others, since it also shows a grammatical distinction regarding sex. The word "common" common" as applied to gender-since there is no common sex-is omitted from many modern grammars. Yet it is a convenient term to apply occasionally to such words as cousin, friend, culprit, etc., which can stand as antecedent to pronouns of either gender according to the application of the word. An obsolete term, epicene, found in ancient grammars, was applied to animal names, which, while strictly of one gender, were made to cover both sexes.

The English language claims the right to apply the terms he and she to inanimate objects, and personification is a frequent and forceful rhetorical figure both in speech and writing.

Nouns have a small share in the syntax of gender since they require the pronouns to "hark back" to themselves as antecedents for the justification of their gender-forms. This is as true of the nouns which are not "gender-words" as of the others; so in a sense, most nouns may be said to be of the neuter gender.

The syntax of gender, though not large, requires careful attention. The rule for the agreement of the pronoun with its antecedent is the only important grammatical rule that belongs to gender. But the applications of this rule involve some knotty points. One of the chief of these is the choice of pronoun when its singular antecedent applies equally to the two sexes. Usage in this case generally takes the masculine as the representative of both. There are cases, however, when the feminine is used, as being most representative

of the class; as "The teacher instructs her children." But there are other cases in which each pronoun seems objectionable. For these, common (or vulgar) usage often employs the plural pronoun, which is ungrammatical, although some writers have contended for it as the best that can be done. Others have seriously proposed the introduction of a new pronoun to fill this "felt want." But new grammatical words must be a "language growth" and not a cunning invention. Some writers try to avoid the difficulty by the use of one as a pronoun that may have either gender, but this, if often repeated, will easily become tedious. In the sentence "John or Ellen has lost his or her pencil," both ambiguity and grammatical inaccuracy have been avoided. Yet the awkwardness of the construction is certainly a rhetorical if not a grammatical fault.

The fact remains that English, with all its virtues, is not a perfect language. It has its own limitations, and when we are brought face to face with them, we are constrained to make a circumlocution, thus avoiding the point at issue; or else "among several evils to choose the least."

XVIII

CASE

Case is the subject, perhaps not of the greatest difficulty in grammar, but of the greatest confusion.-DAVENPORT AND EMERSON.

The Finnish language has fourteen cases, but I do not suppose that it can do more or indeed as much with its fourteen as the Greek is able to do with its five.-TRENCH.

Case classification is of necessity in some measure arbitrary, and should be made as the best practicable compromise of thought analysis on the one hand and of form analysis on the other. In this view it seems best to limit the English cases to four.-DAVENPORT AND EMERSON.

The objective case in English does duty both for the accusative and the dative of other languages.-Mason.

There is no noun in our language which really has an objective case. Still, partly by analogy with the pronouns, and partly because many other languages related with English and even the English itself in earlier times, do distinguish the object from the subject in nouns as well as in pronouns, we usually speak of nouns as having an objective case.-WHITNEY.

The objective of nouns is not merely a figment as regards the speech of to-day; it is something which the language has rejected. It represents the Egypt from which we have come out. It is, therefore, not a harmless fiction; it is a harmful falsehood.-TOLMAN.

We should treat English as precisely what it is, not as it would be if it were Latin or any other language.—WHITNEY.

There are only seven words in the English language which show any difference between the nominative and the objective case. These are I, we, thou, he, she, they, and who. When we remember that two of these are plurals of another two; that thou has only a limited or archaic use; that he and she may be regarded as gender forms of the same pronoun; and still further, that the change from I to me, we to us, etc., is not a true inflection since it is not made by adding a new suffix to a common root—we are forced to acknowledge that the inflection of case in English has a very limited extension indeed.

The languages of the world differ greatly in the number of their cases. Professor Whitney notes that the Scythian tongue had from fifteen to twenty cases. The French language, on the other hand, has advanced even further than English in the rejection of case forms, Even the possessive case of nouns is lacking and the preposition de is used instead.

Old English had six cases: nominative, genitive, dative, vocative, accusative, and instrumental (similar to the ablative, using by or with.) These were distinguished by case-endings, and the definite article and adjective had also a declension of agreeing case forms. Case in those days was no trivial matter in English.

All the relations that belonged to these cases are still found in English syntax. But the dative and instrumental cases have lost their case-endings and become for the most part prepositional phrases. The vocative case is now merely the name of the person addressed,

with perhaps the interjection O prefixed. Even the accusative case is not distinct from the nominative, except in the seven little pronouns aforesaid.

Ancient grammarians, however, following the analogy of the old English, or perhaps that of the Latin grammars, contrived to recognize more cases than the inflectional forms gave evidence of. Thus the "greatly improved grammar" of Thomas Coar, published in London in 1796, had diagrams like the following.

Modern grammars have shown great differences in their treatment of case. Some avoid a strict definition of the term. Thus one grammar says: "Case denotes

the relation which a noun sustains to other words in the sentence, expressed sometimes by its termination, and sometimes by its position.

The number of cases given in different English textbooks varies all the way from zero to the original six. Even the recognition of the possessive as a case of nouns has been thought by some to be unnecessary. That nouns have a "possessive form" no one would deny, but the appropriateness of the word "case" for this adjective form of the noun is not universally