7> 
 
 mil 
 
 fyxull Wttfomttg jphmg 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 £kmi 
 
 k-M^-71 ^J/^/tZ.. 
 
*>V2 8l949 
 
 JSJK " 
 
 3 1962 J) 
 
The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026429740 
 
PRINCIPLES 
 
 GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 COMPILED AND ARRANGED FOR THE USE 
 OF COLLEGES AND. SCHOOLS. 
 
 BY 
 
 J. ROEMER, LL. D., 
 
 PROFESSOR OF FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE IN TIIE COLLEGE OF THE 0IT7 
 OF NEW YORK. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 
 
 1, 8, and 5 BOND STREET. 
 
 1884. 
 ? 
 
-f-d S £ ' H- IT 
 
 Coptkight, 1884, 
 By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 Introduction . 
 
 References 
 
 The Origin of Language . 
 
 Origin and Progress of Writing 
 
 Words 
 
 Classification of Words 
 
 Substantives . 
 
 Adjectives 
 
 Determinatives 
 
 Verbs 
 
 Pronouns 
 
 Adverbs . 
 
 Prepositions . 
 
 Conjunctions 
 
 Interjections 
 
 Conclusion 
 
 9 
 
 25 
 
 64 
 
 63 
 
 66 
 
 79 
 
 84 
 
 89 
 
 106 
 
 113 
 
 121 
 
 130 
 
 140 
 
 142 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 On entering upon the study of a foreign idiom, and 
 comparing its grammar with that of his native tongue, 
 the student can not help noticing the many features which 
 they both have in common. Should he happen^ to know 
 another language, he will, by further comparison, find 
 these points of resemblance to become less in number, 
 and less again with every succeeding language, until at 
 last there will remain but few which are common to all, 
 and these form the principles of all grammars — in other 
 words, of General Grammar. 
 
 • Grammar may be viewed in two lights : either as a 
 collection of rules which have to guide us in the expres- 
 sion of thoughts, or as an investigation of the principles 
 of language deduced from the nature and relations of the 
 ideas to be represented. In the first light, grammar, ap- 
 plying only to the facts of one language, is called special, 
 and constitutes an art; in the second, grammar, propos- 
 ing to explain the nature of words and their relations by 
 the nature and relations of the things which they repre- 
 sent, and also to account for the mode of using them by 
 a consideration of the mental operations on which it de- 
 pends, is said to be general, because it embraces the 
 principles of all languages ; it then constitutes a science, 
 being founded on the universal and immutable laws of 
 external nature and of the human mind. There are thus 
 as many particular grammars as there are languages ; 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 whereas there is only one general grammar — one science 
 of language. 
 
 The art of grammar gives the rules for using the 
 materials of one language ; the science of grammar gives 
 the rationale of all the facts of language. A knowledge, 
 therefore, of its principles is of the utmost importance to 
 any one who, in the acquisition of a foreign idiom, or in 
 the use of his own, aims at something more than a merely 
 practical acquaintance ; for although the power of phi- 
 losophizing about language in general by no means im- 
 plies the power of using any language in particular, yet 
 it is evident that the student must obtain a much better 
 insight into the form and structure of a language if he 
 can reason about it, and learn its grammar by induction, 
 than if he has to receive all his information from dry and 
 uninteresting rules. One might be acquainted with the 
 results of many profound inquiries in all the various 
 sciences, but unless he has also learned the principles 
 thereof, his understanding will not reach much higher 
 than that of an uninstructed workman. He who has 
 studied mechanics will see at a glance more of the mean- 
 ing of any piece of machinery than the mere mechanic 
 who for years has been working the very best of engines 
 under the directions of the ablest engineer ; and even as 
 the former will be able to judge for himself as to the 
 merits of any piece of mechanism, whatever be its origin 
 or nationality, so the student who knows the theory of 
 language will find no difficulty to account for the rules of 
 any grammar in particular, nor will he be puzzled or 
 astonished by exceptions, of which he understands the 
 nature and the propriety. In a word, he will be able and 
 induced to make his own investigations, draw rules from 
 examples, learn grammar from language, and not, as is 
 too often attempted, try to learn language from gram- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 In this country it is not rare to find students who are 
 familiar with one or more foreign idioms ; indeed, with 
 some rare exceptions, modern languages now form every- 
 where part of the regular course of collegiate studies, 
 side by side with the ancient classics. By the analysis 
 and comparison of these languages, including the vernacu- 
 lar which above all should engage their most serious 
 attention, students may learn to discover the general 
 principles of grammar, in contradistinction to those which 
 are peculiar to each language with which they are ac- 
 quainted, and thus lay a foundation for the most inter- 
 esting researches in philology and mental philosophy. 
 Rising above the intellectual facts which constitute the 
 art of grammar, they should study its definitions, investi- 
 gate its generalities, and seek in the formation of ideas, 
 and in the operations of the mind, the universal and im- 
 mutable laws which govern languages, and which consti- 
 tute the science of grammar. To those whose mind is 
 capable of such a study it will lay open a large field on 
 which to exercise their strongest reasoning powers, whereas 
 to those especially who prepare for the learned profes- 
 sions such a course will prove of the highest practical im- 
 portance. But even to him whose linguistic knowledge 
 is confined to his native and one other language only, and 
 who in these idioms feels far enough advanced to look for 
 further progress to a more systematic study of their 
 grammars, we still advise a previous perusal of the fol- 
 lowing brief chapters on the nature of language, and the 
 principles that govern the expression of thought both in 
 speaking and writing. 
 
LIST OF THE WORKS CONSULTED AND QUOTED 
 WITHOUT CONTINUED REFERENCE. 
 
 T. Astle, Origin and Progress of Writing. 
 J. Bbattib, On the Study of Language. 
 
 L. Benloew, Apercu general de la Science comparative des 
 Langues. 
 
 A. Beauzee, Grammaire generale. 
 
 E. B. Condillao, Grammaire generale. 
 
 P. U. Domergue, Grammaire generale simplifiee. 
 
 F. G. Eiohhoff, Grammaire generale Indo-Europeenne. 
 
 G. Habris, Hermes. 
 
 Wm. von Humboldt, Ueber die Verschiedenheit des mensch- 
 lichen Spracbbaues. 
 
 H. N. Humphreys, The Origin and Progress of the Art of 
 Writing. 
 
 C. Marcel, Language as a Means of Mental Culture. 
 
 Lord Moxboddo, On the Origin and Progress of Language. 
 
 Max Muller, Lectures on the Science of Language. 
 
 E. Renan, De 1'Origine du Langage. 
 
 S. de Sact, PriDcipes de Grammaire generale. 
 
 F. von Sohlegel, Philosophic der Sprache. 
 
 A. SonLEioHER, Spracbvergleichende Untersuchungen. 
 
 J. B. Stlvestre, Pal6ographie universelle. 
 
 A. Smith, Considerations concerning the first Functions of 
 Language. 
 
 J. Stoddaet, The Philosophy of Language ; Universal Gram- 
 mar. 
 
 J. H. Tooke, The Diversions of Purley. 
 
 W. D. Whitney, Language and the Theory of Language. 
 
PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 
 
 Language, in the proper sense of the term, signi- 
 fies the expression of our ideas and their various relations 
 by certain articulate sounds which are used as the signs 
 of those ideas and relations. By articulate sounds are 
 meant those modulations of the voice, or of sound emitted 
 from the thorax, which are formed by means of the mouth 
 and its several organs — the teeth, the tongue, the lips, 
 and the palate. In a more general sense, language is 
 sometimes used to denote all sounds by which animals of 
 any kind express their particular feelings and impulses in 
 a manner intelligible to their own species. 
 
 Nature has endowed every animal with powers suffi- 
 cient to make known those sensations and desires with 
 which it is necessary, for the preservation of the individ- 
 ual or the continuance of the kind, that others of the 
 same species should be acquainted. For this purpose the 
 organs of all vocal animals are so formed as, upon any 
 particular impulse, to utter sounds of which those of the 
 same species instinctively know the meaning. The sum- 
 mons of the hen is instantly obeyed by the whole brood 
 of chickens ; and in many others of the irrational tribes a 
 similar mode of communication may be observed between 
 
10 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 the parents and the offspring, and also between one animal 
 and another. But it is not among animals of the same 
 species only that these instinctive sounds are mutually 
 understood. It is as necessary for animals to know the 
 voices of their enemies as those of their friends ; the 
 eagle's scream puts every bird to flight, and the roaring 
 of the lion is a sound of which, previously to all expe- 
 rience, every beast of the forest is naturally afraid. Be- 
 tween these animal voices and the language of men, 
 however, there is very little analogy. Human language 
 is capable of expressing ideas and notions which, there is 
 every reason to believe, the brutes can not conceive. The 
 voices of the latter seem intended by nature to express, 
 not distinct ideas, but only such feelings as it is for the 
 good of the species that they should have the power of 
 making known ; and in this, as in all other respects, these 
 voices are analogous, not to speaking, but to weeping, 
 laughing, sighing, groaning, screaming, and other natural 
 and audible expressions of passion or of appetite. Another 
 difference between the language of men and the voices of 
 brute animals consists in articulation, by which the former 
 may be resolved into distinct elementary sounds or sylla- 
 bles ; whereas the latter, being for the most part inarticu- 
 late, are not capable of such a resolution : for though 
 there are a few birds which utter sounds that may be 
 divided into syllables, yet each of these birds utters but 
 one such sound, which seems to be employed rather as a 
 note of natural music than for the purpose of giving in- 
 formation to others ; and hence, when the bird is dis- 
 turbed or agitated, it utters cries which are very different 
 and have no articulation. 
 
 A third difference between the language of men and 
 the significant cries of brute animals is that the former is 
 the result of art, while the latter is derived from nature. 
 Every human language is learned by imitation, and is in- 
 
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 11 
 
 telligible only to those who either inhabit the country 
 where it is vernacular, or have been taught it by a master 
 or by books. But the voices of brutes are wholly instinct- 
 ive, and intelligible to all the animals of the species by 
 which they are uttered, though brought together from the 
 most distant countries on earth. That a dog which had 
 never heard another dog bark would notwithstanding bark 
 himself, and that the barkings or yelps of a Chinese dog 
 would be instinctively understood by the dogs of this or 
 any other country, are facts which have been ascertained 
 and do not admit of doubt. / But there is no reason to 
 imagine that a man, who has never heard any language 
 spoken, would himself speak ; and we all know that the 
 language of one country is unintelligible to the natives of 
 another country, where a different language is spoken. 
 Indeed, it seems obvious that, were there any instinctive 
 language, the first word uttered by all children would be 
 the same ; and that every child, whether born in the 
 midst of society or in the desert, would understand the 
 language of any other child, however educated or how- 
 ever neglected. Nay more, we may venture to assert 
 that if the use of such a natural language were super- 
 seded by a more refined and artificial idiom among the 
 educated, traces of it would remain sufficiently strong to 
 enable every one to express his natural and most pressing 
 wants among all men of his own or any other country, 
 whether barbarous or civilized. 
 
 It being thus apparent that there is no instinctive ar- 
 ticulated language, it has become an inquiry of some im- 
 portance, how mankind were first induced to fabricate 
 articulated sounds, and to employ them for the purpose of 
 communicating their thoughts. Children learn to speak 
 by insensible imitation ; and when advanced some years 
 in life, they study foreign languages under proper in- 
 structors. But the first men had no speakers to imi- 
 
12 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 tate, and no formed language to study. By what means, 
 then, did they learn to speak ? On this question only 
 two opinions can possibly be formed : either language 
 must have been originally revealed from heaven, or it 
 must be the fruit of human invention. 
 
 The latter opinion is strongly supported by Monboddo 
 in his very learned and able work on the " Origin and 
 Progress of Language." But he candidly acknowledges 
 that, if language was invented, it was of very difficult 
 invention and far beyond the reach of savages. Accord- 
 ingly he holds that, though men were originally solitary 
 animals, and had no natural propensity to social life, yet, 
 before language could be invented, they must have been 
 associated for ages, and have carried on in concert some 
 common work. Nay, he is decidedly of opinion that be- 
 fore the invention of an art so difficult as language, men 
 must not only have herded together but also formed some 
 kind of civil polity, have existed in that political state a 
 very long time, and acquired such powers of abstraction 
 as to be able to form general ideas. But it is obvious 
 that men could not have instituted civil polity, or carried 
 on in concert any common work, without communicating 
 their designs to each other ; and he therefore suggests 
 four ways by which this might have been done before 
 the invention of speech, namely : 1. Inarticulate cries, 
 expressive of sentiments and passions ; 2. Gestures, and the 
 expressions of countenance ; 3. Imitative sounds, express- 
 ive of audible things ; and 4. Painting, by which visi- 
 ible objects may be represented. Of these four ways of 
 communication, it is plain that only two have any con- 
 nection with language— inarticulate cries and imitative 
 sounds ; and of these the author abandons the latter as 
 having contributed nothing to the invention of articula- 
 tion, though he thinks it may have helped to advance its 
 progress. It is, therefore, inarticulate cries only which, 
 
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. . 13 
 
 according to him, have given rise to the formation of lan- 
 guage ; and this theory he supports with a great deal of 
 learning and ingenuity, adducing in the course of his re- 
 flections the opinions, not only of heathen philosophers, 
 poets, and historians, but also of Christian divines, both 
 ancient and modern. 
 
 The prevailing opinion of modern philosophers, how- 
 ever, does not agree with the account of the origin of lan- 
 guage as a human invention, and rather considers it as a se- 
 ries of mere suppositions hanging loosely together, and the 
 whole suspended from no fixed principle. The opinions of 
 Diodorus, Vitruvius, Horace, Lucretius, and Cicero, which 
 are frequently quoted in its support, are in their estimation 
 of no greater authority than the opinions of other men ; 
 for as language was formed and brought to a great degree 
 of perfection long before the era of any historian with 
 whom we are acquainted, the antiquity of the Greek and 
 Roman writers, who are comparatively of yesterday, gives 
 them no advantage in this inquiry over the philosophers 
 of the present times. That the first men sprang from the 
 earth like vegetables, no modern philosopher has ventured 
 to assert ; nor does there anywhere appear sufficient evi- 
 dence that men were originally savages. The oldest book 
 extant contains the only rational cosmogony known to 
 the ancient nations ; and that book represents the first 
 human inhabitants of this earth, not only as reasoning 
 and speaking animals, but also as in a state of high per- 
 fection and happiness. Moses, setting aside his claim to 
 inspiration, deserves, from the consistency of his narra- 
 tive, at least as much credit as Moschus, or Democritus, or 
 Epicurus ; and from his prior antiquity, if antiquity could 
 on this subject have any weight, he would deserve more 
 from having lived nearer to the period of which they all 
 write. But the question respecting the origin of language 
 may be decided without resting an authority of any kind, 
 
14 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 merely by considering the nature of speech, and the men- 
 tal and corporeal powers of man. 
 
 Those who maintain it to he of human invention, sup- 
 pose men at first to have been solitary animals, afterward 
 to have herded together without government or subordina- 
 tion, then to have formed political societies, and by their 
 own exertions to have advanced from the grossest igno- 
 rance to the refinements of science. But this is a suppo- 
 sition contrary to all history and all experience. There 
 is not upon record a single instance, well authenticated, of 
 a people emerging by their own efforts from barbarism 
 to civilization. There have indeed been many nations 
 raised from the state of savages ; but it is known that 
 they were polished, not by their own exertions, but by 
 the influence of individuals or colonies from nations more 
 enlightened than themselves. The human mind, when 
 put upon the proper track, is capable of making great 
 advances in arts and sciences ; but if any credit be due 
 to' the records of history, no people sunk in ignorance and 
 barbarity has ever shown sufficient vigor to discover that 
 track or to conceive a state of things different from that 
 in which they are living. And if we see the aboriginal 
 tribes of this continent continue, as there is every reason 
 to believe they have continued for ages, in the same un- 
 varied state of barbarism, how is it imaginable that peo- 
 ple so much ruder than they as to be ignorant of all lan- 
 guage should think of inventing an art so difficult as that 
 of speech, or even to have a conception of the thing ? In 
 fishing, hunting, building, navigating, and the like, they 
 might imitate the instinctive arts of other animals, but 
 there is no other animal that expresses its sensations and 
 affections by arbitrary articulate sounds. And since it is 
 asserted that, before language could be invented, man- 
 kind must have existed for ages in large political socie- 
 ties, and have carried on in concert some common work, 
 
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 15 
 
 we may well ask, if inarticulate cries and the natural 
 visible signs of the passions and affections were modes of 
 communication sufficiently accurate to keep a large soci- 
 ety together for ages, and to direct its members in the 
 execution of some common work, what could have been 
 the inducement to the substitution of an art so novel and 
 so difficult as that of language ? 
 
 Let us, however, suppose that different nations of sav- 
 ages set about inventing an art of communicating their 
 thoughts which experience had taught them was not ab- 
 solutely necessary ; how came they all, without exception, 
 to think of the art of articulating the voice for this pur- 
 pose ? Inarticulate cries, out of which some think lan- 
 guage was fabricated, have indeed an instinctive con- 
 nection with our passions and affections ; but there are 
 gestures and expressions of countenance with which our 
 passions and affections are in the same manner connected. 
 If the natural cries of passion could be so modified and 
 enlarged as to be capable of communicating to the hearer 
 every idea in the mind of the speaker, it is certain (and 
 the wonderful perfection to which the language of the 
 deaf-and-dumb has arrived proves it) that the natural 
 gestures could be so modified as to answer the very same 
 purpose. It therefore seems strange that among the sev- 
 eral nations who invented languages not one should have 
 stumbled upon fabricating visible signs of their ideas, but 
 that all should have agreed to denote them by articulate 
 sounds. It is in vain to urge that articulate sounds are 
 fitter for the purpose of communicating thought than visi- 
 ble gesticulation ; for though this may be true, it is a 
 truth which could hardly occur to savages who had never 
 experienced tbe fitness of either ; and if, to counterbal- 
 ance the superior fitness of articulation, its extreme diffi- 
 culty be taken into view, it must appear little less than 
 miraculous that every savage tribe should think of it 
 
16 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 rather than the easier method of artificial gesticulation. 
 Savages, it is well known, are remarkable for their indo- 
 lence, and for always preferring ease to utility ; but their 
 modes of life give such pliancy to their bodies, that they 
 could with very little trouble bend their limbs and mem- 
 bers into any positions agreed upon as the signs of ideas. 
 This is so far from being the case with respect to the or- 
 gans of speech that it is with extreme difficulty, if at all, 
 that a man advanced in life can be taught to articulate 
 any sound which he has not been accustomed to hear. 
 Few foreigners who come to this country after the age 
 of thirty ever learn to pronounce English even tolera- 
 bly well ; an American of that age can hardly be taught 
 to utter the French sound of the vowel «, or the gut- 
 tural articulation of the Spanish x ; it is almost impos- 
 sible to imitate a brogue ; and of the solitary savages 
 who have been caught in different forests, we know not 
 that there has been one who, after the age of manhood, 
 learned to articulate any language so as to make himself 
 readily understood. The present age, it is true, has fur- 
 nished instances of deaf persons being taught to speak in- 
 telligibly by skillful masters molding the organs of the 
 mouth into the positions proper for articulating the voice ; 
 but who was to perform this task among the inventors of 
 language, when all mankind were equally ignorant of the 
 means by which articulation is effected? In fact, ex- 
 perience informs us that men who have not learned to ar- 
 ticulate in their childhood never afterward acquire the 
 faculty of speech but by such helps as savages can not 
 obtain ; and, therefore, it would seem that if speech was 
 invented at all, it must have been either by children who 
 were incapable of invention, or by men who were incapa- 
 ble of speech. But these two opinions are equally absurd 
 and untenable ; for while the organs are pliable, there is 
 not understanding enough to frame the conception of an 
 
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 17 
 
 articulate language, and by the time that there is under- 
 standing, the organs have become too stiff for the task. 
 Reason, therefore, as well as experience and history, sug- 
 gest that mankind in all ages must have been speaking 
 animals — the young acquiring the art by imitation, and 
 our first parents being born with the power of naming 
 whatever came under their observation, and urged to use 
 that power by immediate inspiration. 
 
