The person and number of a verb are those modifications in which it agrees with its subject or nominative.

In each number, there are three persons; and in each person, two numbers:  thus,

Singular. Plural. 1st per.  I love, 1st per.  We love, 2d per.  Thou lovest, 2d per.  You love, 3d per.  He loves; 3d per.  They love.

Definitions universally applicable have already been given of all these things; it is therefore unnecessary to define them again in this place.

Where the verb is varied, the second person singular is regularly formed by adding st or est to the first person; and the third person singular, in like manner, by adding s or es:  as, I see, thou seest, he sees; I give, thou givest, he gives; I go, thou goest, he goes; I fly, thou fliest, he flies; I vex, thou vexest, he vexes; I lose, thou losest, he loses.

Where the verb is not varied to denote its person and number, these properties are inferred from its subject or nominative:  as, If I love, if thou love, if he love; if we love, if you love, if they love.

OBSERVATIONS.

OBS. 1.—­It is considered a principle of Universal Grammar, that a finite verb must agree with its subject or nominative in person and number.  Upon this principle, we ascribe to every such verb the person and number of the nominative word, whether the verb itself be literally modified by the relation or not.  The doctrine must be constantly taught and observed, in every language in which the verbs have any variations of this kind.  But suppose an instance, of a language in which all the verbs were entirely destitute of such inflections; the principle, as regards that language, must drop.  Finite verbs, in such a case, would still relate to their subjects, or nominatives, agreeably to the sense; but they would certainly be rendered incapable of adding to this relation any agreement or disagreement.  So the concords which belong to adjectives and participles in Latin and Greek, are rejected in English, and there remains to these parts of speech nothing but a simple relation to their nouns according to the sense.  And by the fashionable substitution of you for thou, the concord of English verbs with their nominatives, is made to depend, in common practice, on little more than one single terminational s, which is used to mark one person of one number of one tense of one mood of each verb.  So near does this practice bring us to the dropping of what is yet called a universal principle of grammar.[235]