[206] Of all these compounds.  L. Murray very improperly says, “They are seldom used, in modern style.”—­Octavo Gram., p. 54; also Fisk’s, p. 65.  None of them are yet obsolete, though the shorter forms seem to be now generally preferred.  The following suggestion of Cobbett’s is erroneous; because it implies that the shorter forms are innovations and faults; and because the author carelessly speaks of them as one thing only:  “We sometimes omit the so, and say, whoever, whomever, whatever, and even whosever. It is a mere abbreviation.  The so is understood:  and, it is best not to omit to write it.”—­Eng.  Gram., 209.  R. C. Smith dismisses the compound relatives with three lines; and these he closes with the following notion:  “They are not often used!”—­New Gram., p. 61.

[207] Sanborn, with strange ignorance of the history of those words, teaches thus:  “Mine and thine appear to have been formed from my and thy by changing y into i and adding n, and then subjoining e to retain the long sound of the vowel.”—­Analytical Gram., p. 92.  This false notion, as we learn from his guillemets and a remark in his preface, he borrowed from “Parkhurst’s Systematic Introduction.”  Dr. Lowth says, “The Saxon Ic hath the possessive case Min; Thu, possessive Thin; He, possessive His:  From which our possessive cases of the same pronouns are taken without alteration.”—­Lowth’s Gram., p. 23.

[208] Latham, with a singularity quite remarkable, reverses this doctrine in respect to the two classes, and says, “My, thy, our, your, her, and their signify possession, because they are possessive cases. * * * Mine, thine, ours, yours, hers, theirs, signify possession for a different reason.  They partake of the nature of adjectives, and in all the allied languages are declined as such.”—­Latham’s Elementary E. Gram., p. 94.  Weld, like Wells, with a few more whose doctrine will be criticised by-and-by, adopting here an other odd opinion, takes the former class only for forms of the possessive case; the latter he disposes of thus:  “Ours, yours, theirs, hers, and generally mine and thine, are POSSESSIVE PRONOUNS, used in either the nominative or objective case,”—­Weld’s Gram., Improved Ed., p. 68.  Not only denying the possessives with ellipsis to be instances of the possessive case, but stupidly mistaking at once two dissimilar things for a third which is totally unlike to either,—­i. e., assuming together for substitution both an ellipsis of one word and an equivalence to two—­(as some others more learned have very strangely done—­) he supposes all this class of pronouns to have forsaken every property of their legitimate roots,—­their person, their number, their gender, their case,—­and