Every one knows that language is variable. Two individuals of the same
generation and locality, speaking precisely the same dialect and moving
in the same social circles, are never absolutely at one in their speech
habits. A minute investigation of the speech of each individual would
reveal countless differences of detail--in choice of words, in sentence
structure, in the relative frequency with which particular forms or
combinations of words are used, in the pronunciation of particular
vowels and consonants and of combinations of vowels and consonants, in
all those features, such as speed, stress, and tone, that give life to
spoken language. In a sense they speak slightly divergent dialects of
the same language rather than identically the same language.
There is an important difference, however, between individual and
dialectic variations. If we take two closely related dialects, say
English as spoken by the "middle classes" of London and English as
spoken by the average New Yorker, we observe that, however much the
individual speakers in each city differ from each other, the body of
Londoners forms a compact, relatively unified group in contrast to the
body of New Yorkers. The individual variations are swamped in or
absorbed by certain major agreements--say of pronunciation and
vocabulary--which stand out very strongly when the language of the
group as a whole is contrasted with that of the other group. This means
that there is something like an ideal linguistic entity dominating the
speech habits of the members of each group, that the sense of almost
unlimited freedom which each individual feels in the use of his language
is held in leash by a tacitly directing norm. One individual plays on
the norm in a way peculiar to himself, the next individual is nearer the
dead average in that particular respect in which the first speaker most
characteristically departs from it but in turn diverges from the average
in a way peculiar to himself, and so on. What keeps the individual's
variations from rising to dialectic importance is not merely the fact
that they are in any event of small moment--there are well-marked
dialectic variations that are of no greater magnitude than individual
variations within a dialect--it is chiefly that they are silently
"corrected" or canceled by the consensus of usage. If all the speakers
of a given dialect were arranged in order in accordance with the degree
of their conformity to average usage, there is little doubt that they
would constitute a very finely intergrading series clustered about a
well-defined center or norm. The differences between any two neighboring
speakers of the series[122] would be negligible for any but the most
microscopic linguistic research. The differences between the outer-most
members of the series are sure to be considerable, in all likelihood
considerable enough to measure up to a true dialectic variation. What
prevents us from saying that these untypical individuals speak distinct
dialects is that their peculiarities, as a unified whole, are not
referable to another norm than the norm of their own series.
[Footnote 122: In so far as they do not fall out of the normal speech
group by reason of a marked speech defect or because they are isolated
foreigners that have acquired the language late in life.]
If the speech of any member of the series could actually be made to fit
into another dialect series,[123] we should have no true barriers
between dialects (and languages) at all. We should merely have a
continuous series of individual variations extending over the whole
range of a historically unified linguistic area, and the cutting up of
this large area (in some cases embracing parts of several continents)
into distinct dialects and languages would be an essentially arbitrary
proceeding with no warrant save that of practical convenience. But such
a conception of the nature of dialectic variation does not correspond to
the facts as we know them. Isolated individuals may be found who speak a
compromise between two dialects of a language, and if their number and
importance increases they may even end by creating a new dialectic norm
of their own, a dialect in which the extreme peculiarities of the parent
dialects are ironed out. In course of time the compromise dialect may
absorb the parents, though more frequently these will tend to linger
indefinitely as marginal forms of the enlarged dialect area. But such
phenomena--and they are common enough in the history of language--are
evidently quite secondary. They are closely linked with such social
developments as the rise of nationality, the formation of literatures
that aim to have more than a local appeal, the movement of rural
populations into the cities, and all those other tendencies that break
up the intense localism that unsophisticated man has always found
natural.
[Footnote 123: Observe that we are speaking of an individual's speech as
a whole. It is not a question of isolating some particular peculiarity
of pronunciation or usage and noting its resemblance to or identity with
a feature in another dialect.]
The explanation of primary dialectic differences is still to seek. It
is evidently not enough to say that if a dialect or language is spoken
in two distinct localities or by two distinct social strata it naturally
takes on distinctive forms, which in time come to be divergent enough to
deserve the name of dialects. This is certainly true as far as it goes.
Dialects do belong, in the first instance, to very definitely
circumscribed social groups, homogeneous enough to secure the common
feeling and purpose needed to create a norm. But the embarrassing
question immediately arises, If all the individual variations within a
dialect are being constantly leveled out to the dialectic norm, if there
is no appreciable tendency for the individual's peculiarities to
initiate a dialectic schism, why should we have dialectic variations at
all? Ought not the norm, wherever and whenever threatened, automatically
to reassert itself? Ought not the individual variations of each
locality, even in the absence of intercourse between them, to cancel out
to the same accepted speech average?
If individual variations "on a flat" were the only kind of variability
in language, I believe we should be at a loss to explain why and how
dialects arise, why it is that a linguistic prototype gradually breaks
up into a number of mutually unintelligible languages. But language is
not merely something that is spread out in space, as it were--a series
of reflections in individual minds of one and the same timeless picture.
Language moves down time in a current of its own making. It has a drift.
