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After a while they brought me here and said I was crazy, but I wasn't. My head was clear as a bell, and I knew as much as I ever did, only I couldn't tell it, because, you see, the right words wouldn't come. But I don't care now I've found some one who knows grammar. How many genders are there, child?" "Four," answered Mary, who had been studying Smith.
Philologists find it impossible to assign the exact amount of change due to the Conquest and to other causes. Let us next notice some changes other than the loss of inflections. Change in Gender. Before any one could speak Anglo-Saxon correctly, he had first to learn the fanciful genders that were attached to nouns: "trousers" was feminine; "childhood," masculine; "child," neuter.
And in one respect, I believe, the English language serves the purpose of poetry better than the antient ones, I mean in the greater ease of producing personifications; for as our nouns have in general no genders affixed to them in prose-compositions, and in the habits of conversation, they become easily personified only by the addition of a masculine or feminine pronoun, as,
A critic thus illustrates the use of genders in that language: "A German gentleman writes a masculine letter of feminine love to a neuter young lady with a feminine pen and feminine ink on masculine sheets of neuter paper, and incloses it in a masculine envelope with a feminine address to his darling, though neuter, Gretchen. He has a masculine head, a feminine hand, and a neuter heart."
He got some old things, old jugs, old brass figgers, old money, such as they used to have in old times: she don't pass now." Paolo's genders were apt to be somewhat indiscriminately distributed. A lucky thought struck the Interviewer. "I wonder if he would examine some old coins of mine?" said he, in a modestly tentative manner. "I think he like to see anything curious.
Think of that Miss B., and be hush about hospitality, &c. Your name to one letter is beautifully written; to the other, la la. The handwriting of the letters various; very good, very bad, and middling; emblematic, shall I say, of the fair authoress? Please to resolve me whether author is not of both genders, for I hate the appendix of ess?
I find that she knows nothing at all about the matter of the exchanging the genders of the babbies only that her mother was on oath to Father O'Toole, who ought to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, instead of those poor fellows whom the government called rebels, but who were no more rebels than Father McGrath himself, who'll uphold the Pretender, as they call our true Catholic King, as long as there's life in his body, or a drop of whisky left in ould Ireland to drink his health wid.
It would not have occurred to us to call this exquisite pearl and rose peak him, as did the garçon, who was proud of his English, and much surer of his genders than we ever hope to be in his language, or any other save our own; but we were ready to echo his lament after a day of clouds and rain.
If men and women are habitually nicknamed, and if defects of language lead their descendants to regard themselves as descendants of the things from which the names were taken, then masculine or feminine genders will be ascribed to these things according as the ancestors named after them were men or women.
But in the air of their sweet natures it flourished surprisingly, and sufficed each day for praise of the weather after it began to be fine, and at parting for some fond regrets, not unmixed with philosophical reflections, sadly perplexed in the genders and the order of the verbs: with me the verb will seldom wait, as it should in German, to the end.
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