Education > Essays on rhetoric

STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE. 43
•of sex to inanimate objects seems to be entirely
casual and capricious. In the Greek and Latin,
however, all inanimate objects are not ranked among
the masculine and feminine; but many of them
are likewise classed where all of them ought to have
been, under the neuter gender, as saxum, a rock;
mare, the sea. But in the French and Italian tongues,
the neuter gender is entirely unknown, and all
their names of inanimate objects are put upon the
same footing with those of living creatures; and
distributed without reserve into masculine and fe¬
minine. In the English language, when we use
common discourse, all substantive nouns that are
not names of living creatures are neuter, without
exception. And ours is, perhaps, the only tongue
in the known world (except the Chinese, which is
said to resemble it in this particular) in which the
distinction of gender is properly and philosophically
attended to.
Case, in declension, declares the state or relation
which one object bears to another, denoted by some
variation made upon the name of that object; ge¬
nerally in the final letters, and by some languages,
in the initial. All tongues, however, do not agree
in this mode of expression. Declension is used by
the Greek and Latin, but in the English, French,
and Italian, it is not found ; or at most, it exists in
a very imperfect state. These languages express
the relations of objects, by means of the words
called prepositions, which are the names of those
relations, prefixed to the name of the object. En¬
glish nouns have no case whatever, except a sort of
a genitive, usually formed by the addition of the
letter S to the noun; as when we say ** Pope’s
Dunciad,” meaning the Dunciad of Pope. Our
personal pronouns have likewise a case, which cor¬
responds with the accusative of the Latin; I, me—
he, him—who, whom. This, however, is but a
diminutive resemblance of that declension which is
used in the ancient languages.