If there were no breaking up of a language into dialects, if each
language continued as a firm, self-contained unity, it would still be
constantly moving away from any assignable norm, developing new features
unceasingly and gradually transforming itself into a language so
different from its starting point as to be in effect a new language. Now
dialects arise not because of the mere fact of individual variation but
because two or more groups of individuals have become sufficiently
disconnected to drift apart, or independently, instead of together. So
long as they keep strictly together, no amount of individual variation
would lead to the formation of dialects. In practice, of course, no
language can be spread over a vast territory or even over a considerable
area without showing dialectic variations, for it is impossible to keep
a large population from segregating itself into local groups, the
language of each of which tends to drift independently. Under cultural
conditions such as apparently prevail to-day, conditions that fight
localism at every turn, the tendency to dialectic cleavage is being
constantly counteracted and in part "corrected" by the uniformizing
factors already referred to. Yet even in so young a country as America
the dialectic differences are not inconsiderable.
Under primitive conditions the political groups are small, the tendency
to localism exceedingly strong. It is natural, therefore, that the
languages of primitive folk or of non-urban populations in general are
differentiated into a great number of dialects. There are parts of the
globe where almost every village has its own dialect. The life of the
geographically limited community is narrow and intense; its speech is
correspondingly peculiar to itself. It is exceedingly doubtful if a
language will ever be spoken over a wide area without multiplying itself
dialectically. No sooner are the old dialects ironed out by compromises
or ousted by the spread and influence of the one dialect which is
culturally predominant when a new crop of dialects arises to undo the
leveling work of the past. This is precisely what happened in Greece,
for instance. In classical antiquity there were spoken a large number of
local dialects, several of which are represented in the literature. As
the cultural supremacy of Athens grew, its dialect, the Attic, spread at
the expense of the rest, until, in the so-called Hellenistic period
following the Macedonian conquest, the Attic dialect, in the vulgarized
form known as the "Koine," became the standard speech of all Greece. But
this linguistic uniformity[124] did not long continue. During the two
millennia that separate the Greek of to-day from its classical prototype
the Koine gradually split up into a number of dialects. Now Greece is as
richly diversified in speech as in the time of Homer, though the present
local dialects, aside from those of Attica itself, are not the lineal
descendants of the old dialects of pre-Alexandrian days.[125] The
experience of Greece is not exceptional. Old dialects are being
continually wiped out only to make room for new ones. Languages can
change at so many points of phonetics, morphology, and vocabulary that
it is not surprising that once the linguistic community is broken it
should slip off in different directions. It would be too much to expect
a locally diversified language to develop along strictly parallel lines.
If once the speech of a locality has begun to drift on its own account,
it is practically certain to move further and further away from its
linguistic fellows. Failing the retarding effect of dialectic
interinfluences, which I have already touched upon, a group of dialects
is bound to diverge on the whole, each from all of the others.
[Footnote 124: It is doubtful if we have the right to speak of
linguistic uniformity even during the predominance of the Koine. It is
hardly conceivable that when the various groups of non-Attic Greeks took
on the Koine they did not at once tinge it with dialectic peculiarities
induced by their previous speech habits.]
[Footnote 125: The Zaconic dialect of Lacedaemon is the sole exception.
It is not derived from the Koine, but stems directly from the Doric
dialect of Sparta.]
In course of time each dialect itself splits up into sub-dialects, which
gradually take on the dignity of dialects proper while the primary
dialects develop into mutually unintelligible languages. And so the
budding process continues, until the divergences become so great that
none but a linguistic student, armed with his documentary evidence and
with his comparative or reconstructive method, would infer that the
languages in question were genealogically related, represented
independent lines of development, in other words, from a remote and
common starting point. Yet it is as certain as any historical fact can
be that languages so little resembling each other as Modern Irish,
English, Italian, Greek, Russian, Armenian, Persian, and Bengali are but
end-points in the present of drifts that converge to a meeting-point in
the dim past. There is naturally no reason to believe that this earliest
"Indo-European" (or "Aryan") prototype which we can in part reconstruct,
in part but dimly guess at, is itself other than a single "dialect" of a
group that has either become largely extinct or is now further
represented by languages too divergent for us, with our limited means,
to recognize as clear kin.[126]
[Footnote 126: Though indications are not lacking of what these remoter
kin of the Indo-European languages may be. This is disputed ground,
however, and hardly fit subject for a purely general study of speech.]
All languages that are known to be genetically related, i.e., to be
divergent forms of a single prototype, may be considered as constituting
a "linguistic stock." There is nothing final about a linguistic stock.