 Such are the reasons and considerations upon which is 
 based a theory adopted by the best and deepest inquirers 
 into the spontaneous generation of language, to which 
 they all ascribe an origin at once divine and human, with- 
 out pretending to solve a question which from its very 
 nature must of necessity remain a mystery forever. Oth- 
 ers, not satisfied with attributing to man the inborn fac- 
 ulty of speech, which, even under inspiration, he may have 
 used at first but very imperfectly and only gradually im- 
 proved, in the same way as men inspired nowadays im- 
 prove their skill by practice and experience, have argued 
 that there actually was an original language, the words 
 and forms of which were communicated to man by divine 
 inspiration. To this it is objected by those who suppose 
 it to be a human invention, that if the first language was 
 communicated by inspiration, it must have been perfect, 
 and held in reverence by those who spoke it ; in other 
 words, by all mankind. A vast variety of languages, 
 they say, have prevailed in the world, many of which, 
 there is every reason to believe, are lost ; and of those 
 which remain, the best and most cultivated are too im- 
 perfect to be the work of God. If different languages 
 were invented by different nations, all this, they think, 
 would naturally follow from the mixture of these nations ; 
 but what, they ask, could induce men possessed of one 
 perfect language of divine origin, to forsake it for bar- 
 barous jargons of their own invention and in every re- 
 
18 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 spect inferior to that with which their forefathers had 
 been inspired ? As there is something plausible in the 
 argument, it may be interesting to inquire into the va- 
 lidity of the objections raised, for if they can not confute 
 the more extreme views which they oppose, they certainly 
 can not disprove the simpler and more generally adopted 
 views set forth upon the subject. 
 
 Truly, perfection is the stamp with which everything 
 of divine origin is marked; but change and decay, as well as 
 propagation and death, appear to be the constant rules by 
 which this perfection is maintained in all nature. Every- 
 thing created is subject to accidents which may suspend 
 and even terminate the natural course of its existence. The 
 infirmities which befall individuals do not argue against 
 the exalted origin of the race, nor can the vicissitudes of 
 nations be laid to any original imperfection of the species. 
 Such vicissitudes of nations, however, bear a direct rela- 
 tion to those of their language. Every degradation or 
 improvement, whether individual or national, is always 
 immediately shown by corresponding changes in the lan- 
 guage. Languages, as nations, have their origin, growth, 
 and decadence, and give birth to others which in their 
 turn prosper, decline, and become extinct ; and as the for- 
 tunes of both always keep pace together, we can not argue 
 from the diversity of tongues or from their alterations 
 that the first language was not perfect, any more than we 
 can prove the degeneracy of part of humanity to be due 
 to an original imperfection of the race. The first lan- 
 guage, if given by inspiration, must in its principles have 
 had all the perfection of which language is susceptible ; 
 but in order to render it available to all mankind, through- 
 out the course of the world's progress, it is necessary that 
 this perfection should lie deeper than in the mere vocabu- 
 lary, which from the nature of things would in the be- 
 ginning not possibly have been very copious. The words 
 
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 19 
 
 of a language are either proper names or the signs of ideas 
 and relations ; but it can not be supposed that the All- 
 wise Instructor would load the memory of man with names 
 for objects he had not yet seen, much less with words to 
 set forth feelings which were not yet stirring within him, 
 combinations which he had not yet made, relations of which 
 he was not yet 'conscious. It was sufficient that a foun- 
 dation was laid of such a nature as would support the 
 largest superstructure which men might ever after have 
 occasion to raise upon it, and that the power of naming, 
 bestowed upon them, included the method of framing 
 words by composition and derivation. This would long 
 preserve the language radically the same, though it could 
 not prevent the introduction of different dialects in the 
 different countries over which men spread themselves. 
 In whatever region we suppose the human race to have 
 been originally placed, the increase of their numbers 
 would, in process of time, either disperse them into dif- 
 ferent nations, or extend the one nation to a vast distance 
 on all sides from the nucleus or principal settlement. In 
 either case they would everywhere meet with new objects, 
 which would occasion the invention of new names ; and 
 as the difference of climate and other natural causes would 
 compel those who removed eastward or northward to adopt 
 modes of life in many respects different from the modes 
 of those who traveled toward the west or the south, a vast 
 number of words would in one country be fabricated to 
 denote complex conceptions, which must necessarily be 
 unintelligible to the body of the people inhabiting coun- 
 tries where those conceptions had never been formed. 
 Thus would various dialects be unavoidably introduced 
 into the original language, even while all mankind re- 
 mained in one society and under one government. But 
 after separate and independent societies were formed these 
 variations would become more numerous, and the several 
 
20 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 dialects would deviate farther and farther from each other, 
 as well as from the idiom and genius of the parent tongue, 
 in proportion to the distance of the tribes by whom they 
 were spoken.* \' 
 
 * Common opinion attributes the diversity of languages to the occur- 
 rences at Babel. But as commentators do not agree in the explanation 
 of the Scripture passages which bear on the subject, we offer the follow- 
 ing for consideration: In Gen. x, 25, 81, 32, we read that Noah portioned 
 out the world among his posterity according to their tongues, families, 
 and nations ; which procedure implies that a diversity of languages was 
 already established. It seems, then, that the subsequent facts concerning 
 the confusion of tongues, related afterward in Gen. xi, did not affect the 
 whole human race, but concerned only that portion of mankind who were 
 especially distinguished by the title " sons of men " (Gen. xi, 5). This 
 phrase, moreover, occurs already in Gen. vi, 2, with a similar meaning, 
 and there can be no good reason for supposing that it is used again so 
 soon afterward in a completely different sense. The only objection that 
 can be raised against this view of the subject lies in the strong expres- 
 sion, " The whole earth was of one language and of one speech " (Gen. xi, 
 1) ; but this phrase has been thoroughly discussed in the account of the 
 flood, as connected with geology. While most theologians agree that the 
 deluge was universal in regard to man, there are several who argue, even 
 from the terms of Scripture, that the flood was only a local catastrophe 
 in respect to the whole globe. It is remarked that the word f""*, besides 
 its extensive meaning of " the earth," is often used in the more limited 
 sense of " land," " country," such as " the land of Canaan," " the land of 
 Egypt." Thus we read in Gen. xli, 54, 56, 6*7, that " the dearth was in 
 all lands ; and the famine was over all the face of the earth ; and all coun- 
 tries came to Egypt to buy corn, because the famine was sore in all lands " ; 
 while it is evident, from the nature of the case, and the application to 
 Egypt for food, that it must have been partial. In the New Testament 
 we meet with the expression, " There was darkness over the whole earth " 
 (Mark xv, 33). Many other instances may be quoted where language 
 equally general in its form is used in a very limited sense, but in the his- 
 tory of Babel the sense of the words is much more clearly defined than 
 in the other passages quoted ; for the ambiguous phrase which may sig- 
 nify either "the whole earth" or "all the land" is here determined to 
 the more limited meaning by the other specific phrase " the sons of men," 
 pointed to in Gen. xi, 2, as a people " migrated from the East," and then 
 engaged in building the city and tower of Babel. 
 
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 21 
 
 If we suppose a few people either to have been ban- 
 ished together from the society of their brethren, or to 
 have wandered through trackless forests to a distance from 
 which they could not return (and such migrations have 
 often taken place), it is easy to see how the most copious 
 language must in their mouths have soon become nar- 
 row, and how even the offspring of inspiration must 
 have in time become so deformed as hardly to retain a 
 feature of the ancestral root whence it originally sprung. 
 Men do not long retain a practical skill in those arts 
 which they never exercise, and there are many facts 
 to prove that a single man cast upon a desert island, 
 and having to provide the necessaries of life by his 
 own ingenuity, would soon lose the art of speaking 
 his mother tongue with fluency. A small number of 
 men cast away together would indeed retain that art 
 somewhat longer ; but in a space of time not very long, 
 it would in a great measure be lost, if not by them, 
 certainly by their posterity. In this state of banishment, 
 as their time would be almost wholly occupied in hunt- 
 ing, fishing, and other means within their reach to sup- 
 port a wretched existence, they would have very little 
 leisure, and perhaps less desire, to preserve by conver- 
 sation the remembrance of that ease and those comforts 
 of which they now found themselves forever deprived ; 
 and they would of course soon forget all the words 
 which in their native language they had used to de- 
 note the accommodations and elegancies of polished life. 
 This, at least, seems to be certain, that they would not 
 attempt to teach their children a part of a language 
 which in their circumstances could be of no use to them, 
 and of which it would be impossible to make them com- 
 prehend the meaning ; for when there are no ideas, the 
 signs of ideas can not be made intelligible. From colo- 
 nies such as thisj dispersed over the earth, it is probable 
 
22 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 that all those nations of savages have arisen whose con- 
 dition has induced so many philosophers to imagine that 
 the state of the savage was the original state of man ; and 
 under such degradation we may well suppose that, from 
 the language of inspiration, whatever may have been its 
 original perfection, must have unavoidably sprung a num- 
 ber of different dialects, all extremely rude and narrow, 
 and retaining nothing of the parent tongue, except per- 
 haps some indistinct trace of the names of the most con- 
 spicuous objects of nature, and of those wants and enjoy- 
 ments which are common to all humanity. The savage 
 state has no artificial wants, and furnishes few ideas that 
 require terms to express them. The habits of solitude 
 and silence incline a savage rarely to speak ; and when 
 he speaks, he uses almost always the same terms to de- 
 note different ideas. Speech, therefore, in this rude con- 
 dition of men, must be as narrow as it may be various. 
 Every new region, and every new climate, suggests dif- 
 ferent ideas and creates different wants, which must be 
 expressed either by terms entirely new, or by old terms 
 used with a new signification. Hence must originate 
 great diversity, even in the first elements of speech, 
 among all savage nations; the words retained of the 
 original language being used in various senses, and pro- 
 nounced, as we may well believe, with rude and various 
 accents. 
 
 "When any of those savage tribes emerged from their 
 barbarism, whether by their own efforts or by the aid of 
 people more enlightened than themselves, it is obvious 
 that the improvement and copiousness of their language 
 would keep pace with their ownyprogress in knowledge 
 and in the arts of civil life ; but in the infinite multitude 
 of words which civilization and -refinement Udd to lan- 
 guage, it would be little less than miraculous were any 
 two nations to agree upon the same sounds to represent 
 
THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 23 
 
 the same ideas. Superior refinement, indeed, may induce 
 imitation, conquest may to some extent impose a language, 
 and extension of empires may melt down different nations 
 and different dialects into one mass ; but independent 
 tribes naturally give rise to diversity of tongues, and it 
 does not seem possible that they should retain more of 
 the original language than the words expressive of those 
 objects with which all men are at all times equally con- 
 cerned. The variety of tongues, therefore, the copious- 
 ness of some, and the narrowness of others, furnish no 
 good objection to the divine origin of language in gen- - 
 eral ; for whether language was at first revealed from 
 heaven, or in the course of ages invented by man, a mul- 
 titude of dialects would inevitably arise as soon as the 
 hunian race had separated into a number of distinct and 
 independent nations. 
 
 Such are in the main the arguments that have been 
 set forth on either side of the question, without assisting 
 much in solving the problem. Many idle speculations 
 are due to that indolent philosophy which refers to a 
 miracle whatever appearances in the natural or moral 
 world it is unable to explain, and many more exhibit a 
 sensitive dread of admitting in the matter of language 
 and its origin any agency not human. It seems incum- 
 bent, however, on those who reject the spiritual doctrine 
 on account of its making reference to supernatural or, as 
 they term it, unknown agency, to furnish us with some 
 account of the origin of our species by which they can 
 explain events, no more miraculous than the origin of lan- 
 guage, with which they are intimately connected. Until 
 these events, which certainly did take place, can be under- 
 stood in a different way from that in which we find them 
 recorded in the Mosaic account, we may, it seems, ration- 
 ally adhere to the whole of the same testimony, as in- 
 volving the operation of no other causes than such as 
 
24 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 account, at least as well as any other thus far suggested, 
 for the phenomena under consideration. 
 
 " Language," says Whewell, " is often called an utter- 
 ance of thought ; but it is also the instrument of thought, 
 or rather it is the atmosphere in which thought lives, a 
 medium essential to the activity of our speculative pow- 
 ers, although invisible and imperceptible in its operation, 
 and an element modifying, by its qualities and changes, 
 the growth and complexion of the faculties which it feeds. 
 In this way the influence of preceding discoveries upon 
 subsequent ones, of the past upon the present, is most 
 penetrating and universal, although most subtle and diffi- 
 cult to trace. The most familiar words and phrases are 
 connected by imperceptible ties with the reasonings and 
 discoveries of former men and distant times. Their 
 knowledge is an inseparable part of ours ; the present 
 generation inherits and uses the scientific wealth of all 
 the past. And this is the fortune, not only of the great 
 and rich in the intellectual world, of those who have the 
 key to the ancient storehouses, and who have accumulated 
 treasures of their own ; but the humblest inquirer, while 
 he puts his reasonings into words, benefits by the labors 
 of the greatest. When he counts his little wealth, he 
 finds he has in his hands coins which bear the image and 
 superscription of ancient and modern intellectual dynas- 
 ties, and that, in virtue of this possession, acquisitions are 
 in his power, solid knowledge within his reach, which 
 none could ever have attained to if it were not that the 
 gold of truth, once dug out of the mine, circulates more 
 and more widely among mankind." * 
 
 The invention of an art by which language, from a 
 simple means of communication, became the key to all 
 knowledge, was writing. 
 
 * William Whewell, " History of the Inductive Soiencea." 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 
 
 The art of drawing ideas into vision, or of exhibiting 
 the conceptions of the mind by legible characters, may 
 justly be deemed the noblest and most beneficial inven- 
 tion of which human ingenuity can boast ; an invention 
 which has contributed more than all others to the im- 
 provement of mankind. 
 
 Although we have but very vague data in respect to 
 its origin, the most probable supposition, as well as that 
 which has the greatest amount of direct evidence in its 
 favor, is that writing always began by being figurative. 
 Thus the sun was indicated by a circle / the moon by a 
 half circle ; a serpent by an undulating line, etc. Man 
 is essentially imitative. Even as he repeats the sounds he 
 hears, so he is inclined to draw the objects he sees ; and, 
 even in his most uncivilized state, he displays a faculty 
 of imitation, which enables him to delineate objects and 
 communicate information by rude pictures or representa- 
 tions. Thus, a man who had seen a strange animal, plant, 
 or any other new object, for which he wanted a name, 
 would have been almost mechanically led to illustrate his 
 description by signs ; and if they were not readily com- 
 prehended, by a rude delineation in the sand, on the bark 
 of a tree, on a slate, a bone, or on such materials as first 
 presented themselves. The permanency of these outlines, 
 and of the objects on which they were traced, naturally 
 suggested the hint of recording events and of conveying 
 3 
 
26 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 intelligence ; and when reflection had taught to express 
 such an idea as murder, for instance, by the image of a man 
 stretched on the earth, and that of another standing by 
 him and holding in his hand a weapon stained with blood, 
 the picture was actually a kind of written affidavit ; for, 
 however rude and primitive, it might represent some of 
 the features and clothing of the assassin and his victim, 
 and thus become an act of accusation against the mur- 
 derer. Similar combinations, more or less ingeniously 
 contrived, constitute what is called picture-writing. 
 
 It is not probable that this art was brought to any de- 
 gree of perfection by one man or nation, or even by one 
 generation ; but was gradually improved and extended 
 by the successive hands of individuals, in the societies 
 through which it passed. It seems to be the uniform 
 voice of nature speaking to the first rude conceptions of 
 mankind, as traces of it have been found among all na- 
 tions at the infancy of society ; and even at the present 
 day all barbarous tribes, like the Indians of this continent, 
 still strive to perpetuate their simple traditions by pict- 
 ures.* But these records are necessarily very inexact 
 and incomplete, for painting can not transmit the fugitive 
 sounds that escape from the lips of man, nor the secret 
 thoughts which determine his actions ; it can only retrace 
 material objects, such as fall under the perception of sight, 
 but is entirely inefficient to express abstract ideas and 
 those with which the other senses have enriched the hu- 
 man intellect. 
 
 It was the simplification of picture-writing which led 
 
 * The author of a book entitled " De vet. lit. Hun. Scyth.," p. 15, men- 
 tions certain innkeepers in Hungary who used hieroglyphic representa- 
 tions, not only to keep their accounts, but to describe their debtors ; so 
 that if one was a soldier, they drew a rude kind of sword ; for a smith or 
 carpenter, a, hammer or an axe ; for a carter, a whip, etc. The like is by 
 no means uncommon all the world over. 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 27 
 
 to a more regular system, and formed the second step in 
 the art of writing. 
 
 A little reflection will discover that men, in their uncul- 
 tivated state, had neither leisure, inclination, nor induce- 
 ment to cultivate the powers of the mind to a degree 
 sufficient for the invention of a regular form of visible 
 language ; but when a people arrived at such a state of 
 civilization as required them to represent the conceptions 
 of the mind which had no corporeal forms, necessity, the 
 mother of invention, would occasion further exertions of 
 the human faculties, and would urge such a people to find 
 out a more expeditious manner of transacting their busi- 
 ness, and of recording their events, than by picture-writ- 
 ing ; for the impossibility of conveying a variety of intel- 
 lectual and metaphysical ideas by pictures would natu- 
 rally occur, and therefore the necessity of seeking out 
 some other means that would be more comprehensive 
 would present itself. 4 -^- - 4- 
 
 In picture-writing each figure meant specifically what 
 it represented. Thus, the figure of the sun expressed or 
 denoted that orb only ; a lion or a dog, simply the ani- 
 mals thus depicted ; but when men acquired more knowl- 
 edge and attempted to describe qualities, as well as visi- 
 ble objects, these delineations were more figuratively 
 explained ; then the figure of the sun, besides its original 
 meaning, denoted glory and genial warmth ; that of the 
 lion, courage ; and that of the dog, fidelity. A still fur- 
 ther improvement in civilization occasioned these delinea- 
 tions to become extremely numerous, every new object 
 requiring a new picture. This induced the delineator to 
 abridge the figures of most frequent recurrence, retaining 
 so much of each figure as would express its species. At 
 length, in order to avoid all unnecessary details, and at 
 the same time to give the picture a more definite ex- 
 pression, they agreed in certain countries upon a given 
 
28 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 number of figures which stood as general terms to sig- 
 nify the main qualities of the objects thus represented. 
 A more extensive application of this method suggested 
 the addition of some arbitrary figures or symbols, which, 
 by means of a supposed analogy, were to represent invisi- 
 ble objects or ideas ; and this by a natural transition led 
 to the adaptation of other figures or characters which 
 represented sounds. This kind of writing, called hiero- 
 glyphical, is of the highest antiquity, and, diversely modi- 
 fied, has been found in all its different stages among many 
 nations which originally had no communication with each 
 other. The Egyptians, however, carried the art to its 
 greatest extent ; and this is one reason why they have 
 been generally considered as the inventors of it, every 
 species of hieroglyphics being recorded in their history. 
 
