ENGLISH GRAMMAR. INTRODUCTION. SPEECH is the proper attribute of man, the manifester of the intelligent soul which God breathed into him at the beginning; it is the sayer of his thoughts and feelings, the interpreter between him and his fellow creature. This manifestation of the mind by speech constitutes language in other words, language is the expression of thought by means of words, the audible signs of ideas. Moreover, to communicate with the absent, and to bequeath his thoughts to future generations through a safer instrument than uncertain tradition, man has invented a kind of second language, writing, which represents words by letters, the visible signs of the sounds and articulations of the voice, of which words are made. Language is subject to the same vicissitudes as mankind; common is their history. As mankind divides B into nations, so does language split into idioms, and simultaneously with nations do idioms grow, decline, transform themselves. Again, as the style shows the man, the tongue shows the people; and thus it is that the comparative study of idioms and literatures gives so deep an insight into what human societies are or have been. Grammar is the science of language: it treats of ideas and words, of thought and discourse; it explains the letter by the spirit. General or particular, it views the fundamental laws of language, or deals with the forms and phraseology peculiar to idioms. The germ of language resides in those spontaneous cries by which man utters his emotions. There we find the object by excellence, I, the soul, and the act by excellence, its emotion, united in a note of the heart, the first-born among the words, and the first language of infant man, the interjection. Hence it is that proceeded the mind's language, to which we now come; from feeling we pass to thought. The mind, the reflector of the material and the moral world, the conscious witness of what takes place within itself, perceives at once, and as one, the object and its act. This perception, the incipient thought, is then developed by expressing these two ideas separately, yet as the parts of a whole. Signified by speech, these ideas become words: the idea of object the pronoun, the idea of act the verb; the thought thus expressed becomes the proposition, the assertion of a fact. Ideas of objects, ideas of acts, such are the two constitutive elements of thought. Limited however to the pronoun and the verb, discourse would have been but a slow and monotonous process, hardly suited to any but sensible objects and present acts. But, by a new effort of the mind, the thought contracts itself into an idea, the attribute, the proposition into a word, derived from the verb, the adjective; and to express objects, attributes, and acts, we possess the pronoun, the adjective, and the verb. And now the pronoun and the adjective combining give us further two kinds of words. In this combination, the pronoun, become the article, still designates the object, while the adjective, transformed into the noun, specifies it by a characteristic attribute, generally undergoing some change in the transformation, often taking a generic desinence; and thus are the article and the noun to be viewed as primarily derived, the one from the pronoun, the other from the adjective, itself primarily derived from the verb. Furnished with these means, the mind can take its flight beyond the sphere of the senses. Conceiving the attribute as an object, it can name it; nay, it can name itself, express its conceptions as well as its perceptions, the unseen and the seen. The family of words would now seem complete. But, though the mind can say all, it would say it with more despatch. Accordingly, we have, for ideas and thoughts of frequent recurrence, short-tongue messengers which vie in rapidity with the mind itself, as short-hand writing does with speech: these are the abbreviatives. Thus, relations of position, acts which would require verbs, are expressed by the preposition, by mere root-words, answering well to the mere act, the act without concomitants; the circumstances of an act, or an attribute, which would require a preposition, a noun, and an adjective, are rendered by the adverb, in which these three words are blended into one; to express assent or dissent, the affirmative and the negative, simple monosyllables, perform the office of a proposition; to avoid breaking the thread of discourse, a pronoun becomes the continuative; finally, to express those operations of the mind by means of which we pass in discourse from one thought to another, one word, the conjunction, often a monosyllable, supersedes a proposition. And thus the last effort of the mind embodies a thought in the abbreviative, as the first effort of the heart has embodied a feeling in the interjection. From this ideology of language result the following definitions: The interjection expresses emotions; The pronoun designates objects; The article designates the objects which the noun names; The noun names objects; The adjective expresses the attributes of objects; And the abbreviative is equivalent to one or more other words. To these definitions it will be well to add a few remarks on the names of the words, and the order assigned to them. The interjection, the germ of language, and itself a language, justly occupies the first place. Thrown into the sentence, yet without being a logical part of it, it has been aptly named the interjection. The pronoun then opens the series of the parts of speech, as the designator of the object, itself the starting-point of the thought. The pronoun represents the three personages of the conversational drama, the speaker, the interlocutor, and the bystander; it is their name for the nonce, and could not be replaced by the names they bear off the scene; moreover, the pronoun of the third person serves frequently in sustained |