In the flexion of substantives and adjectives we see phenomena corresponding to those we have just been considering in the verbs. The ancient languages of our family have several forms where modern languages content themselves with fewer; forms originally kept distinct are in course of time confused, either through a phonetic obliteration of differences in the endings or through analogical extension of the functions of one form. The single form good is now used where OE. used the forms god, godne, gode, godum, godes, godre, godra, goda, godan, godena; Ital. uomo or French homme is used for Lat. homo, hominem, homini, homine—nay, if we take the spoken form into consideration, Fr. [ɔm] corresponds not only to these Latin forms, but also to homines, hominibus. Where the modern language has one or two cases, in an earlier stage it had three or four, and still earlier seven or eight. The difficulties inherent in the older system cannot, however, be measured adequately by the number of forms each word is susceptible of, but are multiplied by the numerous differences in the formation of the same case in different classes of declension; sometimes we even find anomalies which affect one word only.
Those who would be inclined to maintain that new irregularities may and do arise in modern languages which make up for whatever earlier irregularities have been discarded in the course of the historical development will do well to compile a systematic list of all the flexional forms of two different stages of the same languages, arranged exactly according to the same principles: this is the only way in which it is possible really to balance losses and profits in a language. This is what I have done in my Progress in Language § 111 ff. (reprinted in ChE § 9 ff.), where I have contrasted the case systems of Old and Modern English: the result is that the former system takes 7 (+ 3) pages, and the latter only 2 pages. Those pages, with their abbreviations and tabulations, do not, perhaps, offer very entertaining reading, but I think they are more illustrative of the real tendencies of language than either isolated examples or abstract reasonings, and they cannot fail to convince any impartial reader of the enormous gain achieved through the changes of the intervening nine hundred years in the general structure of the English language.
For our general purposes it will be worth our while here to quote what Friedrich Müller (Gr i. 2. 7) says about a totally different language: “Even if the Hottentot distinguishes ‘he,’ ‘she’ and ‘it,’ and strictly separates the singular from the plural number, yet by his expressing ‘he’ and ‘she’ by one sound in the third person, and by another in the second, he manifests that he has no perception at all of our two grammatical categories of gender and number, and consequently those elements of his language that run parallel to our signs of gender and number must be of an entirely different nature.” Fr. Müller should not perhaps throw too many stones at the poor Hottentots, for his own native tongue is no better than a glass house, and we might with equal justice say, for instance: “As the Germans express the plural number in different manners in words like gott—götter, hand—hände, vater—väter, frau—frauen, etc., they must be entirely lacking in the sense of the category of number.” Or let us take such a language as Latin; there is nothing to show that dominus bears the same relation to domini as verbum to verba, urbs to urbes, mensis to menses, cornu to cornua, fructus to fructūs, etc.; even in the same word the idea of plurality is not expressed by the same method for all the cases, as is shown by a comparison of dominus—domini, dominum—dominos, domino—dominis, domini—dominorum. Fr. Müller is no doubt wrong in saying that such anomalies preclude the speakers of the language from conceiving the notion of plurality; but, on the other hand, it seems evident that a language in which a difference so simple even to the understanding of very young children as that between one and more than one can only be expressed by a complicated apparatus must rank lower than another language in which this difference has a single expression for all cases in which it occurs. In this respect, too, Modern English stands higher than the oldest English, Latin or Hottentot.
XVIII.—§ 2. Irregularities Original.