 The Egyptian hieroglyphics consist of three different 
 species of characters : 1. Hieroglyphics, properly so called, 
 in which the object is represented by a picture either entire 
 or in abridged form. 2. Symbolical, in which an idea is 
 expressed by some visible object which represents it — as 
 adoration by a censer containing incense. 3. Phonetic 
 characters, in which the sign represents not a visible 
 object nor idea, but a sound. They read indifferently 
 from right to left, left to right, and from top to bottom. 
 The direction of the lines is indicated by the direction of 
 the heads of the persons or animals represented, and is 
 generally Tdetermined by the right or left hand side of the 
 walls of the monuments. On obelisks the lines are read 
 perpendicularly from the top downward. The emblems 
 used generally resemble the forms of human beings, ani- 
 mals, objects of nature, mechanical instruments, etc., the 
 properties and qualities of which, either real or conven- 
 tional, suggested to the mind such ideas as usage had as- 
 signed to them. Thus a viper expressed ingratitude ; a 
 crocodile, wickedness ; a fly, imprudence ; an ant, wis- 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 29 
 
 dom ; a hawk, power and victory ; a bee, obedience of the 
 people toward the sovereign ; an eye, exact observance 
 of justice ; an eye and scepter, a king ; an eye in the 
 clouds, God's omniscience, etc. ; and, according to estab- 
 lished rules, these figures were able to express a series 
 of abstract ideas, which could be read by the initiated 
 with a certain degree of accuracy, and for which mere 
 picture-writing was altogether inefficient. 
 
 Previous to the year 1802, nothing had been done 
 toward deciphering the meaning of hieroglyphics. The 
 key of these mysteries was furnished by the celebrated 
 Rosetta stone, now in the British Museum, which was 
 discovered in 1799 by a French officer of engineers, 
 between Rosetta and the sea, not far from the mouth 
 of the Nile. It is a stone of black basalt, three feet 
 in length and two feet five inches in breadth. It con- 
 tains three inscriptions, one in the Greek language and 
 characters, and the other two in dialects of the Egyptian 
 language. Of the latter, one is in enchorial characters, 
 the other in hieroglyphics. These inscriptions are a 
 Ptolemaic edict, chiseled at Memphis, in honor of Ptolemy 
 Epiphanes, b. c. 196. The concluding sentence of this 
 edict, which furnished the key to all the discoveries of 
 the Egyptian antiquaries, is in the following words : 
 "That this decree should be engraved on a tablet of 
 hard stone in hieroglyphical, enchorial, and Greek char- 
 acters, and be set up in the first, second and third-rate 
 temples before the statue of the ever-living king." These 
 words led to the natural inference that the inscription 
 was the same in the three characters, and that the dis- 
 covery of the proper names in each would give a clew to 
 the construction of the whole. This mode was successful, 
 and thanks to the incessant labors of Young, both Cham- 
 pollions, Rosellini, Lepsius, Wilkinson, and several others 
 who have continued their learned investigations, hiero- 
 
30 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 glyphics are now almost as perfectly readable as among 
 the ancient Egyptians. The documents we possess of this 
 kind of writing chiefly consist of manuscripts on papyrus 
 and inscriptions on public monuments ; they generally 
 relate to historical events and funeral ceremonies. The 
 earliest monuments extant are the pyramids and tombs of 
 the third and fourth Memphite dynasties. They are purely 
 hieroglyphic. About the twelfth dynasty, a period long 
 antecedent to the time of Abraham, the transition took 
 place from hieroglyphical into a more current form, termed 
 the hieratic or sacerdotal, chiefly used in papyri. Besides 
 these two there arose a third kind of writing, known as 
 the enchorial or demotic, from being the popular mode of 
 writing. It was alphabetic, and came into use about the 
 time of Psammetichus, about 700 b. c. From this time it 
 was in common use until suppressed by a Roman imperial 
 edict, and replaced by the Coptic alphabet of twenty-five 
 Greek letters and seven Egyptian additions. 
 
 A kind of writing, similar to old Egyptian, was found 
 among the ancient Mexicans at the time of their dis- 
 covery by the Spaniards. They not only recorded his- 
 torical events and genealogies by descriptive paintings, 
 but they were also possessed of symbolical hieroglyphics, 
 expressing by arbitrary signs such ideas as water, land, 
 air, wind, light, darkness, speech, motion, etc. They had 
 also symbols to express numbers and the different days 
 and months of the solar year, to show the date of an 
 event, if it had happened by day or by night, etc. This 
 kind of writing was brought by them to a remarkable de- 
 gree of perfection, and was regularly taught in schools 
 by their elders. The ruined cities of Yucatan and other 
 parts of Central America exhibit groups of hieroglyphics 
 to all appearance of a still more refined and artificial char- 
 acter than those of the Mexicans. The Peruvians had a 
 kind of hieroglyphic writing somewhat similar to that of 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 81 
 
 the Mexicans, but roughly executed and much less per- 
 fect. For chronological purposes they made use of regis- 
 ters called quipus, which consisted of sets of strings tied 
 with knots of various sizes and colors, and which, in a 
 more simple form, were used by almost all American na- 
 tions for the common purpose of counting. This sort of 
 mnemotechnical- instrument seems to be of a natural sug- 
 gestion to man ; it still exists in the wampum belts of the 
 Indians, it corresponds to the abacus of the Romans, and 
 traces of it are found in the monuments of the Egyptians 
 and in the written language of the Chinese. 
 
 Chinese Writing, which is now symbolic, was originally 
 also imitative. The characters which replaced the primi- 
 tive pictures were hieroglyphics similar to those of the 
 Mexicans and Egyptians. Rude delineations of visible 
 objects, the first symbols used, were soon reduced to an 
 imperfect outline, and, in course of time, so little of the 
 original figure was left, that nothing but a powerful asso- 
 ciation can recall it to the mind when the symbol is pre- 
 sented to the eye. This kind of writing, a complete de- 
 velopment of the hieroglyphical principle, consists of two 
 hundred and fourteen radical characters, and about forty 
 thousand others, the meaning of which is generally agreed 
 upon ; to which must be added an infinite number of 
 other signs, which is increased by a new one for every new 
 idea. This makes them amount to about eighty thousand, 
 though he who is master of twelve or fifteen thousand is 
 considered a very learned man. The Chinese doctors, in 
 order to facilitate the reading of their language, have 
 compiled lexicons and vocabularies provided with keys 
 to assist consultation. These keys are the two hundred 
 and fourteen radicals referred' to, and contain the gen- 
 eral outlines of characters used in each class of ideas rep- 
 resented. Thus, for instance, everything that relates to 
 heaven, earth, mountain, man, horse, cattle, etc., is to be 
 
32 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 looked for under the character of heaven, earth, mountain, 
 man, horse, cattle, etc. ; but, although a great deal of skill 
 has been displayed in the arrangement, a perfect and 
 complete knowledge of them seems to be almost impos- 
 sible. The Chinese books begin from the right hand ; 
 the characters are placed in perpendicular columns, and 
 are read downward, beginning from the right hand side 
 of the paper. This kind of writing is sometimes termed 
 ideographical, from its representing ideas independently 
 of sound, as the digit 8, for instance, which in English 
 is called eight, in French huit, in Italian otto, etc. 
 
 The resemblances traceable between what little of 
 purely figurative characters is still discernible in the 
 earliest monuments of China, Egypt, and America, have 
 given rise to speculations as to the community of origin 
 or possible intercourse between these radically distinct 
 nations at that primordial epoch ; but these resemblances, 
 few in reality, seem rather to result from the fact that 
 similar causes, operating upon similar elements, naturally 
 produce similar effects ; that is, in Egypt, China, or 
 America, when man wished to write " sun," he drew an 
 orb ; when " moon," a crescent, and so on. The picture 
 was necessarily the same in all countries ; hence the re- 
 semblance of the hieroglyphics derived from it. 
 
 It was certainly a great improvement in the art of 
 writing when it passed. from pictures into hieroglyphics ; 
 still their practical application remained but limited ; for, 
 as most of the symbols used were arbitrary, and generally 
 turning on the least obvious, or even perhaps on imaginary 
 properties of the animals or things represented, either to 
 form or construe them required no small degree of learn- 
 ing and ingenuity. Even then, as the allusions drawn 
 from them were forced and ambiguous, their meaning 
 remained always indistinct, and subject to various inter- 
 pretations. Hieroglyphics, however, contained in germ 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS QF WRITING. 33 
 
 another kind of writing, the invention of which was to 
 exercise a more extensive and important influence on the 
 improvement of the human race than any other. 
 
 It seems ohvious that, while the picture or hiero- 
 glyphic presented itself to the sight, the writer's idea 
 was confined to the figure or ohject itself ; hut when the 
 picture was contracted into a mark, the sound annexed 
 to the thing signified by such mark would become fa- 
 miliar, and, after the invention of arbitrary signs for 
 abstract ideas, would naturally lead to the adaptation 
 of other emblems to denote sounds. When the use of 
 the latter had led in its turn to a more careful exam- 
 ination of the human voice, and the writer reflected 
 how small a number of sounds he made use of in speech 
 to express all his ideas, it would occur that a much fewer 
 number of marks than he had been accustomed to use 
 would be sufficient for the notation of all the sounds 
 which he could articulate. These considerations would 
 induce him to reflect on the nature and power of sounds ; 
 and it would occur that sounds being the matter of audi- 
 ble language, marks for them must be the elements of 
 words : consequently, that by contriving as many sym- 
 bols as there are articulate sounds in a language, they 
 might be so combined as to represent every word of the 
 vocabulary. 
 
 The first step in this new progress was the invention 
 of a series of syllables, such as are still in use in Ethio- 
 pia and certain parts of India. By means of a particular 
 sign for every syllable, the characters used in writing 
 were thus reduced to a number much less than that of 
 words, but still sufficiently numerous to make the art of 
 reading and writing exceedingly complicated. At last 
 some lofty genius arose, who, analyzing speech in its 
 most simple elements, found it to consist of a small num- 
 ber of elementary sounds, modified by certain articular 
 
34 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 tions, also limited in number, both of which he indicated 
 by signs or letters, the whole forming an alphabet of vow- 
 els and consonants, by means of which he was enabled to 
 convey, by corresponding characters, the various inflec- 
 tions of the human voice, and to put in writing all the 
 different words of which a language is composed. Being 
 thus reduced to such simplicity as to be placed within the 
 reach of a child's intelligence, the art of writing made 
 rapid progress, and was gradually brought to that perfec- 
 tion in which we find it practiced among all civilized na- 
 tions of the earth. 
 
 The alphabet current in Europe and Western Asia 
 may, with very few exceptions, be traced to a common 
 source, namely, what is called the ancient Phoenician. 
 Whether the Phoenicians, in their incessant intercourse 
 with Egypt, obtained from her civilized inhabitants their 
 first knowledge of the possibility of writing with phonetic 
 characters alone, without the habitual intermixture of 
 figurative and symbolical signs, or that they were indebt- 
 ed for it to the Assyrians, the well-known parents of art 
 and civilization in the East, has not yet been determined. 
 The fact, however, that inscriptions, closely analogous in 
 their character with the Phoenician, have been found in 
 the ruins of Babylon, gives great weight to the latter 
 opinion. Several Roman authors attribute the invention 
 to the Phoenicians ; * but, however this may be, and 
 whether they adopted the alphabet from their neighbors, 
 
 * Ipsa gens Phoenicura in gloria magna literarum inventionis et si- 
 derum, navaliumque ac bcllicarum artium. (Plinius, " Nat. Hist.," lib. v, 
 cap. 12.) 
 
 Si famae libet credere hsec (Tyriorum) gens literas prima aut docuit, 
 aut didicit. (Curtius, lib. vi, cap. 4.) 
 
 Phoeniccs primi, famse si creditor ausi, 
 Mansuram rudibus vocem signare figuris. 
 
 (Lucan., lib. iii, v. 220, 221.) 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 35 
 
 or perhaps improved on what they had learned from 
 them, it is unanimously agreed that they were the medi- 
 um through which alphabetical writing was communi- 
 cated to the European nations. The legendary account 
 of the Cadmsean introduction of the twelve or sixteen 
 primitive letters of the Greeks from Phoenicia is also 
 confirmed by the name KdDeM, which simply means 
 East / the most ancient Greek alphabet bears, moreover, 
 the closest analogy in its forms to that of the ancient 
 Phoenicians, while the Latin, Etruscan, Celtiberian, and 
 other European characters, are only modifications of the 
 same system. 
 
 The art of phonetic writing has sprung up so gradual- 
 ly, and the written annals of ancient nations are so im- 
 perfect or fabulous, that, if it is extremely difficult to 
 decide as to the people among whom it originated, it is 
 much more so to form any conjecture as to the probable 
 epoch of its invention. The profane authors generally 
 attribute the discovery of letters to the gods, or to some 
 divine man. Plato delivers his sentiments very plainly 
 upon this subject,* and Cicero, who perfectly agrees with 
 him,f states that it was Hermes, or the fifth Mercury, 
 whom the Egyptians called Thoth, who first communi- 
 cated letters to that people.J Diodorus Siculus mentions 
 Mercury as the inventor of the alphabet * ; and the 
 Hindoos affirm that written characters were communi- 
 cated to their ancestors by the Supreme Being, whom 
 
 * &rei8!) tpoij/Tai imeipav Karev6i<rev eire ris 8ebs E?re Kal debs &v8panros. 
 (Plato in " Oat.," vol. ii, p. 18, ed. Serran.) 
 
 \ Quid ilia vis, quse tandem est, quse investigat occulta? aut qui sonos 
 Yocis, qui inflniti videbantur, paucis literarum notis terminavit ? Philo- 
 sophia vero omnium mater artium, quid est aliud, nisi, ut Plato ait, 
 donum, ut ego inventum deorum ? (Cic. in " Tusc. Quest.," lib. i.) 
 
 % Ibid. "Natura Deorum," lib. iii. 
 
 * Diod. Sicul., lib. i, sect. 1. 
 
36 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 they call Brahma. These authorities have evidently no 
 weight with us, for we know that it was customary among 
 the ancients, as Plato tells us himself, " when they could 
 not unravel a difficulty, to bring down a god, as in a 
 machine, to cut the knot." * Yet this very custom of 
 
 * Plato, in "Cratyl.," ed. Fisc., p. 291. The origin of letters has 
 engaged the attention and perplexed the sagacity of many learned men, 
 and while some, considering this difficult subject, have freely confessed 
 that it was above their comprehension, others have asserted that letters 
 " were first communicated to Moses by God himself, while others have 
 even contended that the Decalogue was the first alphabetic writing. 
 ("St. Cyril., contra Julian," lib. viii ; Clem. Alex, lib. i, "Stromat.," c. 
 23; Euseb, "Preparat. Evang.," lib. ix, c. 7; Isidor., "Origin.," lib. i, 
 c. 3 ; and many others among the moderns.) For the satisfaction of 
 those who hesitate to adopt these opinions we will have recourse to the 
 Holy Scriptures themselves, in order to see in how far they are founded. 
 The first mention of writing, recorded in the Bible, occurs in Exodus 
 xvii, 14 : " And the Lord said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial 
 in a book." This command was given immediately after the defeat of 
 the Amalekites near Horeb, and before the arrival of the Israelites at 
 Mount Sinai. It seems that Moses understood what was meant by writ- 
 ing in a book, for in Exodus xxiv, 4, we find that he " wrote all the 
 words of the Lord," which was also done before the two written tables 
 of stone were even so much as promised. Nor was it Moses alone who 
 knew how to write, for in the directions given for the form of the 
 holy garments, Exodus xxviii, the art is spoken of as a thing well known 
 and in familiar use. So, verse 9, we read ; " And thou shall take two 
 onyx-stones, and grave on them the names of the children of Israel " ; and 
 verse 11: " With the work of an engraver in stone, like the engravings of 
 a signet, shalt thou engrave the two stones with the names of the children 
 of Israel" ; and again, verse 36 : " And thou sliati make a plate of pure 
 gold, and grave upon it, like the engravings of a signet, Holiness to the 
 Lord." And lest one may take exception to the term " engrave," we 
 refer to the following texts: Deut. vi, 9; xi, 20; xvii, 18; xxiv, 1; and 
 especially to Deut. xxvii, 3 and 8, in which the people are commanded 
 to write the law on stones. 
 
 It is the term, " like the engravings of a signet," which has given rise 
 to some doubts as to the kind of writing used among the Israelites, and 
 to the supposition that it might have been liieroglyphical, such as they 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 37 
 
 referring all valuable discoveries and inventions of which 
 the origin and memory were lost, such as wheat, wine, 
 writing, astronomy, civil society, etc., to the gods, whose 
 attributes were as ancient as tradition itself, seems to 
 point to the highest antiquity, and in the mean time to 
 the improbability of our ever discovering even as much 
 as an approximating date for the epoch of the invention. 
 The remoteness of the antiquity of Grecian writings, 
 in which we are particularly interested, and which by 
 some has been placed as far .back as the fifteenth cen- 
 tury b. c, is also entirely traditional, and inductively 
 drawn through classical authority, as no inscriptions in 
 that character are extant older than the sixth century be- 
 fore our era, and their primitive form seems not to indi- 
 cate a long previous use or acquaintance with a purely 
 phonetic alphabet.* Homer's works are said to be of a 
 
 had known in Egypt during the time of their captivity. But as the dis- 
 cussion of this question involves too great a number of collateral evi- 
 dences to be brought forward here, the reader is referred to Hengsten- 
 berg, "Die Authentie des Pentateuches," vol. i, pp. 415-502," where the 
 subject of the early use of writiDg in reference to its bearing on the 
 antiquity and genuineness of the Pentateuch is carefully investigated. 
 
 As to the art of alphabetic writing being not of divine origin, but 
 a human invention, the opinion of Galileo, indorsed two centuries ago 
 by one of the greatest biblical scholars the world has ever produced, is 
 too authoritative to be withheld. " Concludam verbis summi nostri 
 seculi mathematici, et novorum inventorum gloria clarissimi, magni Gali- 
 lasi, system, mund. in Colloq. I, dici ad finem : ' Super omnes inventiones 
 stupendas, qua ingenii eminentia fuit is, cui venit in mentem excogitare 
 modum penitissimas animi sui cogitationes alii cuicunque communicandi, 
 ct si longissimo loci et temporis intervallo distanti, colloquendi cum his 
 qui versantur in Indiis, cum his qui necdum nati sunt, nee nisi mille aut 
 decies mille abhinc annis nascuntur ? idque quanta facilitate ? nimirum 
 viginti characteres in charta, inter se varie f ungendo : Esto hoc omnium 
 admirandarum inventionum humanarum sigillum.' " (Walton, " Biblia 
 Polyglotta," 165V; "Prolegomena," ii, § 1.) 
 
 * Boeckh, "Corp. Inscript. Grac," vol. i, p. 4, q. 22. 
 4 
 
38 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 more ancient date ; but Josephus maintains that Homer 
 did not leave his books in writing, but that they were 
 learned by heart, and afterward put together ; and thus 
 he accounts for many inconsistencies in the "Iliad."* 
 It is observable that in all the works under Homer's 
 name, no mention occurs of the art of phonetic writing.f 
 Some modern critics have even gone so far as to doubt 
 his individuality, and suppose the poems attributed to 
 him to have been productions of all Greece, collected and 
 arranged, at a time when the meaning of symbolical writing 
 began to be lost, by Pisistratus (deceased about 528 b. c.) ; 
 and hence that all the cities, recognizing their national 
 contributions, and apprised that the whole was by one 
 author, should each of them claim the honor of his birth. J 
 Although this opinion is far from being generally ad- 
 mitted, yet it invalidates the argument for placing the 
 introduction of letters in Greece before 900 b. c, the 
 epoch at which Homer is said to have written, and cer- 
 tainly opposes all ground for its being carried back to 
 the fifteenth century, the era ascribed to the Cadmean 
 immigration into Greece, personified in the cognomen 
 KaDeM, that is, "eastern," of a mythological indivi- 
 dual who " sowed dragon's teeth, and reaped armed sol- 
 diers." Tradition also falters in the ascription to Cadmus 
 of twelve or sixteen letters, to which an unknown Pala- 
 medes added four, and a later Simonides four more, to 
 complete the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet ; 
 whereas Pliny, quoting Aristotle,* states that the primi- 
 
 * Josephus, " Contra Appion," i, 2. 
 
 f The tr^/iaTo \vypa, carried by Bellerophon ("Iliad," vi, 168), were 
 not letters, but have reference to pictorial characters. Wolf, " Proleg.," 
 p. lxxxi, sq. 6. 
 