When we set it up, we merely say, in effect, that thus far we can go
and no farther. At any point in the progress of our researches an
unexpected ray of light may reveal the "stock" as but a "dialect" of a
larger group. The terms dialect, language, branch, stock--it goes
without saying--are purely relative terms. They are convertible as our
perspective widens or contracts.[127] It would be vain to speculate as
to whether or not we shall ever be able to demonstrate that all
languages stem from a common source. Of late years linguists have been
able to make larger historical syntheses than were at one time deemed
feasible, just as students of culture have been able to show historical
connections between culture areas or institutions that were at one time
believed to be totally isolated from each other. The human world is
contracting not only prospectively but to the backward-probing eye of
culture-history. Nevertheless we are as yet far from able to reduce the
riot of spoken languages to a small number of "stocks." We must still
operate with a quite considerable number of these stocks. Some of them,
like Indo-European or Indo-Chinese, are spoken over tremendous reaches;
others, like Basque,[128] have a curiously restricted range and are in
all likelihood but dwindling remnants of groups that were at one time
more widely distributed. As for the single or multiple origin of speech,
it is likely enough that language as a human institution (or, if one
prefers, as a human "faculty") developed but once in the history of the
race, that all the complex history of language is a unique cultural
event. Such a theory constructed "on general principles" is of no real
interest, however, to linguistic science. What lies beyond the
demonstrable must be left to the philosopher or the romancer.
[Footnote 127: "Dialect" in contrast to an accepted literary norm is a
use of the term that we are not considering.]
[Footnote 128: Spoken in France and Spain in the region of the
Pyrenees.]
We must return to the conception of "drift" in language. If the
historical changes that take place in a language, if the vast
accumulation of minute modifications which in time results in the
complete remodeling of the language, are not in essence identical with
the individual variations that we note on every hand about us, if these
variations are born only to die without a trace, while the equally
minute, or even minuter, changes that make up the drift are forever
imprinted on the history of the language, are we not imputing to this
history a certain mystical quality? Are we not giving language a power
to change of its own accord over and above the involuntary tendency of
individuals to vary the norm? And if this drift of language is not
merely the familiar set of individual variations seen in vertical
perspective, that is historically, instead of horizontally, that is in
daily experience, what is it? Language exists only in so far as it is
actually used--spoken and heard, written and read. What significant
changes take place in it must exist, to begin with, as individual
variations. This is perfectly true, and yet it by no means follows that
the general drift of language can be understood[129] from an exhaustive
descriptive study of these variations alone. They themselves are random
phenomena,[130] like the waves of the sea, moving backward and forward
in purposeless flux. The linguistic drift has direction. In other words,
only those individual variations embody it or carry it which move in a
certain direction, just as only certain wave movements in the bay
outline the tide. The drift of a language is constituted by the
unconscious selection on the part of its speakers of those individual
variations that are cumulative in some special direction. This direction
may be inferred, in the main, from the past history of the language. In
the long run any new feature of the drift becomes part and parcel of the
common, accepted speech, but for a long time it may exist as a mere
tendency in the speech of a few, perhaps of a despised few. As we look
about us and observe current usage, it is not likely to occur to us that
our language has a "slope," that the changes of the next few centuries
are in a sense prefigured in certain obscure tendencies of the present
and that these changes, when consummated, will be seen to be but
continuations of changes that have been already effected. We feel rather
that our language is practically a fixed system and that what slight
changes are destined to take place in it are as likely to move in one
direction as another. The feeling is fallacious. Our very uncertainty as
to the impending details of change makes the eventual consistency of
their direction all the more impressive.
[Footnote 129: Or rather apprehended, for we do not, in sober fact,
entirely understand it as yet.]
[Footnote 130: Not ultimately random, of course, only relatively so.]
Sometimes we can feel where the drift is taking us even while we
struggle against it. Probably the majority of those who read these words
feel that it is quite "incorrect" to say "Who did you see?" We readers
of many books are still very careful to say "Whom did you see?" but we
feel a little uncomfortable (uncomfortably proud, it may be) in the
process. We are likely to avoid the locution altogether and to say "Who
was it you saw?" conserving literary tradition (the "whom") with the
dignity of silence.[131] The folk makes no apology. "Whom did you see?"
might do for an epitaph, but "Who did you see?" is the natural form for
an eager inquiry. It is of course the uncontrolled speech of the folk to
which we must look for advance information as to the general linguistic
movement. It is safe to prophesy that within a couple of hundred years
from to-day not even the most learned jurist will be saying "Whom did
you see?" By that time the "whom" will be as delightfully archaic as the
Elizabethan "his" for "its."[132] No logical or historical argument will
avail to save this hapless "whom." The demonstration "I: me = he: him =
who: whom" will be convincing in theory and will go unheeded in
practice.
[Footnote 131: In relative clauses too we tend to avoid the objective
form of "who." Instead of "The man whom I saw" we are likely to say "The
man that I saw" or "The man I saw."]
[Footnote 132: "Its" was at one time as impertinent a departure as the
"who" of "Who did you see?" It forced itself into English because the
old cleavage between masculine, feminine, and neuter was being slowly
and powerfully supplemented by a new one between thing-class and
animate-class. The latter classification proved too vital to allow usage
to couple males and things ("his") as against females ("her"). The form
"its" had to be created on the analogy of words like "man's," to satisfy
the growing form feeling. The drift was strong enough to sanction a
grammatical blunder.]
