. Gender. § 7. Nominal Concord. § 8. The English Genitive. § 9. Bantu Concord. § 10. Word Order Again. § 11. Compromises. § 12. Order Beneficial? § 13. Word Order and Simplification. § 14. Summary.