ABSTRACT
This condusion is strengthened when we see the way in which the ablest advocate of the distinction, Professor Sonnenschein, carries it out in his grammar, where it will be difficult tc find any consistent system that will guide us in other cases than those that are mentioned. Sometimes historical revqOllS are
invoked, thus when the rule is given that the case after any preposition is the accusative (§ 169, 489): "In OE. some prepositions took the dative ... but a change passed over the language, 80 that in late Old English there was a strong tendency to use the accusative after all prepositions." This is at any rate not the whole truth, for the dative was kept very late in some instances; see, e.g., Chaucer's of towne, yeer by yere, by weste, etc., with the e sounded. We have traces of this to this day in some forms, thus the dat. sg. in alive (on life), Atterbury (ret peere byrig), the dat. pI. in (by) inchrneal, on foot, which may be looked On as a continuation of OE. on fotum, ME. on foten, on fote, at any rate when used of more than one person, as in "they are on foot." Apart from such isolated survivals the plain historical truth is that in most pronouns it was only the dative that survived, in the plurals of substantives the accusative (= nom.), and in the singulars of substantives a form in which nominative, accusative, and dative are indistinguishably mingled-but whatever their origin, from an early period these forms (him, kings, king) were used indiscriminately both where formerly a dative, and where an accusative was req uired.1