Even now we may go so far as to say that the majority of us are secretly
wishing they could say "Who did you see?" It would be a weight off their
unconscious minds if some divine authority, overruling the lifted finger
of the pedagogue, gave them _carte blanche_. But we cannot too frankly
anticipate the drift and maintain caste. We must affect ignorance
of whither we are going and rest content with our mental
conflict--uncomfortable conscious acceptance of the "whom," unconscious
desire for the "who."[133] Meanwhile we indulge our sneaking desire for
the forbidden locution by the use of the "who" in certain twilight cases
in which we can cover up our fault by a bit of unconscious special
pleading. Imagine that some one drops the remark when you are not
listening attentively, "John Smith is coming to-night." You have not
caught the name and ask, not "Whom did you say?" but "Who did you say?"
There is likely to be a little hesitation in the choice of the form, but
the precedent of usages like "Whom did you see?" will probably not seem
quite strong enough to induce a "Whom did you say?" Not quite relevant
enough, the grammarian may remark, for a sentence like "Who did you
say?" is not strictly analogous to "Whom did you see?" or "Whom did you
mean?" It is rather an abbreviated form of some such sentence as "Who,
did you say, is coming to-night?" This is the special pleading that I
have referred to, and it has a certain logic on its side. Yet the case
is more hollow than the grammarian thinks it to be, for in reply to such
a query as "You're a good hand at bridge, John, aren't you?" John, a
little taken aback, might mutter "Did you say me?" hardly "Did you say
I?" Yet the logic for the latter ("Did you say I was a good hand at
bridge?") is evident. The real point is that there is not enough
vitality in the "whom" to carry it over such little difficulties
as a "me" can compass without a thought. The proportion
"I : me = he : him = who : whom" is logically and historically sound, but
psychologically shaky. "Whom did you see?" is correct, but there is
something false about its correctness.
[Footnote 133: Psychoanalysts will recognize the mechanism. The
mechanisms of "repression of impulse" and of its symptomatic
symbolization can be illustrated in the most unexpected corners of
individual and group psychology. A more general psychology than Freud's
will eventually prove them to be as applicable to the groping for
abstract form, the logical or esthetic ordering of experience, as to the
life of the fundamental instincts.]
It is worth looking into the reason for our curious reluctance to use
locutions involving the word "whom" particularly in its interrogative
sense. The only distinctively objective forms which we still possess in
English are _me_, _him_, _her_ (a little blurred because of its identity
with the possessive _her_), _us_, _them_, and _whom_. In all other cases
the objective has come to be identical with the subjective--that is, in
outer form, for we are not now taking account of position in the
sentence. We observe immediately in looking through the list of
objective forms that _whom_ is psychologically isolated. _Me_, _him_,
_her_, _us_, and _them_ form a solid, well-integrated group of objective
personal pronouns parallel to the subjective series _I_, _he_, _she_,
_we_, _they_. The forms _who_ and _whom_ are technically "pronouns" but
they are not felt to be in the same box as the personal pronouns. _Whom_
has clearly a weak position, an exposed flank, for words of a feather
tend to flock together, and if one strays behind, it is likely to incur
danger of life. Now the other interrogative and relative pronouns
(_which_, _what_, _that_), with which _whom_ should properly flock, do
not distinguish the subjective and objective forms. It is
psychologically unsound to draw the line of form cleavage between _whom_
and the personal pronouns on the one side, the remaining interrogative
and relative pronouns on the other. The form groups should be
symmetrically related to, if not identical with, the function groups.
Had _which_, _what_, and _that_ objective forms parallel to _whom_, the
position of this last would be more secure. As it is, there is something
unesthetic about the word. It suggests a form pattern which is not
filled out by its fellows. The only way to remedy the irregularity of
form distribution is to abandon the _whom_ altogether for we have lost
the power to create new objective forms and cannot remodel our
_which_-_what_-_that_ group so as to make it parallel with the smaller
group _who-whom_. Once this is done, _who_ joins its flock and our
unconscious desire for form symmetry is satisfied. We do not secretly
chafe at "Whom did you see?" without reason.[134]
[Footnote 134: Note that it is different with _whose_. This has not the
support of analogous possessive forms in its own functional group, but
the analogical power of the great body of possessives of nouns (_man's_,
_boy's_) as well as of certain personal pronouns (_his_, _its_; as
predicated possessive also _hers_, _yours_, _theirs_) is sufficient to
give it vitality.]
