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Anglo-Saxon, 995.

Sume cwædon, He hyt is; sume cwædon, Nese, ac is him gelic. cwæp soplice, Ic hit eom.

He

Luther, 1534.

Etliche sprachen: Er ist es. Etliche aber; Er ist ihm ähnlich. Er selbst aber sprach: Ich bin es.

If to the above we add the s of most nouns plural and the EN of a very few; also the s of the pronouns his, hers, its, ours, yours, theirs; and further, the -er and -est of adjectival comparison, we have exhausted the relics of nounal and pronounal flexion which survive in the English language.

Syntax of Verbal Flexion.

576. But the verb is the great stronghold of flexion. More than any other part of speech it attracts and attaches inflections to itself in times when flexion is growing and on the other hand, when flexion is on the wane, the verb is the most retentive of its relics, and the most reluctant to part with them. There is no language of Western Europe in which the verb has parted with its flexion more than in English. The Gothic languages are the most advanced in this respect, and especially the Danish, Swedish, and English.

The verbal inflections, which are still used to express person, tense, or mood, are as follows:

(See) seest, sees, seeth, saw, sawest, seen, seeing.

(Look) lookest, looks, looketh, looked, lookedst, looking.

Half of these are antiquated, and all that are in habitual use

are,

sees, saw, seen, seeing.

looks, looked, looking.

When our ancestors came to this island they brought with them no Future tense. The Present was used for the

Future. The Future with shall or will has been made since the colonization. These two auxiliaries are however by no means of equal standing in the language. For shall is old, and had already made some movements in this direction, even in the old mother country; but will as a futuritive is a product of comparatively recent times. And this is why there is no vacillation about the usage of shall, as there notoriously is about that of will:—the latter has not yet got definitely settled into its place.

577. A feature worthy of contemplation is that whereby the flexion which expresses past time is employed also for contingency or uncertainty. It appears as if the link of sympathy between the two things thus rendered by a selfsame formula were remoteness from the speaker's possession.

Looking at the word attempted by itself we should associate it with the idea of past time, but in the following sentence it expresses contingency and not time, or if it regards time at all, the time is future.

His power would break and shiver like glass, if he attempted it.

In the following quotations this twofold power is well seen in the form

had.

I say not that she ne had kunnyng
What harme was, or els she

Had coulde no good, so thinketh me,
And trewly, for to speke of trouth,

But she had had, it had be routh.

Chaucer, The Booke of the Dutchesse, 996.

He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed.-Thomas Fuller.

Hence it comes that the apodosis to had is often would be, or would have.

If this man had not twelve thousand a-year, he would be a very stupid fellow.-Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ch. iv.

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And some among you held, that if the King

Had seen the sight, he would have sworn the vow.

Alfred Tennyson, The Holy Grail.

578. In the single case of the verb to be, however, there are distinct forms for the subjunctive tenses. Be was originally indicative, as it still is in Devonshire, and in our Bible They be blind leaders of the blind,' Matt. xv. 14. But inasmuch as the present had a duplicate form is, are, a division of labour took place, whereby be was reserved for the subjunctive and conditional present:

If I be bereaved of my children, I am bereaved.-Genesis xliii. 14.

What though the field be lost? All is not lost.

John Milton, Paradise Lost, i. 105.

are

In the revision of the Common Prayer Book in 1661, was substituted for be in forty-three places, and the indicative. be was left standing in one place only, namely this' Which be they?'

On the same principle was and were took distinct offices :

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were.

I am not able to unfold, how this cautelous enterprise of licencing can be exempted from the number of vain and impossible attempts. And he who were pleasantly dispos'd, could not well avoid to liken it to the exploit of that gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting his Park-gate.-John Milton, Areopagitica.

579. The subjunctive thus recently acquired is now antiquated; and not even in a sermon of the present day should we meet with the like of this of Isaac Barrow's :

Be we never so urgently set, or closely intent upon any work (be we feeding, be we travelling, be we trading, be we studying), nothing yet can forbid, but that we may together wedge in a thought concerning God's goodness, and bolt forth a word of Praise for it.-The Duty of Prayer.

Nor is were so freely employed now as it once was ;—if it goes out, it will be a beauty lost. But however it may be with colloquy and familiar prose, it can hardly be spared from poetry and the style of dignity :

But to live by law,

Acting the law we live by without fear;
And, because right is right, to follow right,
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.

Alfred Tennyson, Enone.

Should these subjunctives be and were fall into complete desuetude, they will leave behind some fossil traces of their existence in the conjunction howbeit, and in the phrasal adverb as it were.

In the case of ordinary verbs, the subjunctive is distinguished from the indicative merely by the denudation of flexion; but this distinction now lives in poetry only :and age to age,

Though all else pass and fail, delivereth

At least the great tradition of their God.

Frederic W. H. Myers, St. John the Baptist.

580. We will close this section as we closed the previous one, with the infinitive. The old grammatical infinitive in -en lingered in our language as late as the Elizabethan period. Thus Surrey:

sayen.

Give place, ye lovers, here before

That spent your boasts and brags in vain;

My lady's beauty passeth more

The best of yours, I dare well sayen,

Than doth the sun the candle light,

Or brightest day the darkest night.

We lost the infinitive in -en, but we unconsciously retained the same thing in a slightly disguised form, namely with the ending -ing.

In the fifteenth century we find an intermediate and variable termination, yng and -yn. The Promptorium Parvulorum has it throughout in the form -y. The following from Caxton exhibits both :

makyng and reducyn.

Besechyng al them that this litel werke shal see / here / or rede to haue me for excused for the rude & symple makyng and reducyn in to our englisshe. The Game of the Chesse, A.D. 1474; Preface.

580 a. The tendency to turn -an or -en into -ing shews itself elsewhere: thus, Abbandun has become Abingdon; and we are all pretty familiar with such forms as capting, chicking (Little Dorrit, 184), childring, garding, lunching. When the mind has lost its hold on the meaning of a given form, the organs of speech are apt to slide into any contiguous form that has more present currency or is more vital with present meaning. The -an or -en of the infinitive became -ing because it was surrounded with nouns and participles in -ing which differed from the infinitive by a difference too fine to be held-to in the transition and Early English periods, with their neglect of the vernacular. Hence it has become traditional to explain this form always either as a substantive or as a present participle. But there is a large class of instances to which these explanations will not apply. In such a sentence as the following, 'Europeans are no match for Orientals at evading a question,' evading is clearly a verb governing its substantive; and yet it is not a participle, for it has nothing adjectival about it. By an infinitive, I understand a verb in a substantival aspect; by a participle, a verb in an adjectival aspect. In the saying of Rowland Hill to his co-pastor Theophilus Jones, 'Never mind breaking grammar if &c., the word breaking is clearly a verb, and can be no otherwise grammatically designated than as an infinitive. The nature of the participle is seen in the following:

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