The More the Merrier: Grammar of the Instrumental Case

The more, the merrier. It’s a widely known truism that means “the more people or things there are, the better an occasion or situation will be”, and like many traditional proverbs the grammar of this statement seems opaque, or even deficient, but in fact there’s an interesting bit of very old grammar here, a kind of fossilized grammar that was actually already on the way out in the very earliest stages of English we have written down: and that bit of grammar is the instrumental case. No not the instrument case, the instrumental case. But let’s back things up a bit first. Constructions like “the more, the merrier” and “the sooner, the better” are comparative correlatives. Correlatives are words such as conjunctions that pair together to make some kind of logical relationship between two parts of a sentence. I’m talking about things like the if…then pair, as in “if you pay for the movie tickets, then I’ll buy the popcorn” and the so…that pair, like in “I drank so much coffee that I had trouble sleeping at night”. But what about in “the more, the merrier”? Where are the ‘if…then” or “so…that” type words? And how do we know what the logical relationship between “more” and “merrier is? Well, in “the more, the merrier” the correlatives are, surprisingly, the…the, and they are paired with the comparative words more and merrier, hence this construction is called a comparative correlative. Comparatives are words that typically end in -er, along with their cousins the superlatives that end in -est, as in merry, merrier, merriest, though there are also some irregular comparatives and superlatives like much, more, most. But what about the the’s in the sentence? The word the is the definite article, right? So how do articles correlate, and what do they mean in this context? That’s where the instrumental case comes in. First of all, what is a case? Cases are forms of nouns and noun-like words that tell you what those nouns are doing in a sentence grammatically. Modern English has mostly lost its case system but it used to be there in Old English — the term we use for the form of the English language spoken roughly between 500 and 1100 CE. Some of the few places you see cases in Modern English are in pronouns, as in he, him, his — he is used as the subject of a sentence (as in “he has a book”), him is used as the direct or indirect object (as in “I taught him” or “I gave him the book” respectively), and his is used as to show possession (as in “the book is his”). So he is the nominative case, his is the genitive case, and him is the objective case. That last case is a combination of what used to be two distinct cases in Old English, the dative case for the indirect object (with the Old English form him) and the accusative case for the direct object (with the Old English form hine). Regular nouns have over time lost almost all their case endings in English — the one place Modern English nouns do show case is for possession with the ‘s ending, as in “the writer’s book” which in Old English would be “þæs writeres boc”, with the apostrophe in the modern spelling showing that a vowel has been dropped. So those are the four cases in Old English, the nominative, the accusative, the genitive, and the dative, but there was also the remnants of a fifth case in Old English, the instrumental case, which was already at that point disappearing from the language and only still appeared in a few places. In most situations in Old English the dative case absorbed the instrumental case’s functions, just as the dative case would later absorb the accusative case’s functions to give us our Modern English objective case that we talked about earlier, with the dative form him replacing that Old English accusative form hine. The instrumental case had three main functions in Old English: primarily to express means or manner (as in hlutre mode “with a pure mind”), in other words the instrument or means by or with something is done; to express accompaniment (as in lytle werode “with a small band”); and to express time (as in þy ilcan geare “in that same year”). And it’s the word þy meaning “that” in that last example that the the in “the more, the merrier” comes from. The Old English form þy is the instrumental case of the demonstrative se/þæt/seo which means “that”. We get the Modern English demonstrative that from the middle form there, the neuter nominative form. We also get the definite article the from this Old English demonstrative. But for our purposes right now, it’s the instrumental form þy that we’re interested in. Because just as in Modern English, this instrumental form was used as a correlative with comparatives as in this sentence from an Old English riddle: “Heo hæfde swæsra þy læs suna ond dohtra, þy heo swa dyde” meaning “by so much as she did so … she had so much the less of her own dear ones”. And yes, the word læs means “less”, and yes, the word less was perfectly correct to use with count nouns like that, even though some language pedants might insist that it’s a mistake and you need to use fewer — but look, there it is in Old English and it’s survived to this day. But getting back to the point, the Old English correlative construction þy…þy, just like the Modern English construction the…the, literally means “more by that much, merrier by that much” in our phrase. As for the proverb “the more, the merrier” itself, it has a long history, first attested in the 14th century poem Pearl: “Among vus commez nouþer strot ne stryf, Bot vchon enlé we wolde were fyf— Þe mo þe myryer, so God me blesse!” meaning “Among us comes neither wrangling nor strife, but each one separately we would wish were five— the more the merrier, so God bless me!”. But there are a few other fossilized remains of the instrumental case in Modern English, which will make it clear what the clausal structure of “the more, the merrier” actually is. In addition to the demonstrative adjective and pronoun se/þæt/seo meaning “that”, Old English also had a demonstrative meaning “this”, þes/þis/þeos from which of course we get the Modern English word this. The instrumental form of this demonstrative is þys which produced the adverb þus giving us thus in Modern English. This makes sense when you think of the literal meaning of the instrumental form of this demonstrative, “by or in this way” hence “thus”. Similarly Old English had an interrogative pronoun and adjective hwa/hwæt from which we get Modern English who and what, and the instrumental form of this is hwy which is also an adverb meaning “why” giving us the Modern English word why. And again, the literal meaning of the instrumental makes the sense clear, “in what way”, or “why”. Indeed this highlights the general principal of Old English deriving adverbs from instrumental forms. And that’s why the structure of the sentence “the more, the merrier” can be described as two correlated adverb clauses with the verbs ellipsed away: “by that much more (there are), by that much merrier (it is)”. So the the’s in this sentence aren’t definite articles after all, but adverbs. And this just goes to show that sometimes, the smaller the details in language, the more surprising their histories.