But the drift away from _whom_ has still other determinants. The words
_who_ and _whom_ in their interrogative sense are psychologically
related not merely to the pronouns _which_ and _what_, but to a group of
interrogative adverbs--_where_, _when_, _how_--all of which are
invariable and generally emphatic. I believe it is safe to infer that
there is a rather strong feeling in English that the interrogative
pronoun or adverb, typically an emphatic element in the sentence, should
be invariable. The inflective _-m_ of _whom_ is felt as a drag upon the
rhetorical effectiveness of the word. It needs to be eliminated if the
interrogative pronoun is to receive all its latent power. There is still
a third, and a very powerful, reason for the avoidance of _whom_. The
contrast between the subjective and objective series of personal
pronouns (_I_, _he_, _she_, _we_, _they_: _me_, _him_, _her_, _us_,
_them_) is in English associated with a difference of position. We say
_I see the man_ but _the man sees me_; _he told him_, never _him he
told_ or _him told he_. Such usages as the last two are distinctly
poetic and archaic; they are opposed to the present drift of the
language. Even in the interrogative one does not say _Him did you see?_
It is only in sentences of the type _Whom did you see?_ that an
inflected objective before the verb is now used at all. On the other
hand, the order in _Whom did you see?_ is imperative because of its
interrogative form; the interrogative pronoun or adverb normally comes
first in the sentence (_What are you doing?_ _When did he go?_ _Where
are you from?_). In the "whom" of _Whom did you see?_ there is
concealed, therefore, a conflict between the order proper to a sentence
containing an inflected objective and the order natural to a sentence
with an interrogative pronoun or adverb. The solution _Did you see
whom?_ or _You saw whom?_[135] is too contrary to the idiomatic drift of
our language to receive acceptance. The more radical solution _Who did
you see?_ is the one the language is gradually making for.
[Footnote 135: Aside from certain idiomatic usages, as when _You saw
whom?_ is equivalent to _You saw so and so and that so and so is who?_
In such sentences _whom_ is pronounced high and lingeringly to emphasize
the fact that the person just referred to by the listener is not known
or recognized.]
These three conflicts--on the score of form grouping, of rhetorical
emphasis, and of order--are supplemented by a fourth difficulty. The
emphatic _whom_, with its heavy build (half-long vowel followed by
labial consonant), should contrast with a lightly tripping syllable
immediately following. In _whom did_, however, we have an involuntary
retardation that makes the locution sound "clumsy." This clumsiness is a
phonetic verdict, quite apart from the dissatisfaction due to the
grammatical factors which we have analyzed. The same prosodic objection
does not apply to such parallel locutions as _what did_ and _when did_.
The vowels of _what_ and _when_ are shorter and their final consonants
melt easily into the following _d_, which is pronounced in the same
tongue position as _t_ and _n_. Our instinct for appropriate rhythms
makes it as difficult for us to feel content with _whom did_ as for a
poet to use words like _dreamed_ and _hummed_ in a rapid line. Neither
common feeling nor the poet's choice need be at all conscious. It may be
that not all are equally sensitive to the rhythmic flow of speech, but
it is probable that rhythm is an unconscious linguistic determinant even
with those who set little store by its artistic use. In any event the
poet's rhythms can only be a more sensitive and stylicized application
of rhythmic tendencies that are characteristic of the daily speech of
his people.
We have discovered no less than four factors which enter into our subtle
disinclination to say "Whom did you see?" The uneducated folk that says
"Who did you see?" with no twinge of conscience has a more acute flair
for the genuine drift of the language than its students. Naturally the
four restraining factors do not operate independently. Their separate
energies, if we may make bold to use a mechanical concept, are
"canalized" into a single force. This force or minute embodiment of the
general drift of the language is psychologically registered as a slight
hesitation in using the word _whom_. The hesitation is likely to be
quite unconscious, though it may be readily acknowledged when attention
is called to it. The analysis is certain to be unconscious, or rather
unknown, to the normal speaker.[136] How, then, can we be certain in
such an analysis as we have undertaken that all of the assigned
determinants are really operative and not merely some one of them?
Certainly they are not equally powerful in all cases. Their values are
variable, rising and falling according to the individual and the
locution.[137] But that they really exist, each in its own right, may
sometimes be tested by the method of elimination. If one or other of the
factors is missing and we observe a slight diminution in the
corresponding psychological reaction ("hesitation" in our case), we may
conclude that the factor is in other uses genuinely positive. The second
of our four factors applies only to the interrogative use of _whom_, the
fourth factor applies with more force to the interrogative than to the
relative. We can therefore understand why a sentence like _Is he the man
whom you referred to?_ though not as idiomatic as _Is he the man (that)
you referred to?_ (remember that it sins against counts one and three),
is still not as difficult to reconcile with our innate feeling for
English expression as _Whom did you see?_ If we eliminate the fourth
factor from the interrogative usage,[138] say in _Whom are you looking
at?_ where the vowel following _whom_ relieves this word of its phonetic
weight, we can observe, if I am not mistaken, a lesser reluctance to use
the _whom_. _Who are you looking at?_ might even sound slightly
offensive to ears that welcome _Who did you see?_
[Footnote 136: Students of language cannot be entirely normal in their
attitude towards their own speech. Perhaps it would be better to say
"naïve" than "normal."]
[Footnote 137: It is probably this _variability of value_ in the
significant compounds of a general linguistic drift that is responsible
for the rise of dialectic variations. Each dialect continues the general
drift of the common parent, but has not been able to hold fast to
constant values for each component of the drift. Deviations as to the
drift itself, at first slight, later cumulative, are therefore
unavoidable.]
