Language by Edward Sapir

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[Footnote 129: Or rather apprehended, for we do not, in sober fact,
entirely understand it as yet.]

[Footnote 130: Not ultimately random, of course, only relatively so.]

Sometimes we can feel where the drift is taking us even while we
struggle against it. Probably the majority of those who read these words
feel that it is quite "incorrect" to say "Who did you see?" We readers
of many books are still very careful to say "Whom did you see?" but we
feel a little uncomfortable (uncomfortably proud, it may be) in the
process. We are likely to avoid the locution altogether and to say "Who
was it you saw?" conserving literary tradition (the "whom") with the
dignity of silence.[131] The folk makes no apology. "Whom did you see?"
might do for an epitaph, but "Who did you see?" is the natural form for
an eager inquiry. It is of course the uncontrolled speech of the folk to
which we must look for advance information as to the general linguistic
movement. It is safe to prophesy that within a couple of hundred years
from to-day not even the most learned jurist will be saying "Whom did
you see?" By that time the "whom" will be as delightfully archaic as the
Elizabethan "his" for "its."[132] No logical or historical argument will
avail to save this hapless "whom." The demonstration "I: me = he: him =
who: whom" will be convincing in theory and will go unheeded in
practice.

[Footnote 131: In relative clauses too we tend to avoid the objective
form of "who." Instead of "The man whom I saw" we are likely to say "The
man that I saw" or "The man I saw."]

[Footnote 132: "Its" was at one time as impertinent a departure as the
"who" of "Who did you see?" It forced itself into English because the
old cleavage between masculine, feminine, and neuter was being slowly
and powerfully supplemented by a new one between thing-class and
animate-class. The latter classification proved too vital to allow usage
to couple males and things ("his") as against females ("her"). The form
"its" had to be created on the analogy of words like "man's," to satisfy
the growing form feeling. The drift was strong enough to sanction a
grammatical blunder.]

Even now we may go so far as to say that the majority of us are secretly
wishing they could say "Who did you see?" It would be a weight off their
unconscious minds if some divine authority, overruling the lifted finger
of the pedagogue, gave them _carte blanche_. But we cannot too frankly
anticipate the drift and maintain caste. We must affect ignorance
of whither we are going and rest content with our mental
conflict--uncomfortable conscious acceptance of the "whom," unconscious
desire for the "who."[133] Meanwhile we indulge our sneaking desire for
the forbidden locution by the use of the "who" in certain twilight cases
in which we can cover up our fault by a bit of unconscious special
pleading. Imagine that some one drops the remark when you are not
listening attentively, "John Smith is coming to-night." You have not
caught the name and ask, not "Whom did you say?" but "Who did you say?"
There is likely to be a little hesitation in the choice of the form, but
the precedent of usages like "Whom did you see?" will probably not seem
quite strong enough to induce a "Whom did you say?" Not quite relevant
enough, the grammarian may remark, for a sentence like "Who did you
say?" is not strictly analogous to "Whom did you see?" or "Whom did you
mean?" It is rather an abbreviated form of some such sentence as "Who,
did you say, is coming to-night?" This is the special pleading that I
have referred to, and it has a certain logic on its side. Yet the case
is more hollow than the grammarian thinks it to be, for in reply to such
a query as "You're a good hand at bridge, John, aren't you?" John, a
little taken aback, might mutter "Did you say me?" hardly "Did you say
I?" Yet the logic for the latter ("Did you say I was a good hand at
bridge?") is evident. The real point is that there is not enough
vitality in the "whom" to carry it over such little difficulties
as a "me" can compass without a thought. The proportion
"I : me = he : him = who : whom" is logically and historically sound, but
psychologically shaky. "Whom did you see?" is correct, but there is
something false about its correctness.

[Footnote 133: Psychoanalysts will recognize the mechanism. The
mechanisms of "repression of impulse" and of its symptomatic
symbolization can be illustrated in the most unexpected corners of
individual and group psychology. A more general psychology than Freud's
will eventually prove them to be as applicable to the groping for
abstract form, the logical or esthetic ordering of experience, as to the
life of the fundamental instincts.]

