Caveat: This is another eggheady column about grammar, one of my favorite hobby horses, so those of you who find the topic unbearably dull are advised to tune in tomorrow, when Rob Lopresti will provide us with a thought-provoking piece of American judicial history from a Surprise Witness.

—JLW

SYNTHETIC ENGLISH

by James Lincoln Warren

Synthetic English? What’s that? English made from artificial ingredients?

Hardly. Linguists sometimes describe two types of grammar—synthetic on the one hand (where the grammatical function of a word is determined by its case, i.e., specific modification to its root), and on the other hand, analytical (where the grammatical function of a word is determined by syntax).

If that’s as clear as a foggy San Francisco afternoon, let me illustrate.

In Latin, a synthetic language, the sentence “Love conquers all” is Amor vincent omnia: Amor (Love) vincent (conquers) omnia (all). But if you mix up the order of the Latin words, it still means the same thing. In fact, Amor omnia vincent is the preferred way. This is because the two nouns are inflected to show that Amor is the subject and omnia the predicate object. More specifically, Amor is in the nominative case and omnia is in the accusative case. Since a nominative by definition is the subject and an accusative by definition the object, you can put the words in any order and they will still mean the same thing.

English grammar, on the other hand, is (almost) exclusively analytical. (This column is about exceptions to this rule.) In analytical languages, nouns only have one form, and whether a noun is the subject or object depends on where it appears in a sentence. “Love conquers all” follows the syntactical structure “Subject-verb-object”. So while in Latin, Omnia vincent amor still means “Love conquers all”, in English, “All conquers love” has a different meaning altogether.

There are many synthetic languages—Latin, Greek, Russian, etc.—and native speakers of analytical languages usually have a bit of trouble getting their heads around the idea of cases and inflections. Synthetic languages vary in the number and classifications of the cases they contain, but there are generally four main classes of case:

Nominative: subject
    “The man threw the boy’s ball to the woman.”
Accusative: direct object
    “The man threw the boy’s ball to the woman.”
Dative: indirect object
    “John threw the boy’s ball to the woman.”
Genitive: association or possession
    “John threw the boy’s ball to Sally.”

English is a Germanic language, and Germanic languages are synthetic. Old English was highly inflected, but over time, and under the influence of the Norman importation of French (an analytical language), the various cases mostly disappeared. This is not an uncommon evolution— contemporary linguists are observing modern German making the transition from synthetic to analytical in real time. In the above example, the only sign of inflection is the “’s” in “boy’s”, a sort of vestigial limb that is all that remains of the old genitive inflection’s fully functional writing finger. In fact, the apostrophe indicates a missing letter, just as it does when we use it to show verbal elisions like “surf ’n’ turf” for “surf and turf”.

Some genitive forms were still around as late as Shakespeare. Act II of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (spelled “A Midsommer nights Dream” in the First Folio) opens thus:

Over hill, over dale, through bush, through brier,
Over parke, over pale, through flood, through fire,
I do wander everie where, swifter than the Moones sphere …

“Moones” was probably pronounced in two syllables, as you can tell if you scan the line. The “e” was dropped and replaced with an apostrophe, as in this contemporary edition’s rendering of the same line:

I do wander everywhere, swifter than the moon’s sphere …

But not all inflections have disappeared from English. In fact, they are alive and well … in our pronouns. But first, let’s get our terms straight.

In English, the nominative case is usually called the subjective case, to avoid confusing English with actual synthetic grammars. Personally, I prefer “nominative”, since the term “subjective” frequently means nothing more than “noun” among grammarians. The accusative case and the dative case take the same form in English, distinguished only by the use of a preposition in the case of the dative, and are thus combined into the objective case. The genitive case is usually called the possessive, but in the case of pronouns, the term genitive is still appropriate, especially since there are two kinds of genitive, the determinative genitive and the independent genitive.

A determinative genitive is used as an article or adjective: “That is her hairbrush.”

An independent genitive is used as a noun: “That hairbrush is hers.”

Pronouns fall into the following categories: first person singular, first person plural, second person familiar (archaic), second person singular, second person plural, third person masculine singular, third person feminine singular, third person neuter singular, third person plural, and personal relative/interrogative.

Personal relative/interrogative?

That’s who I’m talking about. A relative pronoun is one that is used to indicate a relation—e.g., “Would everybody who has already sold a short story please raise their hands?” The use of “who” relates a condition, that of having sold a story, to “everybody”. It takes the same form as the personal interrogative pronoun, i.e., a pronoun indicating someone who hasn’t been identified, e.g., “Who the hell are you?”

“Who”, too, has cases, although the other (and incidentally nonpersonal) relative pronouns, “that” and “which”, only have one form each, so I’ve left them out. Likewise with another interrogative pronoun, “what”.1

I’ve drawn up a table for you showing how the various pronouns are inflected, which you may link to here.

I’ve also included another class of pronouns which are not, strictly speaking, inflections, but which do serve a separate grammatical purpose. These are reflexive pronouns, pronouns which reflect another noun or pronoun. They can be readily identified by the fact that they all contain the suffix “-self” or “-selves”. The root doesn’t seem to follow any sort of strict rule—in some cases it’s the objective case (“himself”) while in others it’s the determinative genitive (“yourself”). You might think one is missing—I have more than once recently heard people say “ourself”, but that’s jest ignurnt.

Here’s the sort of thing I’m referring to when I say that they reflect on other nouns:

Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.2

See? The word “themselves” reflects “the gods”. Reflexives are actually pretty complicated, so I don’t want to dwell too much on them, but I include them in the table because they show that even in English, second person singular and second person plural are not exactly the same thing, although they might seem like it at first blush.

So that’s synthetic English for you. I think it’s pretty cool.

1. You might think that “where” can also be used as a relative or interrogative pronoun, and your instincts are good, but it is specific to place and so not general like the others—but surprise, place pronouns were themselves once generally inflected: where, whither, whence; there, thither, thence; here, hither, hence. Likewise I haven’t included “when”, the pronoun specific to time, which like “what” isn’t inflected. [↩]
2. Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), in his play “Maid of Orleans”. Schiller is best known to us as the author of “An die freude” (“Ode to Joy”), which Beethoven used as the text to his Ninth Symphony. Among German speakers, his reputation as a poet is second only to Goethe. This quote was used by Isaac Asimov for the title of one of his best novels, The Gods Themselves, which is where I got it. [↩]