[Footnote 138: Most sentences beginning with interrogative _whom_ are
likely to be followed by _did_ or _does_, _do_. Yet not all.]
We may set up a scale of "hesitation values" somewhat after this
fashion:
Value 1: factors 1, 3. "The man whom I referred to."
Value 2: factors 1, 3, 4. "The man whom they referred to."
Value 3: factors 1, 2, 3. "Whom are you looking at?"
Value 4: factors 1, 2, 3, 4. "Whom did you see?"
We may venture to surmise that while _whom_ will ultimately disappear
from English speech, locutions of the type _Whom did you see?_ will be
obsolete when phrases like _The man whom I referred to_ are still in
lingering use. It is impossible to be certain, however, for we can never
tell if we have isolated all the determinants of a drift. In our
particular case we have ignored what may well prove to be a controlling
factor in the history of _who_ and _whom_ in the relative sense. This is
the unconscious desire to leave these words to their interrogative
function and to concentrate on _that_ or mere word order as expressions
of the relative (e.g., _The man that I referred to_ or _The man I
referred to_). This drift, which does not directly concern the use of
_whom_ as such (merely of _whom_ as a form of _who_), may have made the
relative _who_ obsolete before the other factors affecting relative
_whom_ have run their course. A consideration like this is instructive
because it indicates that knowledge of the general drift of a language
is insufficient to enable us to see clearly what the drift is heading
for. We need to know something of the relative potencies and speeds of
the components of the drift.
It is hardly necessary to say that the particular drifts involved in the
use of _whom_ are of interest to us not for their own sake but as
symptoms of larger tendencies at work in the language. At least three
drifts of major importance are discernible. Each of these has operated
for centuries, each is at work in other parts of our linguistic
mechanism, each is almost certain to continue for centuries, possibly
millennia. The first is the familiar tendency to level the distinction
between the subjective and the objective, itself but a late chapter in
the steady reduction of the old Indo-European system of syntactic cases.
This system, which is at present best preserved in Lithuanian,[139] was
already considerably reduced in the old Germanic language of which
English, Dutch, German, Danish, and Swedish are modern dialectic forms.
The seven Indo-European cases (nominative genitive, dative, accusative,
ablative, locative, instrumental) had been already reduced to four
(nominative genitive, dative, accusative). We know this from a careful
comparison of and reconstruction based on the oldest Germanic dialects
of which we still have records (Gothic, Old Icelandic, Old High German,
Anglo-Saxon). In the group of West Germanic dialects, for the study of
which Old High German, Anglo-Saxon, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon are our
oldest and most valuable sources, we still have these four cases, but
the phonetic form of the case syllables is already greatly reduced and
in certain paradigms particular cases have coalesced. The case system is
practically intact but it is evidently moving towards further
disintegration. Within the Anglo-Saxon and early Middle English period
there took place further changes in the same direction. The phonetic
form of the case syllables became still further reduced and the
distinction between the accusative and the dative finally disappeared.
The new "objective" is really an amalgam of old accusative and dative
forms; thus, _him_, the old dative (we still say _I give him the book_,
not "abbreviated" from _I give to him_; compare Gothic _imma_, modern
German _ihm_), took over the functions of the old accusative
(Anglo-Saxon _hine_; compare Gothic _ina_, Modern German _ihn_) and
dative. The distinction between the nominative and accusative was
nibbled away by phonetic processes and morphological levelings until
only certain pronouns retained distinctive subjective and objective
forms.
[Footnote 139: Better, indeed, than in our oldest Latin and Greek
records. The old Indo-Iranian languages alone (Sanskrit, Avestan) show
an equally or more archaic status of the Indo-European parent tongue as
regards case forms.]
In later medieval and in modern times there have been comparatively few
apparent changes in our case system apart from the gradual replacement
of _thou_--_thee_ (singular) and subjective _ye_--objective _you_
(plural) by a single undifferentiated form _you_. All the while,
however, the case system, such as it is (subjective-objective, really
absolutive, and possessive in nouns; subjective, objective, and
possessive in certain pronouns) has been steadily weakening in
psychological respects. At present it is more seriously undermined than
most of us realize. The possessive has little vitality except in the
pronoun and in animate nouns. Theoretically we can still say _the moon's
phases_ or _a newspaper's vogue_; practically we limit ourselves pretty
much to analytic locutions like _the phases of the moon_ and _the vogue
of a newspaper_. The drift is clearly toward the limitation, of
possessive forms to animate nouns. All the possessive pronominal forms
except _its_ and, in part, _their_ and _theirs_, are also animate. It is
significant that _theirs_ is hardly ever used in reference to inanimate
nouns, that there is some reluctance to so use _their_, and that _its_
also is beginning to give way to _of it_. _The appearance of it_ or _the
looks of it_ is more in the current of the language than _its
appearance_. It is curiously significant that _its young_ (referring to
an animal's cubs) is idiomatically preferable to _the young of it_. The
form is only ostensibly neuter, in feeling it is animate;
psychologically it belongs with _his children_, not with _the pieces of
it_. Can it be that so common a word as _its_ is actually beginning to
be difficult? Is it too doomed to disappear? It would be rash to say
that it shows signs of approaching obsolescence, but that it is steadily
weakening is fairly clear.[140] In any event, it is not too much to say
that there is a strong drift towards the restriction of the inflected
possessive forms to animate nouns and pronouns.