 X Vico, " Scienza nuova." Wolf and Payne Knight, " Proleg. in 
 Homer." 
 
 * Plinius, " Hist. Nat.," vii, 56. 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 39 
 
 tive Kadmean, that is, Oriental, alphabet had eighteen 
 letters, which fact is found in the oldest Grecian inscrip- 
 tions. The earliest examples of Grecian writing read in 
 horizontal lines alternately from left to right and right 
 to left, and have the form of the characters reversed in 
 every succeeding line. This mode of connecting the 
 lines, termed Boustrophedon, from its imitating the fur- 
 rows of a field plowed by oxen, was certainly the most' 
 natural ; experience, however, having taught it to be 
 easier to read every line in the same direction, that of 
 the left to the right was generally adopted, and followed . 
 by all nations who derived their alphabet from the Greek. 
 The Hebrews and Arabians have adopted the reverse 
 order. 
 
 The names of the letters of some alphabets are sig- 
 nificant ; a circumstance which has given rise to the sup- 
 position that their form was originally derived from 
 characters which, like the Chinese, were representative 
 of things. The phonetic signs of the Egyptians were 
 images of physical and material objects, each of which 
 stood for the initial of the word which expressed the ob- 
 ject represented. So a lion, Labo, stood for the articula- 
 tion L ; a mouth, Ru, for R ; a hand, Tot, for T, etc. 
 In Hebrew, Aleph («) signifies ox ; Beth (a), a booth ; 
 Gimel {>■), a camel, etc.; and some pretend to see in these 
 characters the rude outlines of the head and horns of an 
 ox, of a tent or hut, and of the head and neck of a 
 camel. In the Icelandic, Me (F) is a flock ; Ur (IT), a 
 torrent ; Duss (D), mountain spirits, etc. The Irish al- 
 phabet is termed Wood, and its letters are each denom- 
 inated by the name of a shrub or tree. Thus, Ailm (A) 
 is an elm ; Beth (B), a birch ; Col (C), a hazel, and so 
 of the others. Such names would seem at first sight to 
 connect these alphabets also with picture-writing, but the 
 association of the letters with the initial articulations of 
 
40 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 certain words had probably no other design than to fix 
 the power of the letter more firmly in the memory, in 
 the same way as we teach our children, both by the eye 
 and by the ear, to say, B, bull ; C, cat ; D, dog ; P, 
 fox ; G, goat, etc. 
 
 Setting aside some doubtful pretensions, it does not 
 appear that any of the countries of Europe, exclusive of 
 Greece and Italy, possessed a national alphabet previous 
 to their conversion to Christianity. The spirit of pros- 
 elytism was very favorable to the extension of letters ; 
 for, as the religious appeal was made to books that were 
 written in a foreign tongue, it became in general neces- 
 sary that the bishops and monks should be acquainted 
 with other languages than their own. Some of them, in 
 translating the Gospel, framed special and appropriate 
 alphabets — as Ulphilas, among the Goths, in the fourth 
 century, and Cyrillus, among the Sclavonians, in the ninth 
 — in the same manner as, at the present day, missionaries 
 fabricate new alphabets for barbarous and distant tribes. 
 The merit of these contrivances, however, has been gen- 
 erally overrated, for they have seldom been an improve- 
 ment, and certainly required no extraordinary powers on 
 the part of the contrivers. We have lately witnessed on 
 this continent a far more remarkable instance of human 
 intellect in the invention of an original alphabet by a 
 Cherokee chief. This individual, called by his country- 
 men See- Quah-Nah, having received some vague intima- 
 tion that the white men communicated their ideas by 
 means of visible symbols, resolved to construct a system 
 of writing applicable to his own language. At first he 
 attempted, like the Chinese, to form an appropriate sym- 
 bol for every separate word ; but finding, as he proceeded, 
 the labor and difficulty of such a task, he determined to 
 try to express sounds instead of ideas, and formed an 
 alphabet of two hundred characters, which he gradually 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 41 
 
 reduced to eighty. He had sufficient influence to per- 
 suade his tribe to study and adopt the new system ; and 
 in process of time a typographical apparatus was pro- 
 cured, by means of which a Cherokee journal and other 
 small publications were made available to the nation. 
 Few more signal triumphs of human sagacity over diffi- 
 culties are upon record ; but we must remember that the 
 process was facilitated, in some degree, by the knowledge 
 that such a system was in actual operation elsewhere, and 
 probably by an idea more or less distinct of the manner 
 in which it might be done. It is probably in the same 
 way that the Japanese have been able to make a similar 
 contrivance. Among the\ various methods of writing 
 current in their country, one called Eata Kana is a 
 regular syllabarium of forty-seven Chinese characters, to 
 which specific sounds are attached in the latter language. 
 Had it ever entered into the minds of the Egyptians to 
 simplify their complex and elaborate system, they could 
 easily have constructed an alphabet closely analogous to 
 the latter by selecting single characters from their multi- 
 tude of phonetic hieroglyphics, or from the hieratic or 
 enchorial abbreviations of them. This, in fact, was done 
 to a certain extent when they adopted alphabetic writing 
 after their conversion to Christianity. The characters 
 which they found it necessary to add to the Greek alpha- 
 bet to express articulations peculiar to their own language, 
 are evidently taken, with very slight modifications, from 
 their enchorial system of writing. Their not taking 
 some similar step many centuries sooner, must be attrib- 
 uted to national prejudice, or perhaps to the unwilling- 
 ness felt by those who held the key of knowledge to 
 place it in the hands of the people ; although it may 
 have also arisen from their perfect confidence in the 
 superiority of the current system of hieroglyphics. 
 
 In fact, the symbolical method of writing seems at 
 
42 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 the outset to have the advantage over the alphabetical 
 by establishing a direct relation between objects and 
 ideas. This advantage we perceive by observing the 
 slow progress of a child in spelling, and his great psycho- 
 logical labor to learn to read understandingly without 
 the assistance of pictures ; and will be still better felt by 
 every one who, in studying a foreign language, has had 
 occasion to experience how difficult it is to perceive at 
 first the triple correlation between sounds, signs, and ideas. 
 For certain purposes, such as arithmetic, symbols have 
 unquestionably the advantage, for, independently of the 
 decimal system of grouping them, the idea of quantity is 
 much more readily and clearly conveyed to the mind if 
 represented in figures than if written in words. It has 
 even been surmised, and it is not impossible, that this 
 direct relation between objects and ideas was favorable 
 to the early development of civilization among the Chi- 
 nese. But, from the moment this civilization became 
 more complex, and the multiplicity of ideas increased be- 
 yond measure the number of symbols to express them, 
 then the contrary effect was produced, and what was 
 first a facility has finally proved to be an obstacle. In 
 fact, while their spoken dialects are left to tradition alone, 
 their written language has become a most complicated 
 study, more conducive to patience than to progress; and 
 there is no doubt that the absence of a phonetic alphabet 
 stands foremost among the reasons which account for 
 the stagnancy of Chinese civilization. 
 
 Nothing but the phonetic alphabet could have be- 
 stowed upon the world the immense benefit which it has 
 derived from the art of writing. While serving as a 
 torch to guide the mind in its most abstract contempla- 
 tions, its most minute researches, it has become the means 
 of embodying and transmitting the same with an almost 
 miraculous precision by representing the very sound of 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 43 
 
 the words in which the ideas are conveyed. If, at first, 
 there exists some difficulty in perceiving the triple rela- 
 tion of sounds, signs, and ideas, this difficulty soon van- 
 ishes to make room for the clearest understanding ; for 
 no sooner are we able to read with fluency, than the words 
 assume a familiar physiognomy which renders them real 
 hieroglyphics, the features of which, however complex or 
 delicate, are so plainly discernible as to leave a mistake 
 almost impossible. Being founded upon the sound by 
 which the object is named, these features, or letters, have 
 moreover the advantage of appealing to the ear as well 
 as to the eye, thus awakening other sensations ; which, 
 increasing our faculty of perception, enable us to com- 
 prehend the most abstract ideas expressed in writing as 
 clearly and perfectly as we conceive the form and color 
 of material objects from pictures. 
 
 With the invention of alphabetic writing commences 
 a new era in the history of language, from the control 
 it exercised in the formation of new words and phrases, 
 and the development of language in general. Until then, 
 sounds that vibrated in the air were heard and repeated 
 without precision, and language changed from genera- 
 tion to generation, for tradition alone could not transmit 
 it without alteration. Thus every tribe, every family, 
 may have spoken a different dialect, and even each indi- 
 vidual have had his own manner of pronouncing, which 
 in course of time must have necessarily affected and 
 altered the words. Rules existed nowhere, and the ca- 
 price of a few was enough to throw a growing idiom into 
 utter confusion. Under such circumstances no progress 
 of language was possible, for even innovation wants a 
 principle to start from, and continual changes never lead 
 to improvement. It was only after the invention of signs, 
 by which the sound of words could be preserved, that 
 languages were no longer exposed to incessant losses and 
 
44 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 alterations. Firmly fixed by writing, old words did not 
 vanish so soon from memory, new terms were no more 
 in danger of dying at their birth, and language, enriched 
 by time and improved by use, could henceforth aspire to 
 immortality, at least as far as such is permitted to any- 
 thing which is the work of man. 
 
 It is now proper to inquire what materials have been 
 used for writing upon in different ages and countries. 
 The most ancient remains of writing which have been 
 transmitted to us are upon hard substances, such as 
 stones and metals, which were used for edicts and matters 
 of public notoriety. The Decalogue was written on two 
 tables of stone. The penal and civil laws among the 
 Greeks were engraved on tables of brass called Cyrbes. 
 Among the Romans, the laws of the twelve tables were 
 equally on brass. The Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Pa- 
 rian chronicle, with the numerous public and private in- 
 scriptions, Greek, Roman, and Indian, still extant, are 
 evidences how extensively this method of keeping records 
 intended for permanency was employed by the ancients ; 
 and it is to their choice of such durable materials that 
 we are indebted for the preservation of much valuable 
 information.* This custom of engraving public trans- 
 actions on stones and metals was practiced from the 
 earliest times till after the decline of the Roman empire, 
 and is now confined to tombstones, to monuments erected 
 to celebrated personages, and to medals. 
 
 Wood was also used for writing upon in different 
 countries. The Chinese, before the invention of paper, 
 wrote or engraved with an iron tool upon their boards, 
 
 * Among the most remarkable monuments which have reached our 
 time may be particularized the celebrated Rosetta stone, the Eugubian 
 tables, and the inscription of Bantia. The value of the latter consists 
 in their having preserved nearly all that we now possess of the Umbrian 
 and Oscan languages. 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 45 
 
 or on bamboo. Several ancient authors inform us that 
 the laws of Solon were inscribed on tables of wood.* 
 Table-books were also known to the Jews, f Among the 
 Romans they were of most common use : the wood was 
 cut into thin slices and neatly planed and polished ; the 
 writing was at first upon the bare wood, with an iron in- 
 strument called a style ; in later times these tablets were 
 usually waxed over and written upon with that instru- 
 ment ; this writing was easily effaced, and by smoothing 
 the wax new matter might be substituted in the place 
 of what had been written before. They were used as 
 memoranda, and more especially for correcting extem- 
 porary compositions J before committing them to writing 
 in books of papyrus, leaves, or skins. Table-books written 
 upon with styles were only laid aside in the fourteenth 
 century, when they were superseded by ivory tablets, 
 written upon with lead-pencils. 
 
 * is rovs 8£ovas. (Diog. " Laertius.") — Apud Athenienses Shoves erant 
 axes lignei in quoa Leges Solonis erant incisse. (Scapul. "Lexicon.") — In 
 Legibus Solonis illis antiquissimis, quee Athenis Axibus Ligneis incisse 
 sunt. (Aulus Gellius, lib. ii, c. 12). 
 
 f Proverbs iii, 3. Isaiah xxx, 8. Habakkuk ii, 2. Ezekiel xxxvii, 16. 
 \ The writing on table-books is particularly recommended by Quin- 
 tilian (" Instit.," lib. x, c. 3). Ovid also, in his story of Caunus and 
 Byblis, mentions some particulars which illustrate this subject : 
 " Dextra tenet ferrum, vacuam tenet altera coram ; 
 Incipit, et dubitat, scribit, damnatque tabcllas ; 
 Et notat, et delet, mutat, culpatque probatque, 
 Inque vicem sumptas ponit, positasque resumit." 
 When epistles were written on tables of wood, they were usually tied 
 together with thread, the seal being put upon the knot ; whence the 
 phrase, " Linum incidere," to break open a letter. Some of these table- 
 books were large, and perhaps heavy ; for, in Plautus, a. school-boy of 
 seven years old is represented breaking his master's head with his 
 table-book : " Priusquam septuennis est, si attingas eum manu, extemplo 
 puer psedagogo tabula dirumpet caput." (Bac, seen, iii, 3.) They were 
 called Pvgittm-es, some say, because they were held in one hand. 
 
46 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 It is evident that none of the above methods were well 
 adapted to voluminous writings, and, consequently, sub- 
 stances of a more portable and tractable nature were in- 
 troduced at a very early period. The slcins of beasts were 
 used for writing upon in the most early ages. Diodorus 
 Siculus says that the ancient Persians wrote their records 
 on skins,* and Herodotus affirms that the skins of sheep 
 and goats were used for writing upon in the earliest times 
 by the Ionians. The Mexicans also used skins for their 
 paintings. Parchment, which was once extensively used 
 for books and documents of all kinds, is now entirely con- 
 fined to testimonials and diplomas. 
 
 The bark of trees has also been used for writing upon 
 in every part of the globe, and it still serves for this pur- 
 pose in several parts of Asia. Some Mexican hieroglyph- 
 ics are painted on bark ; and it is observable that the 
 word liber was used by the Romans as well for the bark 
 of a tree as for a book. 
 
 ^Leaves have also served the same purpose. The Sibyls' 
 leaves referred to by Virgil f prove that writing on leaves 
 was once familiar to the Romans. Diodorus Siculus re- 
 lates that the judges of Syracuse were anciently accus- 
 tomed to write the names of those whom they sent into 
 banishment upon the leaves of olive-trees.J The practice 
 
 * Diodorus Siculus, lib. ii. 
 
 \ " Insanam vatem aspicies, quae rupe sub ima 
 Fata canit, foliisque notas et nomina mandat. 
 Quseeunque in foliis descripsit carmina virgo, 
 Digerit in numorum, atque antro seclusa relinquit." 
 And Juvenal : (" Aeneid," lib. iii, 443.) 
 
 " Credite me vobis folium recitare Sibylla;." 
 " To write a bill and to give it in the hand of a person" (Deut. xxiv, 1) 
 seems to imply that light and tractable materials were used for similar 
 purposes among the Israelites. 
 
 $ Diod. Sicul., lib. xi, c. 35. This sentence was termed petalism, from 
 ttc'toAov, a leaf. 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 47 
 
 of writing upon leaves of palm-trees is still very prevalent 
 in different parts of the East. But the most common ar- 
 ticle manufactured by the ancients to write upon was the 
 papyrus. The plant of which it was made grows in 
 Egypt, and abounds in marshy places' where the Nile 
 overflows and stagnates. It is a triangular reed, from 
 three to four feet high, and about a foot and a half in 
 circumference at the thickest part. After taking off the 
 rind the film was cut into thin pellicles, which were laid, 
 two or more, over each other transversely, and glued to- 
 gether either with the glutinous water of the Nile or with 
 fine paste made of wheat-flour. After being pressed and 
 dried, they were made smooth with a heavy roller, or 
 rubbed over with a solid glass hemisphere. These opera- 
 tions constituted the Egyptian papyrus as far as the art 
 of making it has been discovered.* Being coveted by 
 many other nations, it became a principal article of com- 
 merce with the Egyptians. In the early ages all diplo- 
 matic instruments were written upon this paper in prefer- 
 ence to everything else, on account of its beauty and size. 
 In the seventh century the papyrus was superseded by 
 parchment, and after the eighth it is rarely to be seen ; it 
 was, however, used in Italy for epistolary writing in the 
 time of Charlemagne, and by the popes even in the eleventh 
 century ; in the twelfth it was not yet entirely disused. 
 
 Paper is said to have been invented in China about 
 fifty years after the birth of Christ,f but many contend 
 that it is of much earlier antiquity among that people. 
 Paper made of cotton was an Eastern invention, and was 
 probably known as early as the ninth century ; J it, how- 
 
 * Pliny (" Hist. Nat.," lib. xiii, c. 11, 13) asserts that the practice of 
 writing on papyrus was known among the Egyptians three centuries be- 
 fore the reign of Alexander. The name of paper is derived from it. 
 
 f Du Halde, " History of China." 
 
 % Montfaucon, " Palseograph. Grsec," lib. i, u. 2. 
 
48 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 ever, only came into general use during the twelfth cen- 
 tury of the Christian era. Paper made of rags was first 
 introduced in the course of the thirteenth century. Its 
 invention has been ascribed to the Chinese, though others 
 have asserted that the Saracens of Spain first brought 
 it from the East into that country, whence it was dis- 
 persed over the rest of Europe. For ordinary purposes 
 every other material has been gradually superseded by 
 paper, which, though less durable than vellum or parch- 
 ment, is less costly and more commodious. 
 
 It is obvious that when men wrote, or rather engraved, 
 on hard substances, instruments of metal were necessary, 
 such as the chisel and the style. The Roman stylus was 
 originally made of iron, but afterward of silver, brass, 
 bone, or ivory. It was made sharp at one end to write 
 with, and blunt at the other to efface and correct what 
 was not approved.* A similar instrument is still used on 
 the coast of Malabar to write on bark. The ancient name 
 for pen (calamus) shows that reeds were originally em- 
 ployed for writing on the softer materials ; those reeds 
 were furnished in great quantity by Egypt,f and are still 
 used for the same purpose by all the Eastern nations. 
 Quills of geese, swans, peacocks, crows, etc., have been 
 used in western Europe since the seventh century.J Me- 
 
 * Hence the phrase, " Vertere stylum," to blot out. " Ssepe stylum 
 vertas." (Horace, Sat. x, 10, IS.) The Greek word was ypaQiov, and 
 was adopted by the Romans. " Quid digitos opus est graphium lassare 
 tenendo." (Ovid.) Metal styles were dangerous weapons, and when 
 their prohibition was found necessary by the Eomans, those of bone or 
 ivory were substituted in their stead. 
 
 t Pliny, " Hist.," lib. xvi, c. 36 ; and Martial has these words : " Dat 
 chartis habiles calamos Memphitica tellus " (lib. xiv, epigr. 34). 
 
 % St. Isidore, of Seville, who died a. d. 636, describes a. pen made of 
 a quill as used in his time : " Instrumenta scribas calamus et penna ; ex 
 his enim verba paginis infiguntur ; sed calamus arboris est, penna avis, 
 cujus acumen dividitur in duo.'' (Isid., " Hisp. Oiig.," lib. vi, c. 14.) 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 49 
 
 tallicpens are of but recent introduction, and, although 
 less adapted than quill-pens for the finer descriptions of 
 ■writing, have almost entirely superseded the latter. The 
 Chinese and some other Eastern nations, who form their 
 characters with broad strokes, generally employ a hair- 
 pencil with Indian ink. 
 