It was the belief of the older school of comparativists that each case had originally one single ending, which was added to all nouns indifferently (e.g. -as for the genitive sg.), and that the irregularities found in the existing oldest languages were of later growth; the actually existing forms were then derived from the supposed unity form by all kinds of phonetic tricks and dodges. Now people have begun to see that the primeval language cannot have been quite uniform and regular (see, for instance, Walde in Streitberg’s Gesch., 2. 194 ff.). If we look at facts, and not at imagined or reconstructed forms, we are forced to acknowledge that in the oldest stages of our family of languages not only did the endings present the spectacle of a motley variety, but the kernel of the word was also often subject to violent changes in different cases, as when it had in different forms different accentuation and (or) different apophony, or as when in some of the most frequently occurring words some cases were formed from one ‘stem’ and others from another, for instance, the nominative from an r stem and the oblique cases from an n stem. In the common word for ‘water’ Greek has preserved both stems, nom. hudōr, gen. hudatos, where a stands for original [ən]. Whatever the origin of this change of stems, it is a phenomenon belonging to the earlier stages of our languages, in which we also sometimes find an alteration between the r stem in the nominative and a combination of the n and the r stems in the other cases, as in Lat. jecur ‘liver,’ jecinoris; iter ‘voyage,’ itineris, which is supposed to have supplanted itinis, formed like feminis from femur. In the later stages we always find a simplification, one single form running through all cases; this is either the nominative stem, as in E. water, G. wasser (corresponding to Gr. hudōr), or the oblique case-stem, as in the Scandinavian forms, Old Norse vatn, Swed. vatten, Dan. vand (corresponding to Gr. hudat-), or finally a contaminated form, as in the name of the Swedish lake Vättern (Noreen’s explanation), or in Old Norse and Dan. skarn ‘dirt,’ which has its r from a form like the Gr. skōr, and its n from a form like the Gr. genitive skatos (older [skəntos]). The simplification is carried furthest in English, where the identical form water is not only used unchanged where in the older languages different case forms would have been used (‘the water is cold,’ ‘the surface of the water,’ ‘he fell into the water,’ ‘he swims in the water’), but also serves as a verb (‘did you water the flowers?’), and as an adjunct as a quasi-adjective (‘a water melon,’ ‘water plants’).
In most cases irregularities have been done away with in the way here indicated, one of the forms (or stems) being generalized; but in other cases it may have happened, as Kretschmer supposes (in Gercke and Norden, Einleit. in die Altertumswiss., I, 501) that irregular flexion caused a word to go out of use entirely; thus in Modern Greek hêpar was supplanted by sukōti,[84] phréar by pēgadi, húdōr by neró, oûs by aphtí (= ōtíon), kúōn by skullí; this possibly also accounts for commando taking the place of Lat. jubeo.
Some scholars maintain that the medieval languages were more regular than their modern representatives; but if we look more closely into what they mean, we shall see that they are not speaking of any regularity in the sense in which the word has here been used—the only regularity which is of importance to the speakers of the language—but of the regular correspondence of a language with some earlier language from which it is derived. This is particularly the case with E. Littré, who, in his essays on L’Histoire de la Langue Française, was full of enthusiasm for Old French, but chiefly for the fidelity with which it had preserved some features of Latin. There was thus the old distinction of two cases: nom. sg. murs, acc. sg. mur, and in the plural inversely nom. mur and acc. murs, with its exact correspondence with Latin murus, murum, pl. muri, muros. When this ‘règle de l’s’ was discovered, and the use or omission of s, which had hitherto been looked upon as completely arbitrary in Old French, was thus accounted for, scholars were apt to consider this as an admirable trait in the old language which had been lost in modern French, and the same view obtained with regard to the case distinction found in other words, such as OFr. nom. maire, acc. majeur, or nom. emperere, acc. emperëur, corresponding to the Latin forms with changing stress, májor, majórem, imperátor, imperatórem, etc. But, however interesting such things may be to the historical linguist, there is no denying that to the users of French the modern simpler flexion is a gain as compared with this more complex system. “Des sprachhistorikers freud ist des sprachbrauchers leid,” as Schuchardt somewhere shrewdly remarks.
XVIII.—§ 3. Syntax.
There were also in the old languages many irregularities in the syntactic use of the cases, as when some verbs governed the genitive and others the dative, etc. Even if it may be possible in many instances to account historically for these uses, to the speakers of the languages they must have appeared to be mere caprices which had to be learned separately for each verb, and it is therefore a great advantage when they have been gradually done away with, as has been the case, to a great extent, even in a language like German, which has retained many old case forms. Thus verbs like entbehren, vergessen, bedürfen, wahrnehmen, which formerly took the genitive, are now used more and more with the simple accusative—a simplification which, among other things, makes the construction of sentences in the passive voice easier and more regular.
The advantage of discarding the old case distinctions is seen in the ease with which English and French speakers can say, e.g., ‘with or without my hat,’ or ‘in and round the church,’ while the correct German is ‘mit meinem hut oder ohne denselben’ and ‘in der kirche und um dieselbe’; Wackernagel writes: “Was in ihm und um ihn und über ihm ist.” When the prepositions are followed by a single substantive without case distinction, German, of course, has the same simple construction as English, e.g. ‘mit oder ohne geld,’ and sometimes even good writers will let themselves go and write ‘um und neben dem hochaltare’ (Goethe), or ‘Ihre tochter wird meine frau mit oder gegen ihren willen’ (these examples from Curme, German Grammar 191). Cf. also: ‘Ich kann deinem bruder nicht helfen und ihn unterstützen.’