This unusual faculty of ‘parenthesizing’ causes Danish, and to a still greater degree English, to stand outside the definition of the Aryan family of languages given by the earlier school of linguists, according to which the Aryan substantive and adjective can never be without a sign indicating case. Schleicher (NV 526) says: “The radical difference between Magyar and Indo-Germanic (Aryan) words is brought out distinctly by the fact that the postpositions belonging to co-ordinated nouns can be dispensed with in all the nouns except the last of the series, e.g. a jó embernek, ‘dem guten menschen’ (a for az, demonstrative pronoun, article; jó, good; ember, man, -nek, -nak, postposition with pretty much the same meaning as the dative case), for az-nak (annak) jó-nak ember-nek, as if in Greek you should say το ἀγαθο ἀνθρώπῳ. An attributive adjective preceding its noun always has the form of the pure stem, the sign of plurality and the postposition indicating case not being added to it. Magyars say, for instance, Hunyady Mátyás magyar király-nak (to the Hungarian king Mathew Hunyady), -nak belonging here to all the preceding words. Nearly the same thing takes place where several words are joined together by means of ‘and.’”
Now, this is an exact parallel to the English group genitive in cases like ‘all good old men’s works,’ ‘the King of England’s power,’ ‘Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays,’ ‘somebody else’s turn,’ etc. The way in which this group genitive has developed in comparatively recent times may be summed up as follows (see the detailed exposition in my ChE ch. iii.): In the oldest English -s is a case-ending, like all others found in flexional languages; it forms together with the body of the noun one indivisible whole, in which it is sometimes impossible to tell where the kernel of the word ends and the ending begins (compare endes from ende and heriges from here); only some words have this ending, and in others the genitive is indicated in other ways. As to syntax, the meaning or function of the genitive is complicated and rather vague, and there are no fixed rules for the position of the genitive in the sentence.
In course of time we witness a gradual development towards greater regularity and precision. The partitive, objective, descriptive and some other functions of the genitive become obsolete; the genitive is invariably put immediately before the word it belongs to; irregular forms disappear, the s ending alone surviving as the fittest, so that at last we have one definite ending with one definite function and one definite position.
In Old English, when several words belonging together were to be put in the genitive, each of them had to take the genitive mark, though this was often different in different words, and thus we had combinations like anes reades mannes, ‘a red man’s’ | þære godlican lufe, ‘the godlike love’s’ | ealra godra ealdra manna weorc, etc. Now the s used everywhere is much more independent, and may be separated from the principal word by an adverb like else or by a prepositional group like of England, and one s is sufficient at the end even of a long group of words. Here, then, we see in the full light of comparatively recent history a giving up of the old flexion with its inseparability of the constituent elements of the word and with its strictness of concord; an easier and more regular system is developed, in which the ending leads a more independent existence and may be compared with the ‘agglutinated’ elements of such a language as Magyar or even with the ‘empty words’ of Chinese grammar. The direction of this development is the direct opposite of that assumed by most linguists for the development of languages in prehistoric times.
XVIII.—§ 9. Bantu Concord.
One of the most characteristic traits of the history of English is thus seen to be the gradual getting rid of concord as of something superfluous. Where concord is found in our family of languages, it certainly is an heirloom from a primitive age, and strikes us now as an outcome of a tendency to be more explicit than to more advanced people seems strictly necessary. It is on a par with the ‘concord of negatives,’ as we might term the emphasizing of the negative idea by seemingly redundant repetitions. In Old English it was the regular idiom to say: nan man nyste nan þing, ‘no man not-knew nothing’; so it was in Chaucer’s time: he neuere yet no vileynye ne sayde In all his lyf unto no manner wight; and it survives in the vulgar speech of our own days: there was niver nobody else gen (gave) me nothin’ (George Eliot); whereas standard Modern English is content with one negation: no man knew anything, etc. That concord is really a primitive trait (though not, of course, found equally distributed among all ‘primitive peoples’) will be seen also by a rapid glance at the structure of the South African group of languages called Bantu, for here we find not only repetition of negatives, but also other phenomena of concord in specially luxuriant growth.
I take the following examples chiefly from W. H. I. Bleek’s excellent, though unfortunately unfinished, Comparative Grammar, though I am well aware that expressions like si-m-tanda (we love him) “are never used by natives with this meaning without being determined by some other expression” (Torrend, p. 7). The Zulu word for ‘man’ is umuntu; every word in the same or a following sentence having any reference to that word must begin with something to remind you of the beginning of umuntu. This will be, according to fixed rules, either mu or u, or w or m. In the following sentence, the meaning of which is ‘our handsome man (or woman) appears, we love him (or her),’ these reminders (as I shall term them) are printed in italics:
| umuntu | wetu | omuchle uyabonakala, | simtanda (1) |
| man | ours | handsome appears, | we love. |
If, instead of the singular, we take the corresponding plural abantu, ‘men, people’ (whence the generic name of Bantu), the sentence looks quite different:
abantu betu abachle bayabonakala, sibatanda (2).