It is worth looking into the reason for our curious reluctance to use
locutions involving the word "whom" particularly in its interrogative
sense. The only distinctively objective forms which we still possess in
English are _me_, _him_, _her_ (a little blurred because of its identity
with the possessive _her_), _us_, _them_, and _whom_. In all other cases
the objective has come to be identical with the subjective--that is, in
outer form, for we are not now taking account of position in the
sentence. We observe immediately in looking through the list of
objective forms that _whom_ is psychologically isolated. _Me_, _him_,
_her_, _us_, and _them_ form a solid, well-integrated group of objective
personal pronouns parallel to the subjective series _I_, _he_, _she_,
_we_, _they_. The forms _who_ and _whom_ are technically "pronouns" but
they are not felt to be in the same box as the personal pronouns. _Whom_
has clearly a weak position, an exposed flank, for words of a feather
tend to flock together, and if one strays behind, it is likely to incur
danger of life. Now the other interrogative and relative pronouns
(_which_, _what_, _that_), with which _whom_ should properly flock, do
not distinguish the subjective and objective forms. It is
psychologically unsound to draw the line of form cleavage between _whom_
and the personal pronouns on the one side, the remaining interrogative
and relative pronouns on the other. The form groups should be
symmetrically related to, if not identical with, the function groups.
Had _which_, _what_, and _that_ objective forms parallel to _whom_, the
position of this last would be more secure. As it is, there is something
unesthetic about the word. It suggests a form pattern which is not
filled out by its fellows. The only way to remedy the irregularity of
form distribution is to abandon the _whom_ altogether for we have lost
the power to create new objective forms and cannot remodel our
_which_-_what_-_that_ group so as to make it parallel with the smaller
group _who-whom_. Once this is done, _who_ joins its flock and our
unconscious desire for form symmetry is satisfied. We do not secretly
chafe at "Whom did you see?" without reason.[134]

[Footnote 134: Note that it is different with _whose_. This has not the
support of analogous possessive forms in its own functional group, but
the analogical power of the great body of possessives of nouns (_man's_,
_boy's_) as well as of certain personal pronouns (_his_, _its_; as
predicated possessive also _hers_, _yours_, _theirs_) is sufficient to
give it vitality.]

But the drift away from _whom_ has still other determinants. The words
_who_ and _whom_ in their interrogative sense are psychologically
related not merely to the pronouns _which_ and _what_, but to a group of
interrogative adverbs--_where_, _when_, _how_--all of which are
invariable and generally emphatic. I believe it is safe to infer that
there is a rather strong feeling in English that the interrogative
pronoun or adverb, typically an emphatic element in the sentence, should
be invariable. The inflective _-m_ of _whom_ is felt as a drag upon the
rhetorical effectiveness of the word. It needs to be eliminated if the
interrogative pronoun is to receive all its latent power. There is still
a third, and a very powerful, reason for the avoidance of _whom_. The
contrast between the subjective and objective series of personal
pronouns (_I_, _he_, _she_, _we_, _they_: _me_, _him_, _her_, _us_,
_them_) is in English associated with a difference of position. We say
_I see the man_ but _the man sees me_; _he told him_, never _him he
told_ or _him told he_. Such usages as the last two are distinctly
poetic and archaic; they are opposed to the present drift of the
language. Even in the interrogative one does not say _Him did you see?_
It is only in sentences of the type _Whom did you see?_ that an
inflected objective before the verb is now used at all. On the other
hand, the order in _Whom did you see?_ is imperative because of its
interrogative form; the interrogative pronoun or adverb normally comes
first in the sentence (_What are you doing?_ _When did he go?_ _Where
are you from?_). In the "whom" of _Whom did you see?_ there is
concealed, therefore, a conflict between the order proper to a sentence
containing an inflected objective and the order natural to a sentence
with an interrogative pronoun or adverb. The solution _Did you see
whom?_ or _You saw whom?_[135] is too contrary to the idiomatic drift of
our language to receive acceptance. The more radical solution _Who did
you see?_ is the one the language is gradually making for.

[Footnote 135: Aside from certain idiomatic usages, as when _You saw
whom?_ is equivalent to _You saw so and so and that so and so is who?_
In such sentences _whom_ is pronounced high and lingeringly to emphasize
the fact that the person just referred to by the listener is not known
or recognized.]

