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.