The American Language
/mine/"; "/thy/ faith," but "I am /thine/."[56] Also, one says "/no/
matter," but "I have /none/." Without question this retention of the
/n/ in these pronouns had something to do with the appearance of the
/n/-declension in the treatment of /your/, /her/, /his/ and /our/,
and, after /their/ had displaced /here/ in the third person plural, in
/their/. And equally without question it supports the vulgar American
usage today. What that usage shows is simply the strong popular
tendency to make language as simple and as regular as possible--to
abolish subtleties and exceptions. The difference between "/his/ book"
and "the book is /his'n/" is exactly that between /my/ and /mine/,
/thy/ and /thine/, in the examples just given. "Perhaps it would have
been better," says Bradley, "if the literary language had accepted
/hisn/, but from some cause it did not do so."[57]
As for the addition of /s/ to /you/ in the nominative and objective of
the second person plural, it exhibits no more than an effort to give
clarity to the logical difference between the true plural and the mere
polite plural. In several other dialects of [Pg215] English the same
desire has given rise to cognate forms, and there are even secondary
devices in American. In the South, for example, the true plural is
commonly indicated by /you-all/, which, despite a Northern belief to
the contrary, is never used in the singular by any save the most
ignorant.[58] /You-all/, like /yous/, simply means /you-jointly/ as
opposed to the /you/ that means /thou/. Again, there is the form
observed in "you can /all of you/ go to hell"--another plain effort to
differentiate between singular and plural. The substitution of /you/
for /thou/ goes back to the end of the thirteenth century. It appeared
in late Latin and in the other continental languages as well as in
English, and at about the same time. In these languages the true
singular survives alongside the transplanted plural, but English has
dropped it entirely, save in its poetical and liturgical forms and in
a few dialects. It passed out of ordinary polite speech before
Elizabeth's day. By that time, indeed, its use had acquired an air of
the offensive, such as it has today, save between intimates or to
children, in Germany. Thus, at the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh in
1603, Sir Edward Coke, then attorney-general, displayed his animosity
to Raleigh by addressing him as /thou/, and finally burst into the
contemptuous "I /thou/ thee, /thou/ traitor!" And in "Twelfth Night"
Sir Toby Belch urges Sir Andrew Aguecheek to provoke the disguised
Viola to combat by /thouing/ her. In our own time, with thou passed
out entirely, even as a pronoun of contempt, the confusion between
/you/ in the plural and /you/ in the singular presents plain
difficulties to a man of limited linguistic resources. He gets around
them by setting up a distinction that is well supported by logic and
analogy. "I seen /yous/" is clearly separated from "I seen /you/.".
And in the conjoint position "/yous/ guys" is separated from "/you/
liar."
So much for the personal pronouns. As we shall see, they are used in
such a manner that the distinction between the nominative and the
objective forms, though still existing grammatically, has begun to
break down. But first it may be well to glance at the demonstrative
and relative pronouns. Of the former there [Pg216] are but two in
English, /this/ and /that/, with their plural forms, /these/ and
/those/. To them, American adds a third, /them/, which is also the
personal pronoun of the third person, objective case.[59] In addition
it has adopted certain adverbial pronouns, /this-here/, /these-here/,
/that-there/, /those-there/ and /them-there/, and set up inflections
of the original demonstratives by analogy with /mine/, /hisn/ and
/yourn/, to wit, /thisn/, /thesen/, /thatn/ and /thosen/. I present
some examples of everyday use:
/Them/ are the kind I like.
/Them/ men all work here.
Who is /this-here/ Smith I hear about?
/These-here/ are mine.
/That-there/ medicine ain't no good.
/Those-there/ wops has all took to the woods.
I wisht I had one of /them-there/ Fords.
/Thisn/ is better'n /thatn/.
I like /thesen/ better'n /thosen/.
The origin of the demonstratives of the /thisn/-group is plain: they
are degenerate forms of /this-one/, /that-one/, etc., just as /none/
is a degenerate composition form of /no(t)-one/. In every case of
their use that I have observed the simple demonstratives might have
been set free and /one/ actually substituted for the terminal /n/. But
it must be equally obvious that they have been reinforced very greatly
by the absolutes of the /hisn/-group, for in their relation to the
original demonstratives they play the part of just such absolutes and
are never used conjointly. Thus, one says, in American, "I take
/thisn/" or "/thisn/ is mine," but one never says "I take /thisn/ hat"
or "/thisn/ dog is mine." In this conjoint situation plain /this/ is
always used, and the same rule [Pg217] applies to /these/, /those/
and /that/. /Them/, being a newcomer among the demonstratives, has not
yet acquired an inflection in the absolute. I have never heard
/them'n/, and it will probably never come in, for it is forbiddingly
clumsy. One says, in American, both "/them/ are mine" and "/them/
collars are mine."
/This-here/, /these-here/, /that-there/, /those-there/ and
/them-there/ are plainly combinations of pronouns and adverbs, and
their function is to support the distinction between proximity, as
embodied in /this/ and /these/, and remoteness, as embodied in /that/,
/those/ and /them/. "/This-here/ coat is mine" simply means "this
coat, /here/, or this /present/ coat, is mine." But the adverb
promises to coalesce with the pronoun so completely as to obliterate
all sense of its distinct existence, even as a false noun or
adjective. As commonly pronounced, /this-here/ becomes a single word,
somewhat like /thish-yur/, and /these-here/ becomes /these-yur/, and
/that-there/ and /them-there/ become /that-ere/ and /them-ere/.
