Charles Carpenter Fries stressed two points of methodology in his American English Grammar. First, his conclusions about modern American usage were not based upon impressions of the language but upon a statistical investigation that showed the relative frequency, and hence the importance, of each phenomenon noted. Such an investigation necessitated the sifting of an enormous bulk of clearly-defined and classified source material. Second, Fries was more interested in studying the structural relationships of one syntactical unit to another than in studying their lexical meanings.

An examination of the comments by linguists on the present subjunctive in current English reveals a surprising degree of unanimity of opinion concerning it. Most grammarians consider its extinction either imminent or accomplished. Thus, for example, Whitehall states that “the subjunctive is gradually dying out of the language.” Close considers that “apart from a few archaic remains it has disappeared from English altogether.” And Kruisinga says flatly: “living English has no subjunctive at all.” Other writers say that it “has very little vital power left”; that it “has disappeared”; that it is “moribund”; that it is “extinct”; that it is “fossilized”; and so on. Several authors suggest that its death throes can be observed in “literary English.” It is the purpose of the first part of this article to examine the arguments supporting these conclusions and to comment on their validity. Two types of argument can be discerned: the historical and the morphological.

This paper is an attempt to deal with some of the things C. C. Fries has to say about meaning and to offer criticisms of the meaningfulness of some of the words and concepts he introduces and dismisses. This requires a good deal of preliminary work which, however, also has the merit of showing the sort of systematic error I would claim Fries makes.

General linguistics, like any other academic subject, is always moving. But in recent years there have been more signs of fundamental change than for some time before, at least as far as may be gathered from published literature, necessarily the main source of information on contemporary trends on the part of most of one’s colleagues the world over. The earlier undercurrents and movements in linguistic thinking and discussion can only be known by those in personal contact with their prime movers.

When Barnett projected the connection of Greek eléphant- “ivory” with hieroglyphic Hittite ulubandas “bull,” he believed himself to be solving one of the minor puzzles of etymology, for the origin of Greek eléphant- was still unaccounted for. Since the Romans, when they first met the elephants of Pyrrhus in South Italy, called them Lucanian bulls, it seemed clear to Barnett that this hieroglyphic Hittite word for a bull had been used for what was supposed to be his horn. Kretschmer postulated an Indo-European equation with a particular significance: in addition to comparing Greek eléphant- and hieroglyphic Hittite ul(u)bandas, he compared Gothic ulbandus “camel” and Greek elephairmai “harm.” From this, he inferred an Indo-European appellative “noxious animal, destroyer” referring to “mammoth,” which preserved in Gothic ulbandus the evocation “big animal.” Kretschmer’s line of reasoning is especially definitive in his own words (p. 320), alleging the mammoth to be a species of animals which, though “schon längst ausgestorben…durch die grosse Menge ihrer fossilen Überreste und den kostbaren Stoff Elfenbein, den sie lieferte, sich dauernd im Gedächtnis der Menschen erhielt.”