 Ink.s of different colors and degrees of consistence were 
 known at a very early period ; and there can be no better 
 proof of their excellent quality than the fact that manu- 
 scripts known to be from one thousand to thirteen hun- 
 dred years old are still perfectly legible.* Some books 
 were written in characters of gold and silver ; but these 
 were of rare occurrence, on account of the expense of pre- 
 paring them, and were chiefly confined to copies of the 
 Scriptures intended for the use of exalted personages.f 
 
 Such were the principal improvements made in the 
 materials and methods of writing from its first invention 
 to within four hundred years. Until then all existing 
 science was contained in copied manuscripts. It would 
 be superfluous to dwell on the inefficiency of this method 
 as a means of propagating truth and diffusing knowledge, 
 as it is obvious that, independent of the inevitable inac- 
 curacies attending the tedious process of copying, the 
 price of books was such as to place them only within the 
 reach of the most wealthy. Under such circumstances it 
 seems astonishing that no mechanical means of copying 
 was invented, when the time is hardly known that print- 
 ing, in some shape or other, did not in fact exist. 
 
 It has not been pretended that the art of printing was 
 
 * Peter Caniparius, " De Atramentis cujuscunque generis opus sane 
 novum : hactenua a. nemine promulgatum," London, 1660, 4to ; and 
 Weckerus, " De Secretis," Basil, 1612, 8vo, are two curious works in 
 •which many interesting particulars concerning ink may be found. 
 
 f The celebrated " Codex Argenteus," now at Upsal, is a well-known 
 example. 
 
 5 
 
50 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 practiced by the Romans, and yet the names they stamped 
 on their earthen vessels were in effect nothing but print- 
 ing, and the letters on the matrices or stamps used for 
 making these impressions were necessarily reversed, like 
 those of our printing-types.* The ruins of Babylon and 
 Nineveh offer other instances of primitive printing in 
 their tiles or bricks,f some of which appear to have been 
 impressed by means of engraved cylinders. The art of 
 impressing figures and legends upon coins is nothing more 
 than printing on metals. ' Printing from wooden blocks is 
 generally allowed to have been practiced by the Chinese 
 ever since the year 927,J and was probably adopted by 
 them from the Indian mode of stamping cottons. Toward 
 the end of the twelfth century we find in Europe the same 
 practice of taking impressions from engraved blocks of 
 wood, sometimes for playing-cards, which came into use 
 not long before that time, and sometimes for rude cuts of 
 saints. The latter were frequently accompanied by a few 
 lines of explanatory letters cut in the block. Gradually 
 entire pages were engraved and impressed in this manner, 
 and thus began what are called block-books, printed by 
 fixed characters, but never exceeding a very few leaves. 
 These blocks seem to have been all executed in Holland. 
 
 The similarity of the process has given rise to the sup- 
 position that the art of printing might have been intro- 
 duced into Europe by some European who had traveled 
 into China, and had seen some of their printing-tablets, 
 for it is known that several Europeans had been overland 
 into China before that time ; and what strengthens this 
 supposition in some degree is that the Europeans first 
 
 * Several of these matrices are extant, which are cut out of or cast 
 in one solid piece of metal. 
 
 t Probably on account of the scarcity of stone. 
 
 % The " Historia Sinensis " of Abdallah, written in Persic in 1317, 
 speaks of it as an art in very common use. 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 51 
 
 printed on one side of the paper only, in the same manner 
 as the Chinese. But, however this may be, the art re- 
 mained stationary in China, whereas it made great prog- 
 ress in Europe. 
 
 The Chinese blocks were cut upon ebony and other 
 hard wood, but the European blocks were carved upon 
 beech, pear-tree, and other soft woods, which soon failed, 
 and the letters frequently broke. This put the printers 
 upon the method of repairing the block, by carving new 
 letters and gluing them in, which necessity seems to have 
 suggested the hint of movable types. The great and 
 obvious advantage of this process was, that by separating 
 the types they would serve for any other work, whereas 
 the blocks of wood served only for one work ; and though 
 this was a very fortunate discovery, yet it derived its ori- 
 -gin rather from the imperfection of the European woods 
 for printing-blocks, than from any great ingenuity of those 
 who first used them. In short, necessity, the mother of 
 all arts, introduced movable types. It has been a matter 
 of contest who first practiced the art of printing on this 
 principle. Laurens Koster, of Haarlem, is said to have 
 substituted movable for fixed letters as early as 1430 ; 
 and some have believed that a book called "Speculum 
 Humanse Salvationis," of very rude wooden characters, 
 proceeded from the Haarlem press before any other that 
 is generally recognized. Koster's priority, however, is 
 disputed by those who deem Gutenberg, a native of 
 Mentz, but settled at Strasburg, the real inventor of the 
 art, and some have asserted that he actually printed a few 
 fugitive pieces from movable wooden characters before 
 1450 ; but of these there seems to be no evidence. 
 
 All great inventions appear to have sprung up at va- 
 rious epochs, and to have been brought into use in several 
 different places at about the same period ; and so there is 
 no fair reason to dispute that Gutenberg might also have 
 
52 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 struck out an idea that surely did not require extraordinary 
 skill, and which left the most important difficulties to be 
 surmounted, as they undeniably were, by himself and his 
 coadjutors. Thus, while the priority of the invention re- 
 mains a matter of dispute, it is agreed by all that about 
 1450, Gutenberg, having gone to Mentz, entered into part- 
 nership with Faust, a rich merchant of that city, for the 
 purpose of carrying the invention into effect. It was there 
 that, in the year 1452, Peter Schoffer, their assistant in the 
 work, brought the art to perfection by devising the present 
 mode of casting types ; namely, the punches of engraved 
 steel, by which the matrices or molds are struck, and with- 
 out which, independent of the economy of labor, there could 
 be no uniformity of shape. According to this, Schoffer 
 must be reckoned the inventor of the art of printing in 
 the modern sense ; for movable wooden letters, though 
 small books may possibly have been printed by means of 
 them, are so inconvenient, and letters of cut metal so ex- 
 pensive, that few great works were likely to have passed 
 through the press till cast types were employed. 
 
 It is a remarkable fact in the art of printing that one 
 of the later improvements has been the return very near 
 to its original simplicity. After the invention of single 
 letters, which might be combined into pages, and after 
 being printed from might be distributed and rearranged 
 for another work, a process has been adopted which ap- 
 proaches more nearly to the old plan of printing from 
 page-blocks, either by fusing the types composing a page 
 into a solid mass, or, as in the modern art of stereotyping, 
 by taking a mold in plaster from the page or form of 
 movable types, and using it as the matrix in which to 
 make a solid cast or plate of type-metal. The face of 
 such a cast is a, facsimile of the types from which the 
 mold is taken, and may be printed from in the same man- 
 ner as the original form or page. For scientific works^ 
 
ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF WRITING. 53 
 
 such as mathematical tables, etc., this mode of copying 
 has a great advantage, for, as individual alterations may 
 be made in the plates, they may be corrected in every 
 edition, and by the gradual extirpation of error at last 
 become perfect. In works of great and constant de- 
 mand the process of stereotyping has been, moreover, one 
 of the most important means by which the production of 
 cheap editions has been facilitated in late years, since it 
 enables the publisher to keep up the supply of copies ac- 
 cording to the demand, without the unnecessary outlay of 
 capital either for very large editions or for their recom- 
 position in type. 
 
 The modern improvements in machinery have greatly 
 contributed to bring the art of typography to its present 
 perfection. For the last half century books have multi- 
 plied innumerably, and forced knowledge and information 
 into the density of the forest, and even beyond the con- 
 fines of society. A press is now among the first imple- 
 ments of a new colony. Steam and electricity, the two 
 great powers of the age to conquer time and distance, 
 have both been applied to the art of printing, with the 
 utmost success. While the printing telegraph literally 
 writes down, at any distance and in ordinary characters, 
 intelligence nearly as soon as received, some of the news- 
 paper .presses actually complete more work in one hour 
 than would require one thousand of the most dexter- 
 ous copyists during a whole year. No country has been 
 more benefited by the invention than America, where, 
 thanks to the enlightened and liberal spirit of the nation 
 in educating the masses, to read, to learn, to know, have 
 become a mere question of time, neither the price nor the 
 scarcity of books being any longer an obstacle. 
 
WORDS. 
 
 Discourse includes four objects of consideration : 
 realities, thoughts, articulate speech, and written expres- 
 sion. Realities are represented by thoughts, thoughts 
 by articulate speech, and articulate speech is represented 
 by -written expression. Language is the expression of 
 human thought ; but words, which are the elements 
 thereof, are the signs of ideas, which are themselves the 
 elements of thought. 
 
 In considering the nature of words, we first distin- 
 guish between the sign and the idea : the one, material, 
 which is appreciable by the senses — the other, immate- 
 rial, which is appreciable by the mind only ; the one, the 
 body — the other, the soul of the word. The sign, which 
 may be audible or visible, as it is spoken or written, calls 
 forth the idea, as the latter may suggest the former ; but 
 from the intimate association which exists between the 
 idea and the thing represented, either of these may be 
 considered as the signification of the word. Words, 
 therefore, may be said to represent, primarily, our 
 thoughts ; and, secondarily, the external objects of our 
 thoughts, whether our consciousness of those be the re- 
 sult of perception or conception. 
 
 The use of one common language determines the 
 nationality of a people, and binds them in a fraternal 
 bond ; the people, in their turn, give the language the 
 impress of their ideas and feelings, of their disposition 
 
WORDS. 55 
 
 and genius. Hence it is that a language always repre- 
 sents the ideological character of the nation that speaks 
 or spoke it, and becomes, as it were, the criterion by 
 which we may judge of its degree of civilization. For 
 the language of a people is the exponent of that people's 
 feelings, and the usage by which that language is regu- 
 lated is the aggregate of these feelings and thoughts. 
 
 The intellectual peculiarities by which nations are dis- 
 tinguished from each other thus naturally account for 
 the corresponding peculiarities we find in their idioms, 
 both as regards the choice of words, and the changes 
 made in them to express varieties of sense, as well as 
 regards the way in which they are arranged. These 
 differences in forms of expression are often very consid- 
 erable, even between two nations who speak kindred dia- 
 lects and pursue the same paths of civilization ; but the 
 number of these differences is beyond conception when 
 the two nations speak languages which have not a com- 
 mon origin, or when they differ in their religious creeds, 
 political institutions, social habits, industrial pursuits, 
 and scientific attainments. Great as then may be their 
 divergence, and the variety of detail we may discover on 
 comparing them, we will always find the vocabulary and 
 phraseology of each and every language to correspond to 
 the various features of the different societies of whose 
 civilization they are, or have been, the expression. 
 
 In treating of the origin of language, we remarked 
 that articulate speech is a necessary consequence of man's 
 constitution. He has received with the faculty of thought 
 the corresponding faculty of speech — that is, the power 
 of spontaneously forming words by imitation. However 
 people may differ respecting the interpretation of the 
 sacred writ in reference to the first language, certain it is 
 that man is endowed with, and freely uses, the power of 
 making and extending speech in proportion to his acqui- 
 
56 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 sitions, to his social wants, and to the development of 
 his intellect. Whatever, therefore, may have been the 
 language of our first parents, adapted, as it undoubtedly 
 was, to the peculiar circumstances in which they were 
 placed, it must necessarily have been limited to the repre- 
 sentation of the few objects with which they were sur- 
 rounded ; a more extensive vocabulary could only have 
 embarrassed and confused them. It must have been 
 poor indeed, destitute as it was of all the metaphysical 
 and technical terminology which arises from the infinite 
 relations of society, the progress of arts and sciences, and 
 all the refinements of civilization. In the absence, also, 
 of a written form, which might have given it permanence, 
 its original words must soon have been lost, or at least 
 much altered and corrupted. Hence, in the infancy of 
 society, and in different localities, men were often re- 
 duced to the necessity of forming new signs of ideas, 
 which constituted the elements of various primitive lan- 
 guages. It must not be supposed, however, that with 
 the progress of civilization new terms were invented for 
 every new object that came under observation. This 
 may sometimes have been the case, but more often it was 
 found convenient to use a word already existing which 
 presented some analogy with new conceptions, sensations, 
 or impressions. It is thus that all articulate languages 
 have gradually been formed. The various words which 
 constitute their wealth have been introduced but very 
 slowly ; and the different parts of speech have undoubt- 
 edly been the result of successive improvements conse- 
 quent on mental advancement. 
 
 Whatever may have been the first words spoken, there 
 is every reason to suppose that they were, for the most 
 part, monosyllabic substantives — names of things within 
 the reach of man's perceptive powers, and which, from 
 the varied sensations arising therefrom, called forth his 
 
WORDS. 57 
 
 mental activity and imitative faculties. In conformity 
 with these dictates of nature, the first use which man 
 made of the gift of speech — that is, the power of making 
 articulate signs for his ideas — was probably to name in- 
 dividual animals, as each species came within his notice, 
 by words either analogous to their cries,* or indicative of 
 their peculiar nature, so far as this could be effected by 
 articulate sounds. He then, and by analogy, could give 
 to other objects of sense which engaged his attention 
 names that characterized them by their most striking 
 properties. 
 
 Concrete substantives, which form the basis of lan- 
 guage, preceded those which are abstract ; f for as the 
 union of the properties and substratum precedes their 
 resolution, it is natural to suppose that the concrete no- 
 tions of things existed before the abstract conception was 
 formed by comparison and analysis. It may further be 
 presumed that substantives, significant at first of particu- 
 lar objects, were soon after applied indifferently to other 
 things of the same kind ; hence general nouns arose, from 
 which a better acquaintance with the nature of things, 
 
 * Of such words was the word cuckoo, for instance, formerly spelled 
 cuckow, in old English, cuccu, and yet existing with that sound in almost 
 every language. In Latin it was cuculus and cuceus ; in Greek, k6kkv£ ; 
 in modern Greek, koukkos ; in Italian it is cucullo and cucco ; in Spanish, 
 cuci, ; in French, coucou. In Danish it is kukker ; in Swedish, gok and 
 kuku; in German, $u3ud; in Dutch, koekkoek. In Sanskrit it was 
 kukuha ; in Russian it is kukushka ; in Polish, kuhawka ; in Turkish, 
 ququva ; in Persian, kokau and kuku ; in Armorican, kuku ; in Basque, 
 cucua ; and in Hungarian, kukuk. Notice that in all these words the 
 leading articulation is that of k, and the sound that of the English oo 
 or ou. 
 
 f The word concrete, from the Latin concretus, means " formed by 
 massing several things together " ; applied to substantives, it means those 
 that denote objects having a real existence. Abstract, from the Latin 
 abstractus, which means " separate from something else," is said of sub- 
 stantives denoting objects that exist in the mind only. 
 
58 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 and a correct perception of their resemblances and differ- 
 ences, led to the distinction of individuals, species, and 
 genera, and to the introduction of corresponding terms. 
 This gradual introduction of generic terms is illustrated 
 in some of the Oriental languages, which often show the 
 utmost deficiency in words indicating genera, while 
 abounding in terms denoting individual distinction. 
 
 After substantives had passed from the individual to 
 the specific and generic sense, it became necessary to dis- 
 tinguish one object from another of the same kind, and 
 to state the particular manner in which each affected the 
 senses ; this double consideration led men, by an act of 
 abstraction, to notice, and then name, in connection with 
 the substantives, the peculiar qualities, properties, or 
 other modes of being, which characterized one or a num- 
 ber of the things represented by those substantives. 
 These terms of comparison, expressive of the attributes 
 of things, constitute that class of words which are called 
 adjectives. As substantives were introduced to discrimi- 
 nate between objects of different kinds, so adjectives 
 served to discriminate between objects of the same kind. 
 
 These two species of words — substantives and adjec- 
 tives — necessarily enter into the nomenclature of all lan- 
 guages, because, in every community, things and their 
 properties are made the subject of discourse. These two 
 species of words are indispensable for the expression of a 
 judgment : the first signifies the subject, or the thing of 
 which we think ; the second, the attribute which we per- 
 ceive in that thing, or which we affirm of it. 
 
 But it was not enough, in the expression of a judg- 
 ment, to name the thing which is the subject of thought, 
 and the property or quality attributed to it ; a word was 
 needed to specify clearly and distinctly the connection 
 and the mode of relation between the subject and its 
 attribute. This third conventional sign is the verb ; it 
 
WORDS. 59 
 
 yoms with the other two a proposition, or the expression 
 of 7 a complete judgment. It may be conjectured that 
 the first verb served only to aflirm the existence of the 
 attribute in the subject, as expressed by the English 
 term to be ; but, by a natural tendency to expansion, it 
 was made, in process of time, to denote, besides this 
 affirmation, the attribute itself, as well as time, person, 
 and number : such is the present condition of verbs in 
 all modern idioms. It is thus that this part of speech, 
 which in its origin was perhaps the most simple, has 
 become the most complex, in consequence of the acces- 
 sories of different kinds which have been successively 
 added to its generic meaning ; and although it was intro- 
 duced in the infancy of articulate language, it is to be 
 presumed that a very long interval of time must have 
 elapsed before its moods, tenses, and persons were defi- 
 nitely fixed upon, as they exist in the most improved 
 idioms. 
 
 Substantives, adjectives, and verbs, the primary and 
 indispensable elements of simple sentences, were, in the 
 course of time, found insufficient to follow the complex 
 operations of the mind ; they were, consequently, modi- 
 fied, abbreviated, or combined into other words which 
 served as accessories in the expression of more compli- 
 cated thoughts. These secondary words, however, were 
 not always used separately ; the analysis of language 
 sufficiently proves that in many instances they were 
 made to coalesce with primary words, in order to modify 
 their signification, and determine their grammatical func- 
 tions. 
 
 Of the secondary words, determinatives must have 
 been among the first which were introduced ; because 
 the progress of intellectual intercourse early required 
 that the subject of thought be determined independently 
 of the quality or property found therein, and that general 
 
60 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 terms Tbe occasionally extended or restricted in their appli- 
 cation. By means of determinatives men were enabled to 
 designate particular individuals without having recourse 
 to proper names — a system of representation which would 
 have been impracticable from the multiplicity of terms 
 required. Particular names would, in general, be useless, 
 for the objects of our thoughts are not so much the indi- 
 viduals themselves, as the species to which they belong. 
 
 When once the imperative requirements of social 
 communication were supplied, exactness, refinement, and 
 intellectual gratification were aimed at. Languages, in 
 advancing to perfection, naturally tend to satisfy the 
 mind and follow the rapidity of thought. The adoption 
 of pronouns was one of the results of this double tend- 
 ency : by avoiding the vagueness of nouns and disa- 
 greeable repetitions, they give precision and vivacity to 
 discourse. Pronouns are probably contractions of nouns, 
 determinative terms used elliptically, or abbreviated 
 forms of phrases, serving to designate individuals. Thus 
 the words and phraseology significant of the most familiar 
 ideas, from their every-day and universal use, and from 
 the tendency to rapid speaking just adverted to, undergo 
 successive contractions ; like pebbles on the beach, they 
 are worn away until they lose every corner and mark 
 which would indicate their original form. 
 
 In proportion as man's vocabulary increased, so must 
 have increased the desire of extending his investigations 
 and the power of forming chains of ideas. Things which, 
 at first, had been considered separately, were viewed in 
 their various relations. Hence originated prepositions, 
 which expressed, properly, the relative local aspects of 
 things as they presented themselves to the senses, and, 
 analogically, the relations of the abstract conceptions of 
 the mind. Prepositions must have been introduced at an 
 advanced state of language ; for the ideas of relation 
 
WORDS. 61 
 
 which they represent demand great powers of abstraction 
 and generalization. 
 
 ' A further step in the psychological progress of man 
 led him to discriminate between the various circum- 
 stances of time, place, quantity, and manner, which modi- 
 fied the actions, states, or attributes that were the sub- 
 ject of his thoughts. These circumstances, being them- 
 selves the particular relations which actions, states, or 
 attributes bear to time, place, quantity, or manner, were, 
 at first, expressed by phrases composed of words already 
 existing — substantives and prepositions — but their fre- 
 quent recurrence, and man's tendency to shorten dis- 
 course, that it may keep pace with the ideas, naturally 
 caused these phrases to be gradually compressed into 
 single words, which have been named adverbs. 
 
