FORMATION OF PRONOUNS. WO correspondents have laid before me the TWO need of a new pronoun in English, and both have suggested the same means of supplying the deficiency, which is, in the words of the first, "the use of en, or some more euphonious substitute, as a personal pronoun, common gender." "A deficiency exists there," he glibly continues, "and we should fill it." My other correspondent has a somewhat juster notion of the magnitude of his proposition, or, as I should rather say, of its enormity. But, still, he insists that a new pronoun is "universally needed,” and as an example of the inconvenience caused by the want, he gives the following sentence: "If a person wishes to sleep, they mustn't eat cheese for supper." "Of course," he goes on to say, "that is incorrect; yet almost every one would say they." (That I venture to doubt.) "Few would say in common conversation, 'If a person wishes to sleep, he or she mustn't eat cheese for supper.' It is too much trouble. We must have a word to take the place of he or she, his or hers, him or her, etc. As the French make the little word en answer a great many purposes, suppose we take the same word, give it an English pronunciation (or any other word), and make it answer for any and every case of that kind, and thus tend to simplify the language." To all this there are two sufficient replies. First, the thing can't be done; last, it is not at all necessary or desirable that it should be done. And to consider the last point first. There is no such dilemma as the one in question. A speaker of common sense and common mastery of English would say, "If a man wishes to sleep, he must not eat cheese at supper," "* where man, as in the word mankind, is used in a general sense for the species. Any objection to this use of man, and of the relative pronoun, is for the consideration of the next Woman's Rights Convention, at which I hope it may be discussed with all the gravity beseeming its momentous significance. But as a slight contribution to the amenities of the occasion, I venture to suggest that to free the language from the oppression of the sex and from the outrage to its dignity, which have for centuries lurked in this use of man and he, it is not necessary to say, "If a person wishes to sleep, en mustn't eat cheese for supper,” but merely, as the speakers of the best English now say, and have said for generations, "If one wishes to sleep, one mustn't, etc." One, thus used, is a • Unless we mean that the supper consisted entirely or chiefly of cheese, we should not say cheese for supper, but cheese at supper. good pronoun, of healthy, well-rooted growth. And we have in some another word which supplies all our need in this respect without our going to the French for their over-worked en; e. g., Voici des bonnes fraises. Voulez-vous en avoir? These are fine strawberries. Will you have some? Thus used, some is to all intents and purposes a pronoun which leaves nothing to be desired. With he, she, it, and we, and one, and some, we have no need of en or any other outlandish pronoun. Or we should have had one long ere this. For the service to which the proposed pronoun would be put, if it were adopted, is not new. The need is one which, if it exists at all, must have been felt five hundred years ago as much as it can be now. At that period, and long before, a noun in the third person singular was represented, according to its gender, by the pronouns he, she, or it, and there was no pronoun of common gender to take place of all of them. In the matter of language, popular need is inexorable, and popular ingenuity inexhaustible; and it is not in the nature of things that, if the imagined need had existed, it should not have been supplied during the formative stages of our language, particularly at the Elizabethan period, to which we owe the pronoun its. The introduction of this word, although it is merely a possessive form of it, was a work of so much time and diffi culty, that an acquaintance with the struggle would alone deter a considerate man from attempting to make a new pronoun. Although, as I have said, it is a mere possessive form of a word which had been on the lips of all men of Anglo-Saxon blood for a thousand years, and although it was introduced at a period notable for bold linguistic innovations, and was soon adopted by some of the most popular writers, Shakespeare among them, nearly a century elapsed before it was firmly established in the English tongue. For pronouns are of all words the remotest in origin, the slowest of growth, the most irregular and capricious in their manner of growth, the most tenacious of hold, the most difficult to plant, the most nearly impossible to transplant. To say that I, the first of pronouns, is three thousand years old, is quite within bounds. We trace it through the Old English ich to the Anglo-Saxon ic, and the Gothic ik. It appears in the Icelandic ek, the Danish jeg, the Old German ih, the Russian ia, the Latin and Greek ego, and the Sanscrit aham. Should any of my readers fail to see the connection between ah-am and I, let him consider for a moment that the sound expressed by the English I is ah-ee. The antiquity of pronouns is shown, also, by the irregularity of their cases. That is generally a trait of the oldest words in any language, verbs and adjectives as well as pronouns. For instance, the words expressing consciousness, existence, pleasure, and pain, the first and commonest linguistic needs of all peoples, — in English, I, be, good, bad; in Latin, cgo, esse, bonus, malus, — are regular in no language that I can remember within the narrow circle with which I have been able to establish an acquaintance. Telegraph and skedaddle are as regular as may be; but we say go, went, gone; the Romans said eo, ire, ivi, itum; and the irregular ities, dialectic and other, of the Greek u (cimi), are multitudinous and anomalous. English pronouns have real cases, which is one sign of their antiquity, the Anglo-Saxon having been an inflected language; but not in Anglo-Saxon, in Latin, or in any other inflected language, are the oblique cases of I derived from it more than they are in English. My, me, we, our, us, are not inflections of I; but neither are meus, mihi, me, nos, nostrum, nobis, inflections of ego. The oblique cases of pronouns are furnished by other parts of speech, or by other pronouns, from which they are taken bodily, or composed, in the early, and, generally, unwritten stages of a language. Between the pronoun and the article there is generally a very close relation. It is in allusion to this fact that Sir Hugh Evans, putting William Page to school ("Merry Wives of Windsor," Act IV. Scene 1), and endeavoring to trip the lad, — though he learned the trick of William Lilly the grammarian, asks, "What is he, William, that doth lend articles?" But the boy is too quick for him, and replies, "Articles are borrowed of the pronoun, and be thus declined: singulariter, nominativo, hic, hæc, hoc." A marked instance of this relationship between the pronoun and the article, and an instructive example of the manner in which pronouns come into a language, is our English she, which is borrowed. from the Anglo-Saxon definite article se, the feminine. form of which was seó; and this definite article itself originally was, or was used as, a demonstrative pronoun, corresponding to who, that. For se is a softened form of the older the; and Ic the, he the |