[Footnote 140: Should _its_ eventually drop out, it will have had a
curious history. It will have played the rôle of a stop-gap between
_his_ in its non-personal use (see footnote 11, page 167) and the later
analytic of _it_.]
[Transcriber's note: Footnote 140 refers to Footnote 132, beginning on
line 5142.]
How is it with the alternation of subjective and objective in the
pronoun? Granted that _whom_ is a weak sister, that the two cases have
been leveled in _you_ (in _it_, _that_, and _what_ they were never
distinct, so far as we can tell[141]), and that _her_ as an objective is
a trifle weak because of its formal identity with the possessive _her_,
is there any reason to doubt the vitality of such alternations as _I see
the man_ and _the man sees me_? Surely the distinction between
subjective _I_ and objective _me_, between subjective _he_ and objective
_him_, and correspondingly for other personal pronouns, belongs to the
very core of the language. We can throw _whom_ to the dogs, somehow make
shift to do without an _its_, but to level _I_ and _me_ to a single
case--would that not be to un-English our language beyond recognition?
There is no drift toward such horrors as _Me see him_ or _I see he_.
True, the phonetic disparity between _I_ and _me_, _he_ and _him_, _we_
and _us_, has been too great for any serious possibility of form
leveling. It does not follow that the case distinction as such is still
vital. One of the most insidious peculiarities of a linguistic drift is
that where it cannot destroy what lies in its way it renders it
innocuous by washing the old significance out of it. It turns its very
enemies to its own uses. This brings us to the second of the major
drifts, the tendency to fixed position in the sentence, determined by
the syntactic relation of the word.
[Footnote 141: Except in so far as _that_ has absorbed other
functions than such as originally belonged to it. It was only a
nominative-accusative neuter to begin with.]
We need not go into the history of this all-important drift. It is
enough to know that as the inflected forms of English became scantier,
as the syntactic relations were more and more inadequately expressed by
the forms of the words themselves, position in the sentence gradually
took over functions originally foreign to it. _The man_ in _the man sees
the dog_ is subjective; in _the dog sees the man_, objective. Strictly
parallel to these sentences are _he sees the dog_ and _the dog sees
him_. Are the subjective value of _he_ and the objective value of _him_
entirely, or even mainly, dependent on the difference of form? I doubt
it. We could hold to such a view if it were possible to say _the dog
sees he_ or _him sees the dog_. It was once possible to say such things,
but we have lost the power. In other words, at least part of the case
feeling in _he_ and _him_ is to be credited to their position before or
after the verb. May it not be, then, that _he_ and _him_, _we_ and _us_,
are not so much subjective and objective forms as pre-verbal and
post-verbal[142] forms, very much as _my_ and _mine_ are now pre-nominal
and post-nominal forms of the possessive (_my father_ but _father mine_;
_it is my book_ but _the book is mine_)? That this interpretation
corresponds to the actual drift of the English language is again
indicated by the language of the folk. The folk says _it is me_, not _it
is I_, which is "correct" but just as falsely so as the _whom did you
see_? that we have analyzed. _I'm the one_, _it's me_; _we're the ones_,
_it's us that will win out_--such are the live parallelisms in English
to-day. There is little doubt that _it is I_ will one day be as
impossible in English as _c'est je_, for _c'est moi_, is now in French.
[Footnote 142: Aside from the interrogative: _am I?_ _is he?_ Emphasis
counts for something. There is a strong tendency for the old "objective"
forms to bear a stronger stress than the "subjective" forms. This is why
the stress in locutions like _He didn't go, did he?_ and _isn't he?_ is
thrown back on the verb; it is not a matter of logical emphasis.]
How differently our _I_: _me_ feels than in Chaucer's day is shown by
the Chaucerian _it am I_. Here the distinctively subjective aspect of
the _I_ was enough to influence the form of the preceding verb in spite
of the introductory _it_; Chaucer's locution clearly felt more like a
Latin _sum ego_ than a modern _it is I_ or colloquial _it is me_. We
have a curious bit of further evidence to prove that the English
personal pronouns have lost some share of their original syntactic
force. Were _he_ and _she_ subjective forms pure and simple, were they
not striving, so to speak, to become caseless absolutives, like _man_ or
any other noun, we should not have been able to coin such compounds as
_he-goat_ and _she-goat_, words that are psychologically analogous to
_bull-moose_ and _mother-bear_. Again, in inquiring about a new-born
baby, we ask _Is it a he or a she?_ quite as though _he_ and _she_ were
the equivalents of _male_ and _female_ or _boy_ and _girl_. All in all,
we may conclude that our English case system is weaker than it looks and
that, in one way or another, it is destined to get itself reduced to an
absolutive (caseless) form for all nouns and pronouns but those that are
animate. Animate nouns and pronouns are sure to have distinctive
possessive forms for an indefinitely long period.