 The words which there is every reason to suppose 
 were the last to appear in primitive languages were con- 
 junctions/ for all the other parts of speech must long 
 have served for the expression of simple ideas, and phra- 
 seology must have assumed a certain regularity of form 
 before the need was felt of words by which to express 
 the connection of judgments, the relation and dependence 
 between propositions. There can be no close reasoning, 
 no logical unity of speech, without conjunctions ; and it 
 is noticeable that tribes which have advanced but little 
 in civilization are generally very deficient in this impor- 
 tant part of speech. 
 
 That there existed, for any length of time, only pri- 
 mary words, or that there elapsed a long interval before 
 the secondary words were all in common use, is more 
 than can be asserted ; only we may venture to believe that 
 they probably made their appearance in the order here 
 mentioned. In the instinctive acts of infants can practi- 
 cally be traced the processes of intellect in the infancy of 
 nations, for the child, in acquiring his vernacular tongue, 
 
62 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 follows exactly the same order as that which must have 
 taken place in the gradual adoption of the spoken ele- 
 ments ; substantives, adjectives, and verbs are the first 
 words of his vocabulary. The deaf and dumb, circum- 
 stanced, in reference to language, nearly as men in primi- 
 tive societies, are remarkable for neglecting, in their first 
 written compositions, articles, pronouns, and conjunc- 
 tions. Nature is universal and immutable in her laws ; 
 she guides individuals from infancy to manhood, as she 
 does nations from barbarism to civilization. 
 
CLASSIFICATION OF WORDS. 
 
 To classify words in a uniform and corresponding 
 manner in all idioms, their import should be considered 
 in reference to the functions they perform in the commu- 
 nication of thought and tbe expression of ideas. This 
 classification, if properly defined, is necessarily the same 
 for all languages and dialects, because the differences 
 existing between words are analogous to those that exist 
 between the ideas which they represent ; and these are 
 everywhere the same, owing to the invariable laws of the 
 human mind to which they are subjected. Sometimes, it 
 is true, we do find words, in more than one language, ap- 
 parently the same, which differ in their meaning, while the 
 identity of nature in others which signify the same is not 
 always obvious ; for the scantity of language, compared 
 with the infinite number of ideas ,to be expressed, con- 
 stantly obliges men to use one part of speech for another, 
 and to attach different ideas to the same words, nay, 
 even to combine several words to express but one idea. 
 The diversity of circumstances in which these irregulari- 
 ties take place in different idioms is one of the chief 
 causes of dissimilarity between them. 
 
 Still, none of these irregularities, sometimes found in 
 words, affect in any way their proper classification, for 
 since their nature and grammatical character depend on 
 the office which they fill in discourse, and not on their 
 external form, their import alone must be considered, ex- 
 
64 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 clusively of ellipsis or derivation. If ellipsis were taken 
 into account, great uncertainty might prevail in classify- 
 ing words, as it is often difficult to follow the changes 
 and contractions which expressions have undergone in 
 the course of time. Nor is derivation a sure criterion by 
 which classes of words can be ascertained, because they 
 are not always applied the same way in their derivative 
 as in their primitive form ; many words which in two 
 languages have one common origin, or are derived one 
 from the other, perform functions altogether different, 
 and awake in the mind completely distinct ideas. Words, 
 therefore, as parts of the sentence, are distinguished by 
 their use alone ; any other distinctions which they may 
 happen to have are accidents which vary in different lan- 
 guages, and at different times and places, without alter- 
 ing their grammatical character. 
 
 The words that form the vocabulary of any language 
 may be divided into two main parts — one comprising all 
 notional words, the other the words and signs that indi- 
 cate relation. By notional words is meant those which 
 express notions — that is, ideas of things, acts, properties, 
 and qualities that are the objects of the understanding, 
 such as are expressed by verbs, nouns, and adjectives. By 
 words and signs of relation is meant such as merely ex- 
 press a relation between the different things, acts, and quali- 
 ties which are the objects of the understanding. These 
 signs of relation are either mere terminations — that is, 
 final letters which modify the form of the notional word — 
 or they are separate words expressive by themselves. For 
 instance, in the English phrases, " the dog barks," " my 
 father's horse," " the fulling house," the s, 's, and ing are 
 respectively terminations which indicate a relation be- 
 tween the things and acts in the several phrases. In the 
 phrases, " he lives in the city," " he left us after dinner," 
 in and after are relational words — that is, they connect 
 
CLASSIFICATION OF WORDS. 65 
 
 the notions expressed by " his living " and " his leaving " 
 respectively with the notions of " city " and " dinner." 
 Thus we may consider notional words as the matter of 
 language, and relational words as giving to language its 
 form — that is, its grammatical structure. It must be ob- 
 served, however, that in many languages which possess 
 few terminations a considerable part of the relations 
 which subsist among words are indicated by the order in 
 which these words are placed, which is true to some ex- 
 tent of all languages, modern languages especially, and 
 particularly of French and English. 
 
 Utility and simplicity being the essence of all ele- 
 ments, none but single words, whether simple or com- 
 pound, are entitled to be classed among the above-men- 
 tioned elements of discourse. Complex forms, consisting 
 of separate words, which, from the unavoidable poverty 
 of language, frequently supply the place of single terms, 
 should be considered as phrases, not as pure parts of 
 speech. All languages abound in such expressions, which, 
 whether composed of two or more words, may be de- 
 nominated substantival phrases, adjectival phrases, verbal 
 phrases, pronominal phrases, prepositional phrases, etc., 
 as they stand for substantives, adjectives, verbs, pro- 
 nouns, prepositions, etc. It is in this way that words of 
 one language, which have not an equivalent in another, 
 can always be rendered by phrases. The single words of 
 a language can be enumerated, but its complex forms, to 
 whatever class they belong, are beyond computation ; 
 they are multiplied indefinitely to suit the endless variety 
 and combinations of ideas. 
 
SUBSTANTIVES. 
 
 The substantive, or noun, is the first term of the 
 proposition, the representative of the subject respecting 
 which judgment is expressed. Being the fundamental 
 word of discourse, it imposes on all the others, as its sub- 
 ordinates, their form and place. Its function is to repre- 
 sent the idea of substance, by which word, substance, is 
 grammatically meant any subject of thought, material or 
 immaterial, or even a quality abstractedly considered: As 
 the substance implies the collective elements or essential 
 properties which constitute it, so the substantive ex- 
 presses a collection of the simple perceptions and con- 
 ceptions of those elements or properties. The word gold, 
 for example, comprises in its signification all the simple 
 notions of color, weight, brilliancy, compactness, fusi- 
 bility, malleability, ductility, incorruptibility, etc., which 
 constitute and characterize this metal. The idea con- 
 veyed by a substantive will be the more clear and correct 
 as it suggests to the mind a greater number of the prop- 
 erties which form the essence of the thing signified. Hence 
 it is that the knowledge of words is commensurate with 
 the knowledge of things. 
 
 The collection of ideas comprised within the significa- 
 tion of a substantive constitutes its comprehension ; this 
 comprehension is the greater as a larger number of simple 
 ideas contribute to the general idea represented by the 
 substantive. The number of individuals to which a sub- 
 
SUBSTANTIVES. 67 
 
 stantive applies forms its extension ; this extension is the 
 greater as its signification embraces a greater number of 
 individuals. The comprehension and the extension of 
 substantives expressive of genera, species, and individ- 
 uals, stand always in inverse ratio to each other ; for the 
 number of individuals is the smaller as a greater number 
 of attributes constitutes their signification. Thus, in the 
 following series of general terms : being, animal, quadru- 
 ped, elephant, every subsequent term comprehends in its 
 signification all that is in the preceding, and something 
 more ; and every antecedent term extends to more indi- 
 viduals than the subsequent. 
 
 When the comprehension of a substantive is the 
 greatest, and its extension the smallest — that is, when it 
 recalls all the attributes which characterize one individ- 
 ual — it is called proper. When the substantive recalls 
 the attributes which are common to all the individuals of 
 a species, it is called common. Proper nouns, then, are 
 such as are applied to individual persons or things only, 
 and they may be said to be in themselves utterly unmean- 
 ing. They were contrived simply for the purpose of 
 showing what thing we talk about, and not of telling 
 anything about it. A proper name may be either a sin- 
 gle word, as London, Paris, Vienna ; or a collocation of 
 words, as the President of the United States, the present 
 Queen of Great Britain, the Emperor of all the Russias, 
 the Mayor of New York. The name of " many- worded " 
 or " compound " noun has been given to words of this sort. 
 Different from proper nouns, which designate individuals 
 only, common nouns comprise whole classes, each class 
 denoting an aggregate of attributes affirmed to exist in 
 every individual to whom or to which the common noun 
 applies. The word man, for instance, expresses certain 
 qualities, and when we predicate it of one, or any number 
 of persons, we assert that they all possess these qualities. 
 
68 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 Common nouns are generally divided into three classes, 
 called abstract, collective, and verbal nouns. 
 
 An abstract noun is the name of a quality or property 
 thought of, apart from all consideration of the substance 
 in which the quality resides. The term hears reference 
 to an act of the mind called abstraction, by which we 
 fix our attention on one property of an object, leaving 
 the others out of view. Snow, chalk, writing-paper, are 
 white, and, from that quality, may be oppressive to the 
 eyes. Abstracting the quality from the substance, we 
 can say, in speaking of some persons, that " whiteness is 
 oppressive to their eyes." Whiteness thus becomes an 
 abstract noun. Most abstract nouns come from adjec- 
 tives, and should be distinguished from common nouns 
 generalized. Wisdom, truth, fear, joy, kindness, probity, 
 are single qualities which may characterize an unlimited 
 number of persons ; but the names of man, horse, gold, 
 stone, represent each an assemblage of attributes, the ag- 
 gregate of which constitutes the individual or substance 
 respectively so named. Abstract nouns, when used as such, 
 have no plurals, but common nouns generalized have. 
 
 Collective nouns are those which, though singular in 
 form, may suggest the idea of plurality. Such are army, 
 clergy, crowd, regiment, etc. The same word may be 
 collective and common. "The Seventh Regiment," for 
 instance, is a collective name and also a proper name, but 
 it is not a common name ; " a regiment " is both a col- 
 lective and a common name— common with respect to all 
 similar organizations, collective with respect to the num- 
 ber of soldiers of which any regiment is composed. As 
 collective nouns, though singular in form, may yet sug- 
 gest the idea of plurality, they are joined either to a sin- 
 gular or a plural verb, according as the idea suggested is 
 that of unity or plurality. In other words, collective 
 nouns expressing totality require the verb to be in the - 
 
SUBSTANTIVES. 69 
 
 singular ; whereas partitive collective nouns take the 
 plural. The reason is, that partitive collectives, having 
 no inherent meaning, derive their meaning from the 
 words that follow ; whereas the general collective pre- 
 sents the idea complete in itself, independently of any 
 word or words that may be added. Thus, army, clergy, 
 crowd, etc., however described or analyzed, stand before 
 our mind as a whole, and as such govern their verbs in 
 the sentence ; whereas, number, portion, part, and the 
 like, depending as they do upon a complement for their 
 meaning, form, together with that complement, an ex- 
 pression the sense of which will determine the form of 
 the verb of which it is the subject. Thus, the same term 
 which is partitive collective in one case, may become 
 general collective in another, according to the idea we 
 may wish to convey. In French, for instance, une pariie 
 des infideles s'enfuirent, would direct the mind to the 
 soldiers who fled taken individually ; une partie des sol- 
 dats s'enfuit, to their collective numbers. So, in une 
 douzaine d'oeufs, the word douzaine is a general collec- 
 tive, because eggs are usually sold by that quantity ; 
 whereas, in une douzaine de piastres, it is partitive, as 
 dollars are not counted by the dozen. The former, there- 
 fore, requires the verb in the singular, the latter in the 
 plural number. So, in English, when we say, " The 
 army is on its march," we seem to lose sight of the indi- 
 viduals composing the idea represented by the word 
 army, and speak of it as one mass ; but if we say, " The 
 peasantry go barefooted," this mode of expression seems 
 to give us an idea of a number of people existing sepa- 
 rately, and we therefore put the verb in the plural. The 
 truth is, that the idea of unity or totality, and the idea 
 of multiplicity, may be both involved in a collective 
 noun, and it depends upon which idea predominates 
 whether we shall make the verb singular or plural. 
 
70 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 Verbal nouns are those which express the name of an 
 action. In the sentence, " The eye is not satisfied with 
 seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing," the words seeing 
 and hearing are verbal nouns. The verb thus used as a 
 noun is, of course, not conjugated — that is, united with 
 a subject — but necessarily some part of the infinitive. 
 In English it is generally the present participle, rarely 
 the present. In French it is sometimes the past partici- 
 ple, but, as the subject of a preposition, it is more gen- 
 erally the present infinitive which makes the verb per- 
 form the function of a noun. Entree, sortie, lev'ee, mM'ee, 
 mise, prise, du, parvenu, are past participles used as com- 
 mon nouns ; but, as abstract nouns, it is the present 
 infinitive which is always used as such, as : Waimer que 
 soi, c'est aimer peu de chose. Verbal nouns have much 
 the same relation to verbs that abstract nouns have to ad- 
 jectives. 
 
 Substantives are modified in four ways — number, gen- 
 der, case, and degree. 
 
 The numbers singular and plural distinguish substan- 
 tives as signifying one or more than one individual of the 
 same species, one or more than one species of the same 
 genus ; they consequently affect their extension, not their 
 comprehension. This distinction is found in all lan- 
 guages, it being universally required to distribute the 
 genus into its species, and the species into its individuals. 
 Proper nouns, when strictly used as such, denoting single 
 individuals, do not admit of a plural. 
 
 Number may be truly called an accident of a noun, 
 for not only do we find languages differing as to the ex- 
 tent in which they indicate numbers, but we sometimes 
 meet with words commonly said to be alike in both num- 
 bers — that is, in fact, without the distinction of number 
 at all — and yet we do not experience any difficulty in in- 
 dicating whether we mean one or more than one. In 
 
SUBSTANTIVES. 71 
 
 English, for instance, the words sheep, deer, salmon, snipe, 
 dozen, pair, and others have no plural, although the ideas 
 which they signify are susceptible of number. Words 
 like these prove that the distinction could be dispensed 
 with, at the same time that their fewness shows it to be a 
 very useful one. 
 
 While all languages have number, they have them not 
 all to the same extent. In Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, 
 Greek, and other ancient languages, there is a particular 
 form called the Dual, which serves to indicate two indi- 
 viduals. Thus, in Greek aporrjp signifies a or one plow- 
 man ; dpora, two plowmen ; and dporai, any number of 
 plowmen above two.* 
 
 In almost every idiom there are a few nouns which 
 form their plurals quite anomalously. Irregularities like 
 these can be generally traced to some older forms of Ian-. 
 
 * The principle on which the dual number was introduced, and sub- 
 sequently discontinued, may bo thus explained : A great many objects 
 in nature as well as in art, and those in which we are at an early period 
 of life particularly interested, present themselves to us in duals. Our 
 hands, eyes, cheeks, shoulders, arms, limbs, feet, are all twins. The 
 natural relations of life present the same dual aspect — father and moth- 
 er, sister and brother, son and daughter ; and, in short, the relations of 
 the sexes in the animated kingdom generally exhibit this combination. 
 Land and sea, heaven and earth, east and west, north and south, are 
 all correlatives. Many of the instruments used by man are duals — a 
 pair of pincers, tongs, scissors, snuffers, etc., and scales and balances, 
 by which relative weight and value are ascertained, are likewise paired. 
 At the same time, it is manifest that as all duals are plurals, and as 
 plurals occur more frequently in nature than duals, the plurals may be 
 expected to supersede the use of the duals ; and in most languages 
 this is actually the case. Nay, even in the Greek language, where the 
 dual has perhaps obtained the most permanent footing, the plural is fre- 
 quently made use of instead of the dual. In fact, this refinement on 
 numbers — for such it may be considered to be — seems to have been felt 
 at last to be in a great measure superfluous, and so came to be gradually 
 discontinued even in those languages where it Once obtained an exten- 
 sive use. 
 
72 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 guage. Such are in English the words child, cow, foot, 
 goose, man, mouse, ox, tooth, whose plurals are children, 
 Jcine, feet, geese, men, mice, oxen, teeth. Others, again, 
 have two different plurals with distinct meanings. 
 Brother, for instance, has brothers, sons of the same 
 parents, and brethren, members of the same society or 
 profession. The former word is a true plural ; the latter 
 a kind of collective. Nouns adopted from dead or for- 
 eign tongues in some instances retain their original plu- 
 rals. This, however, is more often an affectation than a 
 necessity, which good writers rarely indulge in, the regu- 
 lar plural being always preferable when custom will in 
 any degree permit it. 
 
 Distinctibn of sex has been marked in language by 
 genders — the masculine and feminine — which indicate 
 respectively the names of males and females. This is 
 effected sometimes by distinct substantives, such as man, 
 woman ; husband, wife; father, mother ; son, daughter ; 
 boy, girl ; imcle, aunt ; nephew, niece ; horse, mare ; 
 drake, duck; gander, goose ; etc. Sometimes, also,.words 
 applied to males and females indiscriminately are made 
 to indicate gender by prefixing auxiliary words forming, 
 with their primitives, compound nouns showing the dis- 
 tinction. Thus, in English, the word servant signifies 
 either a male or a female ; but, if we desire to designate 
 which, we can use the compound words man-servant and 
 maid-servant. Of the same kind are he-goat and she-goat, 
 cock-sparrow and hen-sparrow, and many others. In 
 other words the feminine is indicated by the suffix ess 
 added to the root of the masculine, such as abbott, abbess ; 
 actor, actress ; governor, governess ; duke, duchess ; and 
 the like. If the masculine word is adopted from a dead 
 or foreign tongue, the feminine is generally taken from 
 the same language, as czar, czarina; sultan, sultana; 
 infant, infanta ; hero, heroine ; etc. 
 
SUBSTANTIVES. 73 
 
 Such are in the main the changes of form by means 
 of which difference of sex is indicated in almost all lan- 
 guages. Masculine and feminine genders have, by analo- 
 gy, been applied to the names of inanimate things, ac- 
 cording as the nouns expressive of them were formed of 
 grave or acute, harsh or agreeable sounds ; but more 
 often as the thing named bore supposed affinity to the 
 male or the female kind. A third gender — the neuter — 
 has been, in many languages, attached to the names of 
 inanimate things and of animals considered abstractedly 
 of sex. As genders arise from various causes in different 
 languages, they vary in their application to particular 
 substantives in each, and often present strange anomalies. 
 Thus, in English, man-of-war is feminine ;■ the German 
 Weib, "married woman," and Madchen, "girl," are neuter; 
 the French gens, " people," varies its gender, according as 
 an adjective precedes or follows it, as ce sont de charmantes 
 gens, or des gens charmants, " they are charming people." 
 
