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We have a curious bit of further evidence to prove that the English personal pronouns have lost some share of their original syntactic force.
The Latin sentence speaks with the assurance of its individual members, the English word needs the prompting of its fellows. Roughly speaking, to be sure. And yet to say that a sufficiently elaborate word-structure compensates for external syntactic methods is perilously close to begging the question.
I select it from Paiute, the language of the Indians of the arid plateaus of southwestern Utah. The formula is intended to imply that the finished word conveys, in addition to what is definitely expressed, a further relational idea, that of subjectivity; in other words, the form can only be used as the subject of a sentence, not in an objective or other syntactic relation.
After all that we have said about grammatical form in the preceding chapter, it is clear that we cannot now make the distinction between form languages and formless languages that used to appeal to some of the older writers. Every language can and must express the fundamental syntactic relations even though there is not a single affix to be found in its vocabulary.
We know, however, that it was originally an adverb of considerable concreteness of meaning, "away, moving from," and that the syntactic relation was originally expressed by the case form of the second noun. As the case form lost its vitality, the adverb took over its function.
One of the most insidious peculiarities of a linguistic drift is that where it cannot destroy what lies in its way it renders it innocuous by washing the old significance out of it. It turns its very enemies to its own uses. This brings us to the second of the major drifts, the tendency to fixed position in the sentence, determined by the syntactic relation of the word.
She talked only of the 'exam, of her chances in this or that 'paper, of the likelihood that this or the other question would be 'set. Her brain was becoming a mere receptacle for dates and definitions, vocabularies and rules syntactic, for thrice-boiled essence of history, ragged scraps of science, quotations at fifth hand, and all the heterogeneous rubbish of a 'crammer's' shop.
In the former case the purport of the syntactic whole is simply to enjoin meditation, and it cannot therefore aim at giving instruction about Brahman. If, on the other hand, the texts about Brahman are separate independent sentences, they cannot have the purport of prompting to action and are therefore devoid of instructive power.
Longfellow's own style of work so much as upon the method itself with which they are necessarily implicated. These defects are, first, the too frequent use of syntactic inversion, and secondly, the too manifest preference extended to words of Romanic over words of Saxon origin. To illustrate the first point, let me give a few examples. In Canto I. we have:
They knew no rest from the pursuit of stony-hearted verbs, savage noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of exercises that appeared to them in their dreams. Under the forcing system, a young gentleman usually took leave of his spirits in three weeks. He had all the cares of the world on his head in three months.
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