These three conflicts--on the score of form grouping, of rhetorical
emphasis, and of order--are supplemented by a fourth difficulty. The
emphatic _whom_, with its heavy build (half-long vowel followed by
labial consonant), should contrast with a lightly tripping syllable
immediately following. In _whom did_, however, we have an involuntary
retardation that makes the locution sound "clumsy." This clumsiness is a
phonetic verdict, quite apart from the dissatisfaction due to the
grammatical factors which we have analyzed. The same prosodic objection
does not apply to such parallel locutions as _what did_ and _when did_.
The vowels of _what_ and _when_ are shorter and their final consonants
melt easily into the following _d_, which is pronounced in the same
tongue position as _t_ and _n_. Our instinct for appropriate rhythms
makes it as difficult for us to feel content with _whom did_ as for a
poet to use words like _dreamed_ and _hummed_ in a rapid line. Neither
common feeling nor the poet's choice need be at all conscious. It may be
that not all are equally sensitive to the rhythmic flow of speech, but
it is probable that rhythm is an unconscious linguistic determinant even
with those who set little store by its artistic use. In any event the
poet's rhythms can only be a more sensitive and stylicized application
of rhythmic tendencies that are characteristic of the daily speech of
his people.

We have discovered no less than four factors which enter into our subtle
disinclination to say "Whom did you see?" The uneducated folk that says
"Who did you see?" with no twinge of conscience has a more acute flair
for the genuine drift of the language than its students. Naturally the
four restraining factors do not operate independently. Their separate
energies, if we may make bold to use a mechanical concept, are
"canalized" into a single force. This force or minute embodiment of the
general drift of the language is psychologically registered as a slight
hesitation in using the word _whom_. The hesitation is likely to be
quite unconscious, though it may be readily acknowledged when attention
is called to it. The analysis is certain to be unconscious, or rather
unknown, to the normal speaker.[136] How, then, can we be certain in
such an analysis as we have undertaken that all of the assigned
determinants are really operative and not merely some one of them?
Certainly they are not equally powerful in all cases. Their values are
variable, rising and falling according to the individual and the
locution.[137] But that they really exist, each in its own right, may
sometimes be tested by the method of elimination. If one or other of the
factors is missing and we observe a slight diminution in the
corresponding psychological reaction ("hesitation" in our case), we may
conclude that the factor is in other uses genuinely positive. The second
of our four factors applies only to the interrogative use of _whom_, the
fourth factor applies with more force to the interrogative than to the
relative. We can therefore understand why a sentence like _Is he the man
whom you referred to?_ though not as idiomatic as _Is he the man (that)
you referred to?_ (remember that it sins against counts one and three),
is still not as difficult to reconcile with our innate feeling for
English expression as _Whom did you see?_ If we eliminate the fourth
factor from the interrogative usage,[138] say in _Whom are you looking
at?_ where the vowel following _whom_ relieves this word of its phonetic
weight, we can observe, if I am not mistaken, a lesser reluctance to use
the _whom_. _Who are you looking at?_ might even sound slightly
offensive to ears that welcome _Who did you see?_

[Footnote 136: Students of language cannot be entirely normal in their
attitude towards their own speech. Perhaps it would be better to say
"naive" than "normal."]

[Footnote 137: It is probably this _variability of value_ in the
significant compounds of a general linguistic drift that is responsible
for the rise of dialectic variations. Each dialect continues the general
drift of the common parent, but has not been able to hold fast to
constant values for each component of the drift. Deviations as to the
drift itself, at first slight, later cumulative, are therefore
unavoidable.]

[Footnote 138: Most sentences beginning with interrogative _whom_ are
likely to be followed by _did_ or _does_, _do_. Yet not all.]

We may set up a scale of "hesitation values" somewhat after this
fashion:

Value 1: factors 1, 3. "The man whom I referred to."
Value 2: factors 1, 3, 4. "The man whom they referred to."
Value 3: factors 1, 2, 3. "Whom are you looking at?"
Value 4: factors 1, 2, 3, 4. "Whom did you see?"

We may venture to surmise that while _whom_ will ultimately disappear
from English speech, locutions of the type _Whom did you see?_ will be
obsolete when phrases like _The man whom I referred to_ are still in
lingering use. It is impossible to be certain, however, for we can never
tell if we have isolated all the determinants of a drift. In our
particular case we have ignored what may well prove to be a controlling
factor in the history of _who_ and _whom_ in the relative sense. This is
the unconscious desire to leave these words to their interrogative
function and to concentrate on _that_ or mere word order as expressions
of the relative (e.g., _The man that I referred to_ or _The man I
referred to_). This drift, which does not directly concern the use of
_whom_ as such (merely of _whom_ as a form of _who_), may have made the
relative _who_ obsolete before the other factors affecting relative
_whom_ have run their course. A consideration like this is instructive
because it indicates that knowledge of the general drift of a language
is insufficient to enable us to see clearly what the drift is heading
for. We need to know something of the relative potencies and speeds of
the components of the drift.