 English is, on this point, the most consistent of all 
 languages ; it admits of masculine and feminine pronouns, 
 denoting males and females of the human kind, and of a 
 few of the most common species of the brute creation, 
 and has no gender for other nouns, specific words being, 
 for the greater part, joined to the names of the lower 
 animals to mark their sex when distinction is required. 
 Sometimes, however, it departs from this rule and assigns 
 a masculine or feminine gender to a word that should 
 strictly be considered neuter, as expressing a thing with- 
 out life and consequently without the natural distinction 
 of sex. The choice of gender in such cases seems to have 
 been made capriciously, or at any rate to have been regu- 
 lated by ideas whose operation on the language we can 
 not now clearly trace.* Still, this power of varying the 
 
 * In the midst of playful humor, a distinguished novelist has pro- 
 posed a theory on this subject, which seems to have a good deal of truth 
 7 
 
74 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 gender of nouns gives an obvious advantage to English 
 over other idioms in which gender is fixed. If we wish 
 to speak of an object without feeling, we use its natural 
 gender ; but if we wish to produce a rhetorical effect, we 
 use a masculine or feminine gender. The natural philoso- 
 pher, referring to the sun merely as one of the compo- 
 nent parts of a system, would properly enough use the 
 pronoun it ; but the poet, who wishes to excite a feeling 
 of admiration for the object, would say he. In the same 
 way the metaphysician, detailing a theory of virtue with- 
 out wishing to awaken any feeling, would use it /* but 
 the poet, fired with love for the object, would say she.\ 
 
 The French language is, in respect to genders, very 
 perplexing to foreigners, not only because it has but two 
 — the masculine and feminine — but because they seem 
 most arbitrarily distributed among its nouns. In some 
 languages the gender of nouns often changes with their 
 
 in it. " There is not a mystical creation, type, symbol, or poetical inven- 
 tion for meanings abstruse, recondite, and incomprehensible, which is not 
 represented by the female gender. There is the Sphinx, Chimsera, and 
 Isis, whose veil no man ever lifted; they are all ladies, every one of 
 them ! And so was Persephone, who must be always either in heaven or 
 hell — and Hecate, who was one thing by night and another by day. The 
 Sibyls were females ; and so were the Gorgons, the Harpies, the Furies, 
 the Fates, and the Teutonic Valkyrs, Nornies, and Hela herself ; in short, 
 all representations of ideas, obscure, inscrutable, and portentous, are 
 nouns feminine." (Bulwer's " Caxtons.") 
 
 * Forasmuch as it has been disputed wherein virtue consists, or what- 
 ever ground for doubt there may be about particulars, yet, in general, 
 there is in reality an universally acknowledged standard of it. (Butler's 
 Dissertation " Of the Nature of Virtue.") 
 f Mortals that would follow me, 
 
 Love virtue ; she alone is free. 
 
 She can teach you how to climb 
 
 Higher than the sphery chime ; 
 
 Or if virtue feeble were, 
 
 Heaven itself would stoop to her. (Milton's " Comus.") 
 
SUBSTANTIVES. 75 
 
 meanings, of which the French and German offer many- 
 examples. In Greek, Latin, and Italian some nouns even 
 change their genders in passing from the singular to the 
 plural. Close attention to these irregularities is the more 
 imperative in inflected languages, as an ignorance of the 
 gender of nouns brings several errors in its train, since 
 articles, determinatives, adjectives, pronouns, and partici- 
 ples take different inflections according as the substantive 
 to which they relate is either masculine, feminine, or 
 neuter. 
 
 The nature of the relations which exist between ideas 
 may be determined in language either by prepositions, by 
 the respective places of the nouns, or by their change of 
 form. Sometimes these three ways combine in the ex- 
 pression of relation. 
 
 The changes of form, which consist chiefly of inflec- 
 tions or variations in the termination of nouns, and which 
 serve to denote the relation in which nouns stand to each 
 other or any other part of the sentence, are called cases. 
 The more numerous the cases, the more favorable to trans- 
 positive collocation is the language ; whereas the absence 
 of inflections confines its structure to one determinate 
 order, because in that case the relations of words can be 
 marked only by juxtaposition. 
 
 The number of cases varies considerably in different 
 languages ; the English has two, the* German four, the 
 Greek five, and the Latin six. The collection of the 
 various inflected forms, assumed by a substantive in all 
 its cases, is called declension ; and the nouns which are 
 susceptible of cases are said to be declinable. French, 
 Spanish, and Italian, having no case system, are therefore 
 said to be indeclinable, relations in these languages being 
 expressed by situations or by prepositions. In referring 
 to their grammar, it would be wrong, therefore, to speak 
 of cases, for where there is no change of form there evi- 
 
76 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 dently is no case. It is true that in some of the old 
 French and English grammars we find the word used to 
 indicate relation, and this can only be accounted for in 
 this way, that the first grammars of modern languages, 
 having been molded on the Latin, a false analogy was 
 established between its principles and those of modern 
 idioms ; and hence arose the improper application of de- 
 clensions to their substantives, although these are inde- 
 clinable. Each language has a particular genius which 
 can not be transferred from one to another. 
 
 The genitive case, in English grammar called posses- 
 sive, is of all the oblique cases — that is, those that are 
 equivalent to prepositions — the most generally used. It 
 represents a vast variety of relations, the principal one 
 being that of ownership or possession, and as it involves 
 an idea of appurtenance attributed to a second substan- 
 tive, the noun so inflected may be virtually considered as 
 an adjective modifying and restricting the signification 
 of the second substantive. Hence it is that in several 
 idioms the possessive, like an adjective, is placed before 
 the substantive to which it relates. 
 
 In English the possessive singular is formed by adding 
 's (apostrophe s) to the noun in singular ; the possessive 
 plural, by adding an apostrophe alone to its plural form ; 
 and when the plural does not end in s, the possessive is 
 formed like the singular,* which inflections correspond in 
 
 * An apostrophe usually indicates the omission of some letter or syl- 
 lable, but grammarians are not agreed as to what this apostrophe repre- 
 sents. Some, as Addison, think that it is a contraction for his, and they 
 maintain that, had the possessive been native to the English tongue, we 
 should not have met with such expressions as "Asa his heart was per- 
 fect " ; " For Jesus Christ his sake," and the like. This theory has been 
 refuted by the remark that while it is easy to see how " the king his 
 crown " might in course of time be contracted into " the king's crown," 
 no possible contraction would account for the form " the queen's crown " 
 from " the queen her crown," and the old form of the possessive Ungis 
 
SUBSTANTIVES. 77 
 
 import exactly to the preposition of. The expressions 
 "in his father's house," and "in the house of his father," 
 are as nearly as possible identical. In the one, the rela- 
 tion existing between house and father is expressed by a 
 change in the word father ; in the other, the same idea 
 is expressed by the preposition of. Sometimes, however, 
 there is a difference between these two modes of expres- 
 sion, as in the phrases " Lord's day," f^ad " day of the 
 Lord " ;' but this arises from the circumstance that both 
 have lost their common meanings, and become, in fact, 
 common proper nouns. The two are also not equivalent 
 when of is used as an adverb ; thus, though we can say 
 "He spoke of Csesar," we can not say "He spoke 
 Caesar's." 
 
 Of the three means resorted to in language to indi- 
 cate relation — inflection, preposition, and collocation — 
 inflection is probably the oldest, as it requires much less 
 abstraction to express the nature of the relation that ex- 
 ists between two objects by a change of form in one of 
 them, than to call into use a class of words expressing 
 relation and nothing else. Indeed, to express relation by 
 
 of the word king, and the like, have been brought forward to show that 
 the possessive case was really of old English origin. This argument, 
 however, is invalidated by the fact — 1. That if this form at one period 
 of English prevailed in the language, it was by no means universally so ; 
 2. That many Saxon possessives, either singular or plural, do not termi- 
 nate in s at all ; and, 3. That the apostrophe s is now used with all nouns, 
 whether their Saxon originals ended in s in the possessive or not. Which- 
 ever theory be adopted, it is clear that there has been an arbitrary trans- 
 ference of a contraction from a place where it was appropriate to one 
 where it was not. The convenience of the contraction, from whatever it 
 came, being seen in the case of nouns singular masculine, it was in course 
 of time transferred likewise to nouns feminine and plural. This is not 
 the only instance in language in which certain terminations have been, as 
 it were, forced on words to which they do not naturally apply. (See La- 
 tham's " English Language,'' particularly the chapter on " Hybridism," 
 for fuller information on this subject.) 
 
78 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 a variation in the name of the correlative object, requir- 
 ing neither abstraction nor generalization nor comparison 
 of any kind, must at first have come more natural and 
 easy than to express it by prepositions of which the first 
 invention necessarily demanded some degree of all these 
 operations. It is observable also that, while many lan- 
 guages, such as the French, Italian, and others, have 
 thrown off inflected forms, there is no instance of a lan- 
 guage ever having reverted to the inflected form after 
 using prepositions. 
 
 Substantives admit of degrees called augmentatives 
 and diminutives. These degrees convey an idea of great- 
 ness or smallness, or of something pleasing, disagreeable, or 
 contemptible, added to their comprehensions, and are indi- 
 cated by a suffix or some other modification of the original 
 word. In Greek, Latin, French, and English, this means of 
 modifying the sense of the substantive exists in but a few 
 instances ; but both augmentatives and diminutives are 
 very common in Spanish and Italian, in which almost all 
 substantives can be so modified. All Dutch and German 
 nouns admit of diminutives. These degrees impart co- 
 piousness, force, and grace to these languages ; but, al- 
 though scarce adequately represented in others by trans- 
 lation, their lack in original composition is but little felt, 
 because the ideas conveyed by them are there habitually 
 expressed by adjectives. 
 
ADJECTIVES. 
 
 Adjectives serve to distinguish substantives by addi- 
 tional qualities, properties, or modes of existence. They 
 do not, as usually defined, express quality or property ; 
 they only predicate it in the substance — that is, they in- 
 dicate that the thing signified by the substantive to which 
 they relate possesses such additional qualities ; and inas- 
 much as qualities, or attributes, have no separate exist- 
 ence apart from the substance to which they belong, ad- 
 jectives are inseparable from their substantives, of which 
 they form part and parcel. 
 
 The substantive, involving in its comprehension all 
 the ideas of properties which constitute the class of 
 things signified, takes no adjectives but such as predicate 
 properties forming no essential part of that class. Ad- 
 jectives, therefore, serve as terms of comparison to dis- 
 tinguish, by accessory ideas, the individuals which sub- 
 stantives signify from other individuals of the same 
 species. Thus, when we affirm of a mountain that it is 
 lofty, we must have a tacit reference to other mountains ; 
 when we affirm of any particular river that it is rapid, we 
 unconsciously, perhaps, but yet actually, make a compari- 
 son between it and some other rivers. In calling an ani- 
 mal big or little, we always form a secret comparison 
 between that animal and others of the same species ; and 
 it is that comparison which regulates our judgment con- 
 cerning its greatness. A dog and a horse may be of the 
 very same size, while the one is admired for the greatness 
 
80 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 of its bulk, and the other for the smallness. Adjectives, 
 moreover, affect both the comprehension and extension of 
 substantives ; for they increase the first by the addition 
 of a new idea, and diminish the second by confining the 
 signification of the substantive to a smaller range of indi- 
 viduals. The word ros3, for instance, embraces the whole 
 class ; white rose, only a sub-class or species ; with the 
 additional property of whiteness our conception of the 
 substance is increased, while all roses not so distinguished 
 are excluded from our consideration. 
 
 The natural union which exists between the substance 
 and its attributes has produced the logical connection be- 
 tween the subject and the predicate, and led to the adop- 
 tion of means by which a corresponding connection is 
 established between the substantive and the adjective. 
 In German, Greek, Latin, and other inflected idioms, this 
 connection is effected by the adjective being made to 
 agree, in gender, number, and case, with its substantive — 
 that is to say, to assume different inflections which corre- 
 spond to and harmonize with those of the substantive 
 viewed in these three parts. Nouns in French, Spanish, 
 and Italian, having no cases, their adjectives agree with 
 them in gender and number only. In English, adjectives 
 have neither number, gender, nor case ; and their relation 
 to the substantive is marked by their being placed imme- 
 diately before it. This peculiarity of construction, which 
 belongs also to the Dutch and German, enables substan- 
 tives to be converted into qualificative adjectives by be- 
 ing so placed, as gold watch, stone wall, brick house; 
 sometimes united by a hyphen, as rail-fence, steam-engine, 
 book-learning ; and in course of time even coalescing into 
 single words, as railroad, steamboat, schoolmaster, etc. 
 The facility of thus multiplying attributive terms im- 
 parts to a language great descriptive powers, and is most 
 favorable to poetical and oratorical effects. 
 
ADJECTIVES. 81 
 
 Single-worded adjectives are, in reality, only abridged 
 forms of expression, and are not even absolutely necessary 
 to impart to the noun additional ideas of quality, prop- 
 erty, or mode of existence ; indeed, many languages have 
 no adjectives corresponding to those found in other 
 idioms. Thus, the Latin aureus, argenteus, ferteus, etc., 
 and their corresponding gold, silver, iron, in English, 
 golden, silbern, eisern, in German, are rendered in French 
 by their circumstantial attributes d'or, cT argent, de fer. 
 This language, in common with all others of the classical 
 stock, generally supplies the absence of attributive terms 
 by adjectival phrases composed of prepositions and sub- 
 stantives, as maison de briques, chemin de fer, bateau a, 
 vapeur, arrangement a Famiable, etc. Deprived of the 
 advantage of converting nouns into qualificative adjec- 
 tives, it is endowed with others equally great. It changes 
 its nouns into attributes by withholding the determina- 
 tive, as : H 'etait berger et il devint roi ; while it converts 
 almost every adjective into a noun by means of some de- 
 terminative, as : Mien n'est beau que le vrai ; le sage est 
 toujours content ; c'est un petit paresseux ; venez id mon 
 brave, etc. But what in French is a peculiar source of 
 wealth and beauty to the language is the shade of meaning 
 and often the double sense of its adjectives, arising from 
 their position ; for, although they are generally placed 
 after substantives, they occasionally precede them when 
 used emphatically or figuratively in the sentence. 
 
 The qualities or properties which it is the purport of 
 adjectives to predicate in substantives are susceptible of 
 different degrees of intensity ; the excess or deficiency 
 of the quality suggested by any particular adjective may 
 also be considered absolutely or relatively to that of an- 
 other. All languages possess modes of indicating these 
 various degrees, to which have been given the names of 
 comparative, superlative relative, and superlative absolute. 
 
82 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 These degrees of comparison are expressed either by ad- 
 verbs placed before the adjectives,. as in French, or by a 
 change in the termination, as in Greek, Latin, and Ger- 
 man. It is this change in the form of adjectives which 
 properly deserves the name of degrees of comparison. In 
 Italian and Spanish the comparative and the superlative 
 relative are indicated by adverbs only ; but the superla- 
 tive absolute is formed either by an adverb corresponding 
 to the English word much, or by a particular inflection of 
 the adjective. English admits of both ways, the com- 
 paratives and relative superlatives of words of one sylla- 
 ble being formed by the suffixes er and est, and those of 
 longer words, especially such as are derived from the 
 French and Latin, by means of the adverbs more and 
 most. Such, at least, is the practice in modern English, 
 which says younger, older ; tallest, smallest ; but more or 
 ■most virtuous, more or most famous, and no longer, as 
 Milton has it, virtuousest, famousest. The superlative 
 absolute is marked by the word very. The rule laid 
 down by English grammarians, that the comparative is 
 to be used when two things are spoken of, and the super- 
 lative relative when more than two are the subject of 
 discourse, has not been always observed, even by the 
 best writers,* and still less by the best speakers. In the 
 present state of the language, it may be safe, perhaps, to 
 say that, while in colloquial language the superlative is 
 
 * So strong, however, is the tendency to abolish the distinction be- 
 tween two and more than two, that very good writers occasionally use the 
 superlative, distinctly referring to two ; as, for instance, Goldsmith, when 
 he says, " Deborah exerted much sagacity in conjecturing which of the 
 two girls was likely to have the best place and most opportunities for see- 
 ing good company" ; and again, Scott: " The progress of reason and the 
 principles of justice concurred to prove that a combat in the lists might 
 indeed show which of the two knights was the best rider and the stoutest 
 swordsman, but that such an encounter could afford no evidence which of 
 the two was innocent or guilty." 
 
ADJECTIVES. 83 
 
 allowed when two are implied, yet if two are distinctly 
 compared, the comparative is the better form to use. 
 
 The degrees of comparison have different import, ac- 
 cording as "they are applied to relative or absolute prop- 
 erties. In the first instance, they show an excess in one 
 property over another, or over several, without reference 
 to a positive or definite standard ; thus, if we say one 
 line is longer than another, or is the longest, we do not, 
 thereby, imply that either of them is long, or approach- 
 ing to any particular length — this property being rela- 
 tive. In the second instance, when absolute properties 
 are compared, the degrees of comparison mark not so 
 much an increase of property, as an approach to the 
 definite property expressed by the adjective in the posi- 
 tive state : by saying one line is straighter than another, 
 or is the straightest, we mean that it approaches nearer, 
 or the nearest to straightness. 
 
DETEEMINATIVES. 
 
 Determinatives serve chiefly to limit the meaning of 
 common substantives from a general to a particular sense. 
 They have been classed by some as adjectives, merely be- 
 cause, like adjectives, they are joined to substantives of 
 whose signification they usually restrict the extension. 
 This confusion, arising from a false denomination, would 
 probably not have been made, had adjectives, as sug- 
 gested by some modern grammarians, been more properly 
 called modificatives or qualificatives, and their functions 
 more strictly defined. Adjective does not simply mean 
 " added to " ; it denotes a mode of action or existence, a 
 quality or property not found in the noun to which the 
 word is added. The termination ive, for instance, which 
 in general has an active sense, imparts an active quality 
 to the noun to which the term is added. Destructive does 
 not mean "destroying" or "destroyed," but "causing 
 destruction." Corrosive means " gnawing, consuming, 
 wearing away," and predicates the power of producing 
 such effects in the substance to the name of which this 
 adjective is added. Adjectives may even, in some in- 
 stances, represent their nouns when the quality they im- 
 part is the leading quality expressed, as, " the living and 
 the dead ; the rich and the poor ; the learned and the 
 ignorant^' etc. Not so the determinatives. They never 
 represent a noun by referring to quality or mode of exist- 
 ence ; two of them can never come together ; they can not 
 
DETERMINATIVES. 85 
 
 form the third term of a proposition ; nor do they admit' 
 of degrees of comparison. The difference will be more 
 obvious still when we observe that adjectives increase 
 the comprehension of substantives, whereas determina- 
 tives affect their extension only. 
 
 Determinatives may be divided into three classes — 
 possessive, demonstrative, and numeral. 
 
 The English words my, thy, his, her, its, our, your, 
 their, and their corresponding forms in other idioms, are 
 determinatives called possessive, from the idea of posses- 
 sion which they attach to the nouns before which they 
 are placed. In reference to the possessor, they may with 
 equal propriety be called pronominal determinatives, as 
 they sometimes are styled ; but they are not pronouns, 
 their function being to designate nouns, and not to sup- 
 ply their place. The corresponding Latin words meus, 
 mea, meum, tuus, tua, tuum, etc., are either pronouns or 
 determinatives, as they signify mine or my, thine or thy, 
 etc. — determinatives when accompanying their nouns ; 
 pronouns when representing them. In the same way, the 
 English word his is either pronoun or determinative, ac- 
 cording to its function in the sentence. 
 
 Numerals are subdivided into three classes : Cardi- 
 nal, answering the question, How many ? Ordinal, an- 
 swering the question, Which number? And Indefinite, 
 which simply refer to number, without specifying which 
 or what number. Of these the ordinal numbers are true 
 adjectives, for they convey an idea of order, and conse- 
 quently increase the comprehension of the substantive, at 
 the same time that they restrict its extension. The car- 
 dinal numbers are determinatives and not adjectives, inas- 
 much as they express no mode of action or existence, no 
 quality attributable to the thing signified by the substan- 
 tive, but affect the extension only, and not the compre- 
 hension of the noun before which they are placed. When 
 8 
 
86 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 used by themselves with, tacit reference to particular 
 nouns, the cardinal numbers become pronouns, as : two 
 heads are better than one, in which two is a determina- 
 tive, and one a pronoun. When used abstractedly, as in 
 two and two are four, they are neither determinatives 
 nor pronouns, but abstract nouns. The indefinite num- 
 bers are determinatives that only vaguely refer to qual- 
 ity, such as some, several, feic, any, many, etc. Some 
 of these words, it is true, may, by the suppression of the 
 substantive, be used as pronouns ; but, when joined to 
 substantives, and performing the same function as deter- 
 minatives, they can only be classed with the latter part 
 of speech, and not with pronouns or adjectives. 
 
