Most of the later tongues of our family still retain that adaptedness of the qualifying adjective, in gender and number and case, to the noun qualified, which, inherited from the time when adjective and substantive were not separated, was characteristic of their ancestors; to this we preserve nothing whatever that is correspondent; that an adjective should change its form on account of the character of the noun it belongs to is as strange to us as to many languages it is that the verb should change its form on account of the character of the subject of which it predicates something.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.218