Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin

by Otto Jespersen

Many extremely convenient idioms unknown in the older synthetic languages have been rendered possible in English through the doing away with the old case distinctions, such as: Genius, demanding bread, is given a stone after its possessor’s death (Shaw) (cf. my ChE § 79) | he was offered, and declined, the office of poet-laureate (Gosse) | the lad was spoken highly of | I love, and am loved by, my wife | these laws my readers, whom I consider as my subjects, are bound to believe in and to obey (Fielding) | he was heathenishly inclined to believe in, or to worship, the goddess Nemesis (id.) | he rather rejoiced in, than regretted, his bruise (id.) | many a dun had she talked to, and turned away from her father’s door (Thackeray) | their earthly abode, which has seen, and seemed almost to sympathize in, all their honour (Ruskin).

XVIII.—§ 4. Objections.

Against my view of the superiority of languages with few case distinctions, Arwid Johannson, in a very able article (in IF I, see especially p. 247 f.), has adduced a certain number of ambiguous sentences from German:

Soweit die deutsche zunge klingt und gott im himmel lieder singt (is gott nominative or dative?) | Seinem landsmann, dem er in seiner ganzen bildung ebensoviel verdankte, wie Goethe (nominative or dative?) | Doch würde die gesellschaft der Indierin (genitive or dative?) lästig gewesen sein | Darin hat Caballero wohl nur einen konkurrenten, die Eliot, welche freilich die spanische dichterin nicht ganz erreicht | Nur Diopeithes feindet insgeheim dich an und die schwester des Kimon und dein weib Telesippa. (In the last two sentences what is the subject, and what the object?)

According to Johannson, these passages show the disadvantages of doing away with formal distinctions, for the sentences would have been clear if each separate case had had its distinctive sign; “the greater the wealth of forms, the more intelligible the speech.” And they show, he says, that such ambiguities will occur, even where the strictest rules of word order are observed. I shall not urge that this is not exactly the case in the last sentence if die schwester and dein weib are to be taken as accusatives, for then an should have been placed at the very end of the sentence; nor that, in the last sentence but one, the mention of George Eliot as the ‘konkurrent’ of Fernan Caballero seems to show a partiality to the Spanish authoress on the part of the writer of the sentence, so that the reader is prepared to take welche as the nominative case; freilich would seem to point in the same direction. But these, of course, are only trifling objections; the essential point is that we must grant the truth of Johannson’s contention that we have here a flaw in the German language; the defects of its grammatical system may and do cause a certain number of ambiguities. Neither is it difficult to find the reasons of these defects by considering the structure of the language in its entirety, and by translating the sentences in question into a few other languages and comparing the results.

First, with regard to the formal distinctions between cases, the really weak point cannot be the fewness of these endings, for in that case we should expect the same sort of ambiguities to be very common in English and Danish, where the formal case distinctions are considerably fewer than in German; but as a matter of fact such ambiguities are more frequent in German than in the other two languages. And, however paradoxical it may seem at first sight, one of the causes of this is the greater wealth of grammatical forms in German. Let us substitute other words for the ambiguous ones, and we shall see that the amphibology will nearly always disappear, because most other words will have different forms in the two cases, e.g.:

Soweit die deutsche zunge klingt und dem allmächtigen (or, der allmächtige) lieder singt | Seinem landsmann, dem er ebensoviel verdankte, wie dem grossen dichter (or, der grosse dichter) | Doch würde die gesellschaft des Indiers (or, dem Indier) lästig gewesen sein | Darin hat Calderon wohl nur einen konkurrenten, Shakespeare, welcher freilich den spanischen dichter nicht erreicht (or, den ... der spanische dichter ...) | Nur Diopeithes feindet dich insgeheim an, und der bruder des Kimon und sein freund T. (or, den bruder ... seinen freund).

It is this very fact that countless sentences of this sort are perfectly clear which leads to the employment of similar constructions even where the resulting sentence is by no means clear; but if all, or most, words were identical in the nominative and the dative, like gott, or in the dative and genitive, like der Indierin, constructions like those used would be impossible to imagine in a language meant to be an intelligible vehicle of thought. And so the ultimate cause of the ambiguities is the inconsistency in the formation of the several cases. But this inconsistency is found in all the old languages of the Aryan family: cases which in one gender or with one class of stems are kept perfectly distinct, are in others identical. I take some examples from Latin, because this is perhaps the best known language of this type, but Gothic or Old Slavonic would show inconsistencies of the same kind. Domini is genitive singular and nominative plural (corresponding to, e.g., verbi and verba); verba is nominative and accusative pl. (corresponding to domini and dominos); domino is dative and ablative; dominæ gen. and dative singular and nominative plural; te is accusative and ablative; qui is singular and plural; quæ singular fem. and plural fem. and neuter, etc. Hence, while patres filios amant or patres filii amant are perfectly clear, patres consules amant allows of two interpretations; and in how many ways cannot such a proposition as Horatius et Virgilius poetæ Varii amici erant be construed? Menenii patris munus may mean ‘the gift of father Menenius,’ or ‘the gift of Menenius’s father’; expers illius periculi either ‘free from that danger’ or ‘free from (sharing) that person’s danger’; in an infinitive construction with two accusatives, the only way to know which is the subject and which the object is to consider the context, and that is not always decisive, as in the oracular response given to the Æacide Pyrrhus, as quoted by Cicero from Ennius: “Aio te, Æacida, Romanos vincere posse.” Such drawbacks seem to be inseparable from the structure of the highly flexional Aryan languages; although they are not logical consequences of a wealth of forms, yet historically they cling to those languages which have the greatest number of grammatical endings. And as we are here concerned not with the question how to construct an artificial language (and even there I should not advise the adoption of many case distinctions), but with the valuation of natural languages as actually existing in their earlier and modern stages, we cannot accept Johannson’s verdict: “The greater the wealth of forms, the more intelligible the speech.”

XVIII.—§ 5. Word Order.

If the German sentences quoted above are ambiguous, it is not only on account of the want of clearness in the forms employed, but also on account of the German rules of word order. One rule places the verb last in subordinate sentences, and in two of the sentences there would be no ambiguity in principal sentences: Die deutsche zunge klingt und singt gott im himmel lieder; or, Die deutsche zunge klingt, und gott im himmel singt lieder | Sie erreicht freilich nicht die spanische dichterin; or, Die spanische dichterin erreicht sie freilich nicht. In one of the remaining sentences the ambiguity is caused by the rule that the verb must be placed immediately after an introductory subjunct: if we omit doch the sentence becomes clear: Die gesellschaft der Indierin würde lästig gewesen sein, or, Die gesellschaft würde der Indierin lästig gewesen sein. Here, again we see the ill consequences of inconsistency of linguistic structure; some of the rules for word position serve to show grammatical relations, but in certain cases they have to give way to other rules, which counteract this useful purpose. If you change the order of words in a German sentence, you will often find that the meaning is not changed, but the result will be an unidiomatic construction (bad grammar); while in English a transposition will often result in perfectly good grammar, only the meaning will be an entirely different one from the original sentence. This does not amount to saying that the German rules of position are useless and the English ones all useful, but only to saying that in English word order is utilized to express difference of meaning to a far greater extent than in German.