It is hardly necessary to say that the particular drifts involved in the
use of _whom_ are of interest to us not for their own sake but as
symptoms of larger tendencies at work in the language. At least three
drifts of major importance are discernible. Each of these has operated
for centuries, each is at work in other parts of our linguistic
mechanism, each is almost certain to continue for centuries, possibly
millennia. The first is the familiar tendency to level the distinction
between the subjective and the objective, itself but a late chapter in
the steady reduction of the old Indo-European system of syntactic cases.
This system, which is at present best preserved in Lithuanian,[139] was
already considerably reduced in the old Germanic language of which
English, Dutch, German, Danish, and Swedish are modern dialectic forms.
The seven Indo-European cases (nominative genitive, dative, accusative,
ablative, locative, instrumental) had been already reduced to four
(nominative genitive, dative, accusative). We know this from a careful
comparison of and reconstruction based on the oldest Germanic dialects
of which we still have records (Gothic, Old Icelandic, Old High German,
Anglo-Saxon). In the group of West Germanic dialects, for the study of
which Old High German, Anglo-Saxon, Old Frisian, and Old Saxon are our
oldest and most valuable sources, we still have these four cases, but
the phonetic form of the case syllables is already greatly reduced and
in certain paradigms particular cases have coalesced. The case system is
practically intact but it is evidently moving towards further
disintegration. Within the Anglo-Saxon and early Middle English period
there took place further changes in the same direction. The phonetic
form of the case syllables became still further reduced and the
distinction between the accusative and the dative finally disappeared.
The new "objective" is really an amalgam of old accusative and dative
forms; thus, _him_, the old dative (we still say _I give him the book_,
not "abbreviated" from _I give to him_; compare Gothic _imma_, modern
German _ihm_), took over the functions of the old accusative
(Anglo-Saxon _hine_; compare Gothic _ina_, Modern German _ihn_) and
dative. The distinction between the nominative and accusative was
nibbled away by phonetic processes and morphological levelings until
only certain pronouns retained distinctive subjective and objective
forms.

[Footnote 139: Better, indeed, than in our oldest Latin and Greek
records. The old Indo-Iranian languages alone (Sanskrit, Avestan) show
an equally or more archaic status of the Indo-European parent tongue as
regards case forms.]

In later medieval and in modern times there have been comparatively few
apparent changes in our case system apart from the gradual replacement
of _thou_--_thee_ (singular) and subjective _ye_--objective _you_
(plural) by a single undifferentiated form _you_. All the while,
however, the case system, such as it is (subjective-objective, really
absolutive, and possessive in nouns; subjective, objective, and
possessive in certain pronouns) has been steadily weakening in
psychological respects. At present it is more seriously undermined than
most of us realize. The possessive has little vitality except in the
pronoun and in animate nouns. Theoretically we can still say _the moon's
phases_ or _a newspaper's vogue_; practically we limit ourselves pretty
much to analytic locutions like _the phases of the moon_ and _the vogue
of a newspaper_. The drift is clearly toward the limitation, of
possessive forms to animate nouns. All the possessive pronominal forms
except _its_ and, in part, _their_ and _theirs_, are also animate. It is
significant that _theirs_ is hardly ever used in reference to inanimate
nouns, that there is some reluctance to so use _their_, and that _its_
also is beginning to give way to _of it_. _The appearance of it_ or _the
looks of it_ is more in the current of the language than _its
appearance_. It is curiously significant that _its young_ (referring to
an animal's cubs) is idiomatically preferable to _the young of it_. The
form is only ostensibly neuter, in feeling it is animate;
psychologically it belongs with _his children_, not with _the pieces of
it_. Can it be that so common a word as _its_ is actually beginning to
be difficult? Is it too doomed to disappear? It would be rash to say
that it shows signs of approaching obsolescence, but that it is steadily
weakening is fairly clear.[140] In any event, it is not too much to say
that there is a strong drift towards the restriction of the inflected
possessive forms to animate nouns and pronouns.

[Footnote 140: Should _its_ eventually drop out, it will have had a
curious history. It will have played the role of a stop-gap between
_his_ in its non-personal use (see footnote 11, page 167) and the later
analytic of _it_.]

