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and articles are concerned. Their pronouns offer the sole survival of declension by case endings. Here France, the runner-up, is a trifle slow in the possession of a real, live dative case of the pronoun (acc. le, la, les; dat. lui, leur). England wins by a neck with one universal oblique case (him, her, them). This insidious suggestion is not meant to endanger the entente cordiale; even perfidious Albion would not convict the French nation of arrested development on the side-issue of pronominal atavism. Mark Twain says he paid double for a German dog, because he bought it in the dative case; but no nation need be damned for a dative. We have no use for the coup de Jarnac.
But consider the article. Here, if anywhere, is a test of the power of a language to move with the times. For some reason or other (the real underlying causes of these changes in language needs are obscure) modern life has need of the article, though the highly civilized Romans did very well without it. So strong is this need that, in the middle ages, when Latin was used as an international language by the learned, a definite article (hic or τó) was foisted into the language. How is it with the modern world? The Slavs have remained in this matter at the point of view of the ancient world. They are articleless. Germany has a cumbrous three-gender, four-case article; France rejoices in a two-gender, one-case article with a distinct form for the plural. The ripe product of tendency, the infant heir of the eloquent ages, to whose birth the law of Aryan evolution groaned and travailed until but now, the most useful, if not the "mightiest," monosyllable "ever moulded by the lips of man," the "the," one and indeclinable, was born in the Anglo-Saxon mouth, and sublimed to its unique simplicity by Anglo-Saxon progress.
The general law of progress in language could be illustrated equally well from the history of genders as exhibited in various languages. We are here only dealing with Aryan languages, but, merely by way of illustration, it may be mentioned that a primitive African language offers seven "genders," or grammatical categories requiring the same kind of concords as genders. In