/Those-there/, if I observed accurately, is still pronounced more
distinctly, but it, too, may succumb to composition in time. The
adverb will then sink to the estate of a mere inflectional particle,
as /one/ has done in the absolutes of the /thisn/-group. /Them/, as a
personal pronoun in the absolute, of course, is commonly pronounced
/em/, as in "I seen /em/," and sometimes its vowel is almost lost, but
this is also the case in all save the most exact spoken English. Sweet
and Lounsbury, following the German grammarians, argue that this /em/
is not really a debased form of /them/, but the offspring of /hem/,
which survived as the regular plural of the third person in the
objective case down to the beginning of the fifteenth century. But in
American /them/ is clearly pronounced as a demonstrative. I have never
heard "/em/ men" or "/em/ are the kind I like," but always "/them/
men" and "/them/ are the kind I like."
The relative pronouns, so far as I have been able to make out, are
declined as follows:
/Nominative/ who which what that
/Possessive Conjoint/ whose whose
/Possessive Absolute/ whosen whosen
/Objective/ who which what that
[Pg218]
Two things will be noted in this paradigm. First there is the
disappearance of /whom/ as the objective form of /who/, and secondly
there is the appearance of an inflected form of /whose/ in the
absolute, by analogy with /mine/, /hisn/ and /thesen/. /Whom/, as we
have seen, is fast disappearing from standard spoken American;[60] in
the vulgar language it is already virtually extinct. Not only is /who/
used in such constructions as "/who/ did you find there?" where even
standard spoken English would tolerate it, but also in such
constructions as "the man /who/ I saw," "them /who/ I trust in" and
"to /who/?" Krapp explains this use of /who/ on the ground that there
is a "general feeling," due to the normal word-order in English, that
"the word which precedes the verb is the subject word, or at least the
subject form."[61] But this explanation is probably fanciful. Among
the plain people no such "general feeling" for case exists. Their only
"general feeling" is a prejudice against case inflections in any form
whatsoever. They use /who/ in place of /whom/ simply because they can
discern no logical difference between the significance of the one and
the significance of the other.
/Whosen/ is obviously the offspring of the other absolutes in /n/. In
the conjoint relation plain /whose/ is always used, as in "/whose/ hat
is that?" and "the man /whose/ dog bit me." But in the absolute
/whosen/ is often substituted, as in "if it ain't /hisn/, then
/whosen/ is it?" The imitation is obvious. There is an analogous form
of /which/, to wit, /whichn/, resting heavily on /which one/. Thus,
"/whichn/ do you like?" and "I didn't say /whichn/" are plainly
variations of "/which one/ do you like?" and "I didn't say /which
one/." That, as we have seen, has a like form, /thatn/, but never, of
course, in the relative situation. "I like /thatn/," is familiar, but
"the one /thatn/ I like" is never heard. If /that/, as a relative,
could be used absolutely, I have no doubt that it would change to
/thatn/, as it does as a demonstrative. So with /what/. As things
stand, it is sometimes substituted for /that/, as in "them's the kind
/what/ I like." Joined to /but/ it can also take the place of /that/
in other situations, as in "I don't know /but what/." [Pg219]
The substitution of /who/ for /whom/ in the objective case, just
noticed, is typical of a general movement toward breaking down all
case distinctions among the pronouns, where they make their last stand
in English and its dialects. This movement, of course, is not peculiar
to vulgar American; nor is it of recent beginning. So long ago as the
fifteenth century the old clear distinction between /ye/, nominative,
and /you/, objective, disappeared, and today the latter is used in
both cases. Sweet says that the phonetic similarity between /ye/ and
/thee/, the objective form of the true second singular, was
responsible for this confusion.[62] At the start /ye/ actually went
over to the objective case, and the usage thus established shows
itself in such survivors of the period as /harkee/ (/hark ye/) and
/look ye/. In modern spoken English, indeed, /you/ in the objective
often has a sound far more like that of /ye/ than like that of /you/,
as, for example, in "how do y' do?" and in American its vowel takes
the neutral form of the /e/ in the definite article, and the word
becomes a sort of shortened /yuh/. But whenever emphasis is laid upon
it, /you/ becomes quite distinct, even in American. In "I mean /you/,"
for example, there is never any chance of mistaking it for /ye/.
In Shakespeare's time the other personal pronouns of the objective
case threatened to follow /you/ into the nominative, and there was a
compensatory movement of the nominative pronouns toward the objective.
Lounsbury has collected many examples.[63] Marlowe used "is it /him/
you seek?" "'tis /her/ I esteem" and "nor /thee/ nor /them/, shall
want"; Fletcher used "'tis /her/ I admire"; Shakespeare himself used
"that's /me/." Contrariwise, Webster used "what difference is between
the duke and /I/?" and Greene used "nor earth nor heaven shall part my
love and /I/." Krapp has unearthed many similar examples from the
Restoration dramatists.[64] Etheredge used "'tis /them/," "it may be
/him/," "let you and /I/" and "nor is it /me/"; Matthew Prior, in a
famous couplet, achieved this: [Pg220]
For thou art a girl as much brighter than /her/.
As he was a poet sublimer than /me/.
The free exchange continued, in fact, until the eighteenth century was