animate pronouns that distinguish pre-verbal and post-verbal forms[143] are of the greatest theoretical interest.  They show that, however the language strive for a more and more analytic form, it is by no means manifesting a drift toward the expression of “pure” relational concepts in the Indo-Chinese manner.[144] The insistence on the concreteness of the relational concepts is clearly stronger than the destructive power of the most sweeping and persistent drifts that we know of in the history and prehistory of our language.

[Footnote 143:  They:  them as an inanimate group may be looked upon as a kind of borrowing from the animate, to which, in feeling, it more properly belongs.]

[Footnote 144:  See page 155.]

[Transcriber’s note:  Footnote 144 refers to the paragraph beginning on line 4795.]

The drift toward the abolition of most case distinctions and the correlative drift toward position as an all-important grammatical method are accompanied, in a sense dominated, by the last of the three major drifts that I have referred to.  This is the drift toward the invariable word.  In analyzing the “whom” sentence I pointed out that the rhetorical emphasis natural to an interrogative pronoun lost something by its form variability (who, whose, whom).  This striving for a simple, unnuanced correspondence between idea and word, as invariable as may be, is very strong in English.  It accounts for a number of tendencies which at first sight seem unconnected.  Certain well-established forms, like the present third person singular _-s_ of works or the plural _-s_ of books, have resisted the drift to invariable words, possibly because they symbolize certain stronger form cravings that we do not yet fully understand.  It is interesting to note that derivations that get away sufficiently from the concrete notion of the radical word to exist as independent conceptual centers are not affected by this elusive drift.  As soon as the derivation runs danger of being felt as a mere nuancing of, a finicky play on, the primary concept, it tends to be absorbed by the radical word, to disappear as such.  English words crave spaces between them, they do not like to huddle in clusters of slightly divergent centers of meaning, each edging a little away from the rest. Goodness, a noun of quality, almost a noun of relation, that takes its cue from the concrete idea of “good” without necessarily predicating that quality (e.g., I do not think much of his goodness) is sufficiently spaced from good itself not to need fear absorption.  Similarly, unable can hold its own against able because it destroys the latter’s sphere of influence; unable is psychologically as distinct from able as is blundering or stupid.  It is different with adverbs in _-ly_.  These lean too heavily on their adjectives to have the kind of vitality that English demands of its words. Do