The Loom Of Language

Accidence—The Table Manners of Language 99

conesponding pronouns of several languages placed in the Indo-
European group, encourages us to believe that the correspondence
between the English pionoun ME and the endnig MI is not a mere
accident
The meaning of this coincidence would be more difficult to under-

FAMILY RESEMBLANCE OF ARYAN PRONOUNS

i>cois
GAELIC
RUSSIAN
ITALIAN*
LAfIN
EARLY GREEK*
ICELANDIC

I
]
YA
10
EGO
EGO
LG or JEG

Ace
I MI
MENYA (
1
ME
ML
MIG

ME
Dat
I
MNE
> ME
MIHI
MOI
MJER

THOU
i
TI
TU
ru
TU
1HU

Acc
L TU
TEBYA
T
TL
TE
JTHIG

THEE
Dat
1
TEBE
> TE
TISI
TOI
THJER

WE
i
MI
|
}NOS
> NO
VJER

Acc
I SINN
HAS
Y NOI

J
I

us Dat
I
NAM
I
NOBIS
NON
> OSS

stand if it were not due to a process which we can see at work in Anglo-
American at the present day. When we speak quickly, we do not say
/ amy you are, he is. We say fm^yoifre^ he's, and Bernard Shaw spells
them as the single words Imyyowe> hes. The fact that the agglutinating,
or gluing on of the pronoun, takes place in this order need not bother
us, because the habit of invariably putting the pronoun before the verb
is a new one. In Bible English we commonly meet with constructions
such as thus spake he. Even in modern speech we say wzyou. In certain
circumstances this inversion generally occurs in other Teutonic lan-
guages as in Bible English. It was once a traffic rule of the Aryan family;
* The Italian forms are the stressed ones (p 363) The later Greek forms of
tus te9 toi were sit, $e> sot The Greek NO, NON are dual forms (p 109) The
corresponding plural forms m Doric Greek were homes9 heme> hemtn The first
is comparable to the Russian Mi and to the first person plural terminal of the
Greek3 Latin, or Sanskrit verb