[Transcriber's note: Footnote 140 refers to Footnote 132, beginning on
line 5142.]

How is it with the alternation of subjective and objective in the
pronoun? Granted that _whom_ is a weak sister, that the two cases have
been leveled in _you_ (in _it_, _that_, and _what_ they were never
distinct, so far as we can tell[141]), and that _her_ as an objective is
a trifle weak because of its formal identity with the possessive _her_,
is there any reason to doubt the vitality of such alternations as _I see
the man_ and _the man sees me_? Surely the distinction between
subjective _I_ and objective _me_, between subjective _he_ and objective
_him_, and correspondingly for other personal pronouns, belongs to the
very core of the language. We can throw _whom_ to the dogs, somehow make
shift to do without an _its_, but to level _I_ and _me_ to a single
case--would that not be to un-English our language beyond recognition?
There is no drift toward such horrors as _Me see him_ or _I see he_.
True, the phonetic disparity between _I_ and _me_, _he_ and _him_, _we_
and _us_, has been too great for any serious possibility of form
leveling. It does not follow that the case distinction as such is still
vital. 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.

[Footnote 141: Except in so far as _that_ has absorbed other
functions than such as originally belonged to it. It was only a
nominative-accusative neuter to begin with.]

We need not go into the history of this all-important drift. It is
enough to know that as the inflected forms of English became scantier,
as the syntactic relations were more and more inadequately expressed by
the forms of the words themselves, position in the sentence gradually
took over functions originally foreign to it. _The man_ in _the man sees
the dog_ is subjective; in _the dog sees the man_, objective. Strictly
parallel to these sentences are _he sees the dog_ and _the dog sees
him_. Are the subjective value of _he_ and the objective value of _him_
entirely, or even mainly, dependent on the difference of form? I doubt
it. We could hold to such a view if it were possible to say _the dog
sees he_ or _him sees the dog_. It was once possible to say such things,
but we have lost the power. In other words, at least part of the case
feeling in _he_ and _him_ is to be credited to their position before or
after the verb. May it not be, then, that _he_ and _him_, _we_ and _us_,
are not so much subjective and objective forms as pre-verbal and
post-verbal[142] forms, very much as _my_ and _mine_ are now pre-nominal
and post-nominal forms of the possessive (_my father_ but _father mine_;
_it is my book_ but _the book is mine_)? That this interpretation
corresponds to the actual drift of the English language is again
indicated by the language of the folk. The folk says _it is me_, not _it
is I_, which is "correct" but just as falsely so as the _whom did you
see_? that we have analyzed. _I'm the one_, _it's me_; _we're the ones_,
_it's us that will win out_--such are the live parallelisms in English
to-day. There is little doubt that _it is I_ will one day be as
impossible in English as _c'est je_, for _c'est moi_, is now in French.

[Footnote 142: Aside from the interrogative: _am I?_ _is he?_ Emphasis
counts for something. There is a strong tendency for the old "objective"
forms to bear a stronger stress than the "subjective" forms. This is why
the stress in locutions like _He didn't go, did he?_ and _isn't he?_ is
thrown back on the verb; it is not a matter of logical emphasis.]

How differently our _I_: _me_ feels than in Chaucer's day is shown by
the Chaucerian _it am I_. Here the distinctively subjective aspect of
the _I_ was enough to influence the form of the preceding verb in spite
of the introductory _it_; Chaucer's locution clearly felt more like a
Latin _sum ego_ than a modern _it is I_ or colloquial _it is me_. We
have a curious bit of further evidence to prove that the English
personal pronouns have lost some share of their original syntactic
force. Were _he_ and _she_ subjective forms pure and simple, were they
not striving, so to speak, to become caseless absolutives, like _man_ or
any other noun, we should not have been able to coin such compounds as
_he-goat_ and _she-goat_, words that are psychologically analogous to
_bull-moose_ and _mother-bear_. Again, in inquiring about a new-born
baby, we ask _Is it a he or a she?_ quite as though _he_ and _she_ were
the equivalents of _male_ and _female_ or _boy_ and _girl_. All in all,
we may conclude that our English case system is weaker than it looks and
that, in one way or another, it is destined to get itself reduced to an
absolutive (caseless) form for all nouns and pronouns but those that are
animate. Animate nouns and pronouns are sure to have distinctive
possessive forms for an indefinitely long period.

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