preliminary investigation of Old English poetic instrumental interrogative pronouns

Among the first Old English inflectional forms to vanish were the instrumentals, surviving only in the interrogative pronoun that became the Modern English word "why." Its four synonymous forms were the only Old English words that had exclusively "instrumental" meanings. Despite their apparent importance, in all 30,535 Old English poetry lines, they occur only forty-eight times. This suggests that the Old English poetic instrumental merely imitated the Latin ablative's instrumental usage. Old English poets tried to graft onto it their own dative-instrumentals, anticipating in their meanings the goals of their clauses' subjects and in their forms the invariant preposition-plus-dative caseforms gradually replacing most Old English case inflection. This Latin-Old English discord attends all Old English instrumental interrogative clauses.