Essay on Language; As Connected with the Faculties of the Mind, and as Applied to Things in Nature and Art

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1825. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... or, the first person speaks, to the seeond, about iLe third. 111. Pronouns, though very convenient in giving variety to discourse, are not an original, nor an absolutely necessary part of speech. This, like some other branches of knowledge, may be learned from savages and children, if we had no other means of discovering the fact. The tenants of the American forest, in their various dialects, havoone general word for the third person singular, which answers for the three genders; and when one of these men, in speaking broken English, mentions a woman, he habitually calls her hertr him. However oddly this may sound to us, it is only the application of e same principle to the singular number, which we ourselves use in the plural; for we say they or them without 'distinguishing whether we mean women or men. It is very natural for an Indian, or any other person, to carry into a foreign language the habits with which he is familiar in his mother tongue. It is no more philosophically improper that savages should say he, for one person, male or female, than that polite scholars should say they, for ten of either sex. All English learners, in French, Spanish, Italian, andmanyothertongues, are liable to turn Indians in misapplying the pronoun plural for they. Children also instruct us in the secondary character of pronouns; for when the little prattler speaks of himself, he commonly makes use of his own name, instead of the wordsiorme; as, Charley fall down: give John drink. 112. Grammatical writers have very generally made out a table of words of three cases, which they call personal pronouns. It seems strange that persons acquainted with language should fail ta perceive that this personal pronoun in the possessive case is always nominative or objective, and unavoidabl...