Meanwhile observe that the old alignment of case forms is being invaded
by two new categories--a positional category (pre-verbal, post-verbal)
and a classificatory category (animate, inanimate). The facts that in
the possessive animate nouns and pronouns are destined to be more and
more sharply distinguished from inanimate nouns and pronouns (_the
man's_, but _of the house_; _his_, but _of it_) and that, on the whole,
it is only animate pronouns that distinguish pre-verbal and post-verbal
forms[143] are of the greatest theoretical interest. They show that,
however the language strive for a more and more analytic form, it is by
no means manifesting a drift toward the expression of "pure" relational
concepts in the Indo-Chinese manner.[144] The insistence on the
concreteness of the relational concepts is clearly stronger than the
destructive power of the most sweeping and persistent drifts that we
know of in the history and prehistory of our language.
[Footnote 143: _They_: _them_ as an inanimate group may be looked upon
as a kind of borrowing from the animate, to which, in feeling, it more
properly belongs.]
[Footnote 144: See page 155.]
[Transcriber's note: Footnote 144 refers to the paragraph beginning on
line 4795.]
The drift toward the abolition of most case distinctions and the
correlative drift toward position as an all-important grammatical method
are accompanied, in a sense dominated, by the last of the three major
drifts that I have referred to. This is the drift toward the invariable
word. In analyzing the "whom" sentence I pointed out that the rhetorical
emphasis natural to an interrogative pronoun lost something by its form
variability (_who_, _whose_, _whom_). This striving for a simple,
unnuanced correspondence between idea and word, as invariable as may be,
is very strong in English. It accounts for a number of tendencies which
at first sight seem unconnected. Certain well-established forms, like
the present third person singular _-s_ of _works_ or the plural _-s_ of
_books_, have resisted the drift to invariable words, possibly because
they symbolize certain stronger form cravings that we do not yet fully
understand. It is interesting to note that derivations that get away
sufficiently from the concrete notion of the radical word to exist as
independent conceptual centers are not affected by this elusive drift.
As soon as the derivation runs danger of being felt as a mere nuancing
of, a finicky play on, the primary concept, it tends to be absorbed by
the radical word, to disappear as such. English words crave spaces
between them, they do not like to huddle in clusters of slightly
divergent centers of meaning, each edging a little away from the rest.
_Goodness_, a noun of quality, almost a noun of relation, that takes its
cue from the concrete idea of "good" without necessarily predicating
that quality (e.g., _I do not think much of his goodness_) is
sufficiently spaced from _good_ itself not to need fear absorption.
Similarly, _unable_ can hold its own against _able_ because it destroys
the latter's sphere of influence; _unable_ is psychologically as
distinct from _able_ as is _blundering_ or _stupid_. It is different
with adverbs in _-ly_. These lean too heavily on their adjectives to
have the kind of vitality that English demands of its words. _Do it
quickly!_ drags psychologically. The nuance expressed by _quickly_ is
too close to that of _quick_, their circles of concreteness are too
nearly the same, for the two words to feel comfortable together. The
adverbs in _-ly_ are likely to go to the wall in the not too distant
future for this very reason and in face of their obvious usefulness.
Another instance of the sacrifice of highly useful forms to this
impatience of nuancing is the group _whence_, _whither_, _hence_,
_hither_, _thence_, _thither_. They could not persist in live usage
because they impinged too solidly upon the circles of meaning
represented by the words _where_, _here_ and _there_. In saying
_whither_ we feel too keenly that we repeat all of _where_. That we add
to _where_ an important nuance of direction irritates rather than
satisfies. We prefer to merge the static and the directive (_Where do
you live?_ like _Where are you going?_) or, if need be, to overdo a
little the concept of direction (_Where are you running to?_).
Now it is highly symptomatic of the nature of the drift away from word
clusters that we do not object to nuances as such, we object to having
the nuances formally earmarked for us. As a matter of fact our
vocabulary is rich in near-synonyms and in groups of words that are
psychologically near relatives, but these near-synonyms and these groups
do not hang together by reason of etymology. We are satisfied with
_believe_ and _credible_ just because they keep aloof from each other.
_Good_ and _well_ go better together than _quick_ and _quickly_. The
English vocabulary is a rich medley because each English word wants its
own castle. Has English long been peculiarly receptive to foreign words
because it craves the staking out of as many word areas as possible, or,
conversely, has the mechanical imposition of a flood of French and Latin
loan-words, unrooted in our earlier tradition, so dulled our feeling for
the possibilities of our native resources that we are allowing these to
shrink by default? I suspect that both propositions are true. Each feeds
on the other. I do not think it likely, however, that the borrowings in
English have been as mechanical and external a process as they are
generally represented to have been. There was something about the
English drift as early as the period following the Norman Conquest that
welcomed the new words. They were a compensation for something that was
weakening within.