 The English words this, that, these, those, and their 
 corresponding forms in other languages, are called de- 
 monstrative determinatives, from their pointing, in a clear 
 and distinct manner, to the nouns they designate. In 
 this respect the word the does not as fully determine the 
 sense of the substantive, but only indicates that the latter 
 is to be taken in a definite sense, which is further speci- 
 fied by a complement. This and these refer to what is 
 nearest in time or place, to persons and things present or 
 under immediate consideration ; that and those to what 
 is more distant, to persons and things not present or 
 under immediate consideration. But it is not always by 
 presence or absence, proximity or distance, that men and 
 things are designated ; it is even more generally by some 
 special quality, some circumstance or description, that 
 they are distinguished from other men and things, and 
 for this purpose the word the, which in reality is but a 
 softened form of that, is used as less emphatic when de- 
 tails concerning the noun are all found in its complement, 
 whether expressed or understood. Thus we say : This 
 man is rich; that man is poor — pointing at the indi- 
 viduals ; but we say : The man who built that house 
 
DETERMINATIVES. 87 
 
 is rich ; the rich are apt to despise the poor. It is this 
 difference in the use of the and that which has led many 
 grammarians to consider the former as a separate part of 
 speech, under the name of definite article. In the same 
 way, the word a, which is only a shortened form of an, 
 and whose equivalent in many languages is no other than 
 the numeral one* has been called an indefinite article ; 
 so might any, which is only a more emphasized, form 
 thereof ; but as both the and a come, in all respects, un- 
 der the definition of determinatives, it is unnecessary, and 
 even illogical, to rank them as a class by tnemselves. 
 
 Proper substantives, denoting individuals in a deter- 
 minate manner, require, in general, no article. Greek and 
 Italian are among the languages which present some ex- 
 ceptions to this rule. In Italian, the article is often used 
 before the names of celebrated persons, poets, and artists, 
 as, il Dante, il Tasso, la Grisi, la Patti, etc., which 
 custom has prevailed for some time, also, in French. 
 Names of countries, rivers, and mountains, in Greek, 
 French, Italian, and Spanish, also take the article, which, 
 however, is sometimes dispensed with in French before the 
 names of countries, especially when used with the preposi- 
 tions de and en, as la carte d? Europe ; vin d'Espagne; Vem- 
 pereur d'Autriche ; il voyage en Italic ; nous arrivons de 
 France. In French, the article also serves to indicate an 
 entire class, as distinct from any other, as, Les femmes ■ 
 
 * Words having more than one meaning in one language have often 
 as many corresponding forms as they have meanings in another. The 
 word a, when it means " one," is rendered in Latin by unus, as in the 
 following example of Ennius : " Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem.'' 
 When employed in its vague and undetermined sense, it is translated by 
 quidam, or not at all ; and when one is used in opposition, as in the ex. 
 pression, " One says yes, the other no," it is rendered by alter. In the 
 same way, the adjective " certain," when meaning " true," is translated 
 by certus ; when denoting some vague and undetermined unit, its Latin 
 equivalent is quidam. 
 
88 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL. GRAMMAR. 
 
 ont la sensibility en partage, niais la force est V apanage 
 des hommes. The absence of the article in English, by 
 which is consistently indicated the greatest extension of 
 the common substantive — that is, its general sense or sig- 
 nification of a class — is an advantage which this language 
 possesses over many others. 
 
 In inflected languages, determinatives, like adjectives, 
 vary to agree in gender and number with their substan- 
 tives, and thus they serve to point out these distinctions 
 in the latter when not sufficiently marked by their form. 
 This is more particularly the case in French, in which 
 the written form of substantives seldom affords a clew 
 to their gender, and not always to their number ; but, in 
 languages in which the distinction of masculine and 
 feminine is consistent with that of sex, or in which the 
 form of the plural is perceptible both to the eye and to 
 the ear, the determinatives seldom vary in gender and 
 number, as is the case in English. Their invariability 
 permits the same determinative to refer to several con- 
 secutive substantives, as the father, mother, and chil- 
 dren ; but, when they are variable, as in French, they 
 must be repeated in their various forms before every 
 noun, as, le pere, la mere, et les enfants. 
 
 Determinatives, and especially the article, contribute 
 in a considerable degree to the precision and perspicuity 
 of discourse ; but, useful as they are, several languages 
 dispense with some of them, in which case their place is 
 supplied by particular terminations and suffixes added to 
 the nouns.* 
 
 * M. de la Condamine mentions a tribe of savages, on the banks of 
 the River Amazon, who have no numeral determinatives beyond three, 
 which number they express by the word poetazzarorincouroac. 
 
VERBS. 
 
 The chief office of the veeb is to denote a relation of 
 co-existence between the substantive and its attributes. 
 The verb to be, which denotes the simple existence of the 
 attribute in the subject, has been considered by many 
 grammarians as the only real verb ; it is, indeed, suffi- 
 cient, in combination with adjectives, to express all judg- 
 ments. The verbs which include the attributes in their 
 signification have been called attributive, in contradis- 
 tinction to substantive, a denomination given to the ab- 
 stract verb to be. The attributive verb, like the adjec- 
 tive, qualifies the subject, but it qualifies it with the 
 additional ideas of affirmation, time, manner, number, 
 person, and sometimes even gender. It is this multi- 
 ple office which makes it the most complex, and at the 
 same time the most important and most useful of all 
 words. 
 
 When the attributive verb denotes an action per- 
 formed by the subject, it is called active ; when it de- 
 notes an action suffered by the subject, it is called passiv e ; 
 and when it denotes neither, but signifies a mode of exist- 
 ence, it is called neuter. 
 
 The action expressed by an active verb may relate to 
 an extraneous object toward which it is directed, and 
 which completes the idea ; the word denoting this com- 
 plement of the action is called object. The action may be 
 absolute — that is, may remain within its agent ; it is then 
 
90 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 complete in itself, and does not require an object. Hence 
 two sorts of active verbs, the transitive and the intran- 
 sitive. 
 
 The transitive verb may reach its object directly, or 
 by means of a preposition ; the first is called transitive- 
 direct, the second transitive-indirect ; and their respective 
 objects are called accordingly direct and indirect objects. 
 The direct object, in our modern idioms, corresponds to 
 the Latin' and Greek accusatives, and the indirect to an 
 oblique case, including the preposition in its composi- 
 tion. 
 
 The same verb may be transitive-direct with regard 
 to one thing, and transitive-indirect with regard to an- 
 other ; it has then two objects, one direct and another 
 indirect, as : I received a booh from my father ; I gave 
 a booh to my brother. 
 
 With some verbs that have two objects, one direct 
 and the other indirect, the latter becomes its direct ob- 
 ject when the former is omitted, as, He teaches me 
 music, and He teaches me, either of which allows the 
 passive form, music is taught, and I am taught. In 
 French, the verb payer is transitive-direct in regard to 
 both the person paid and the amount paid him, when 
 mentioned separately, as Je Vai pay'e, "I have paid 
 him," and J 'ai pay'e une forte somme, "I have paid 
 a large sum " ; but, when both person and amount are 
 mentioned, the verb payer is transitive-direct in regard 
 to the amount paid, and transitive-indirect in regard to 
 the person to whom the payment is made ; and " I have 
 paid him a large sum " is rendered by Je lui ai pay'e une 
 forte somme. " We pay that man two dollars a day " 
 can be rendered by Nous payons a cet homme deux 
 dollars par jour, or Nous payons cet homme a raison de 
 deux dollars par jour ; the former stating the amount 
 paid and the person to whom it is paid, and the latter 
 
VERBS. 91 
 
 mentioning the man who is paid and the rate at which 
 he is paid. 
 
 The greater number of transitive verbs can be used 
 intransitively ; and it frequently happens that a verb is 
 transitive in one language and intransitive in another, or 
 transitive-direct in the one and transitive-indirect in the 
 other, according as the idea expressed by it was originally 
 considered absolutely or relatively. Thus, to enjoy is 
 transitive- direct in English, the French jouir is transi- 
 tive-indirect ; to listen is transitive - indirect, eeouter is 
 transitive-direct ; to love God is rendered in Spanish by 
 amar d Dios. 
 
 When two objects are attached to a transitive verb, 
 not only are these often differently placed in different 
 languages, but sometimes, also, the object which is direct 
 in the one happens to be indirect in the other, as, I lost 
 sight of that, which is translated into French hjfai perdu 
 cela de vue. 
 
 "When the subject of a transitive verb, whether direct 
 or indirect, is also its complement or object, that verb is 
 called reflective. The active verb denotes an action done ; 
 the passive, an action received ; and the reflective, an 
 action done and received. The reflective verb is the op- 
 posite of the neuter ; for it is both active and passive, 
 whereas the latter is neither the one nor the other. Yet, 
 in practice, these two opposite forms are frequently 
 equivalent to each other in different languages ; many 
 neuter verbs in English, for example, are rendered by re- 
 flective verbs in French, Italian, and Spanish. The reason 
 is, that reflective and neuter verbs have this in common, 
 that their action extends not to any outward object, but 
 remains within the agent. 
 
 The passive verb is, in some languages, a distinct 
 word altogether, and is formed from the active by a 
 change in the termination. In the greater number of 
 
92 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 modern languages there is no passive verb ; * its place is 
 supplied by a periphrasis consisting of the verb to be, and 
 the past participle expressive of the action suffered by 
 the subject. Transitive - direct verbs alone can assume 
 the passive form ; and the latter may always be changed 
 into the active. 
 
 Exceptions to this rule, supposed to exist in English, 
 are more apparent than real. Although this language, in 
 common with many others, has no distinct form of pas- 
 sive — such as the Latin amo, I love ; amor, I am loved — 
 it has, nevertheless, all the means of giving its verbs a 
 passive sense by the aid of the auxiliary verb to be. A 
 proneness of English to use that verb leads to the fre- 
 quent use of the transitive-direct as passive, which cus- 
 tom it even extends — at least, apparently so — to transi- 
 tive-indirect verbs. Thus, to be spoken to is a form of 
 expression which is decidedly passive, and very correctly 
 so, for although to speak is a transitive-indirect verb, to 
 speak to is a compound transitive-direct or active verb, 
 
 * " The English verb," says Crombie, " has only one voice, namely, 
 the active. Dr. Lowth, and most other grammarians, have assigned it 
 two voices — active and passive. Lowth has, in this instance, not only 
 violated the simplicity of our language, but has also advanced an opinion 
 inconsistent with his own principles. For, if he has justly excluded 
 from the number of cases in nouns, and moods in verbs, those which are 
 not formed by inflection, but by the addition of prepositions and auxiliary 
 verbs, there is equal reason for rejecting a passive voice, if it be not 
 formed by variety of termination. Were I to ask him why he denies 
 from a Icing to be an ablative case, or / may love to be the potential 
 mood, he would answer, and very truly, that those only can be justly 
 regarded as cases or moods which, by a different form of the noun or 
 verb, express a different relation or a different mode of existence. If 
 this answer be satisfactory, there can be no good reason for assi°nin<» 
 to our language a passive voice, when that voice is formed not by inflec- 
 tion but by an auxiliary verb. Doceor [being an inflection of the word 
 doceo] is truly a passive voice ; but I am laugJd can not, without impro- 
 priety, be considered as such." ("Etymology and Syntax.") 
 
VERBS. 93 
 
 the meaning of which is to address. So, in I am told, 
 the verb to tell has evidently the sense of to inform, 
 which, in reference to the person informed, is transitive- 
 direct, and, consequently, can be changed into the passive. 
 The English compound-neuter verbs, which are formed 
 by the adjunction of an adverb, as to look up, to run 
 away, can not as such be changed into the passive ; but, 
 if further compounded with a preposition, they assume 
 the office of active verbs, and can be used in the passive 
 voice, as, He is looked up to by them • he was run away 
 with. 
 
 The power of substituting the active for the passive 
 form, and vice versa, affords the means of drawing the at- 
 tention more forcibly on either the subject or the object, as 
 may be deemed preferable. Although the active and the 
 passive form can generally be substituted one for the 
 other, they are not indiscriminately used by all nations 
 alike. The English, as we have just remarked, are in- 
 clined to prefer the passive ; the French, Italian, Spanish, 
 and German, the active and reflective. 
 
 A verb, whether active or neuter, is said to be imper- 
 sonal when the action or state which it expresses is con- 
 ceived abstractly of an agent, a pronoun of the third 
 person singular being, in some languages, used- for a sub- 
 ject, but without reference to any conception, and merely 
 to keep up the general analogy with other verbs. Im- 
 personal verbs can have no first or second person, as these 
 would imply the idea of an agent ; they have only the 
 third person, and in languages that have three genders 
 for the pronoun third person singular, it is generally the 
 neuter which is used, as : it rains / it hails ; in French, 
 il pleut ; il grtle. When the inflections of the verb are 
 sonorous enough to dispense with the pronoun, as in 
 Latin, the third person of the verb alone is sufficient, as 
 pluit ; grandinat. 
 
94 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 Consciousness, doubt, supposition, desire, will, which 
 are different states of the mind in the conception of thought 
 and the expression of judgments, demand corresponding 
 forms in the verbs by which such states of mind may be 
 manifested in the communication of ideas. These forms, 
 called moods, are distinguished by particular inflections, 
 or by auxiliary words, according as the language is more 
 or less inflected. They mark the different modes of as- 
 sertion ; in other words, the relations in which the various 
 propositions of discourse stand to each other, whether 
 they are affirmative or conditional, deliberative or sup- 
 positive, imperative or optative, principal or subordinate. 
 
 The number of moods varies in different languages, 
 but those most generally found in ancient and modern 
 languages are the indicative, the conditional or potential, 
 the imperative, the subjunctive, and the infinitive. 
 
 All the judgments which we form relate either to the 
 past, the present, or the future. This triple circumstance 
 has given rise to the tenses of verbs, which, like the 
 moods, are distinguished either by particular inflections 
 in their final syllables, or by means of auxiliary verbs 
 and expletives. The different degrees of proximity to 
 the present, or remoteness from it, and the definiteness 
 or vagueness of the epoch alluded to, as well as the rela- 
 tive periods at which various actions may be performed, 
 have introduced among nations great diversity in the 
 import and number of tenses. Grammarians are by no 
 means agreed as to the names by which to distinguish 
 these tenses ; in different languages they are often known 
 by apparently opposite names ; similar names sometimes 
 indicate different tenses ; and tenses which seem to corre- 
 spond in two or more idioms are not always used in simi- 
 lar circumstances. 
 
 The indicative mood, for instance, expresses categori- 
 cal affirmation, and its present tense indicates primarily 
 
VERBS. 95 
 
 that smallest possible portion of time which connects the 
 past with the future. There can be thus logically but 
 one present tense, and still the English language has three 
 different forms which, while they all refer to the present, 
 convey additional ideas which in some cases are the more 
 prominent. 
 
 The form I love is used to indicate not so much a 
 present action as a habit ; thus, "I love to read." It is 
 often called the present indefinite. 
 
 Monarchs seldom condescend to become the preceptors 
 of their subjects. (Gibbon.) 
 
 I do love, called the present emphatic, indicates not 
 only present time, but affirms with intensity or in opposi- 
 tion to a denial. 
 
 Excellent wretch ! perdition seize my soul, but I do 
 love thee. (Shakespeare.) 
 
 I am loving, the present definite or progressive, indi- 
 cates present time and progressive action.* 
 
 An author who waits till all requisite materials are ac- 
 cumulated to his hands, is but watching the stream that 
 will run on forever. (Hallam.) 
 
 The form I was loving is called the imperfect or past 
 progressive, and indicates past time and progressive action. 
 
 One evening, as the emperor was returning to the 
 palace through a dark and narrow portico in the amphi- 
 theatre, an assassin, who waited his passage, rushed upon 
 him with a drawn sword, loudly exclaiming, " The Senate 
 sends you this ! " (Gibbon.) 
 
 * This form of the verb often bears a passive signification, as " the 
 house is building,'' " a conspiracy is forming," etc. Till- about a century 
 ago it used to be the common practice to write " the house is a-building," 
 " the conspiracy is a-forming," and this mode of expression still prevails 
 among the uneducated. Attempts have been made to establish another 
 form, and to say " the house is being built " and " the conspiracy is being 
 formed," but it is not generally adopted. 
 
96 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 The English perfect is used to indicate, not past ac- 
 tion, but the present result of a past action. If I say, 
 " Livy writes" or " Livy has written so and so," I imply 
 that the book containing the incident is now extant. But 
 if I say, "Livy wrote so and so," I should naturally be 
 taken to be speaking of something reported as having 
 been written in one of the books of his history which 
 have been lost. We may say of a sick man yet living, 
 "He has lost much strength during the week." But the 
 moment he is dead, we can no longer thus speak : we 
 must say, " He lost much strength during the week." If 
 I say, "I have seen Naples twice," I carry the period 
 during which my assertion is true through my whole life 
 down to the present time. If I say, "I saw Naples 
 twice," my words simply refer to the fact, and the period 
 to which they refer is understood to have terminated. I 
 mean, in my youth, or when I was in Europe, or the like. 
 Sometimes the difference between the two tenses may 
 convey an interesting moral distinction. If I say, "My 
 father left me an injunction to do this or that," I leave 
 the way open to say, "but now circumstances have 
 changed, and I find another course more advisable." If 
 I say, " My father has left me an injunction to do this or 
 that," I imply that I am at this moment obeying, and 
 mean to obey, that injunction. The perfect tense is, in 
 fact, a present, relating to the effect, at the present time, 
 of some act done in the past.* 
 
 * The French "past indefinite? says Simonin, " corresponding inform 
 to the English perfect, denotes that the action is past and finished, whether 
 within a period entirely elapsed; as, J'ai Itndie hiermes lecons; or with- 
 in a period of which some portion still remains to be completed • as J'ai 
 icrit une lettre aujourd'hui. In other words, it is used to express (l)'what 
 look place in time fully past, and (2) to express what has taken place in 
 time not yet fully past. Hence it differs essentially from the English 
 perfect in that the latter always conveys an allusion to the present time 
 denoting that the action or event, though by no means necessarily recent^ 
 
VERBS. 97 
 
 The perfect indefinite, I loved, indicates completed ac- 
 tion within a period fully expired. It corresponds to the 
 French past definite.* 
 
 The militia fell much to decay during these two 
 reigns. (Hume.) 
 
 Tarquin now determined on war ; and at the head of 
 
 has occurred in this century, year, month, week, or day, and that there 
 still remains a part of the century, year, month, week, or day spoken of. 
 Indeed, when a precise period of past time is alluded to or specified, the 
 English perfect can not be used. Thus, it would be contrary to- English 
 grammar to say, ' I have seen him yesterday.' — ' He has suffered a great 
 deal last month.' But in French it is quite correct to say, Je Vai vu 
 hier. — II a beaucoup souffert le mois dernier. 
 
 " Yet, like the English perfect, the passb indefini (past indefinite), as 
 its name implies, may be used without allusion to any particular point of 
 past time, and simply to express what still continues in its effects ; as, II 
 a beaucoup lu. — II a beaucoup etvdtt. — II a profile de ses lectures. — II a 
 r'efiichi toute sa vie. 
 
 "Again, like the English perfect, it is also sometimes used with refer- 
 ence to futurity; as, Attendez-moi, j'aifini dans un instant. 
 
 " To sum up the foregoing remarks, the passe indefini and the English 
 perfect are exactly equivalent tp each other in all respects save one, 
 namely, that the latter can not be used when a precise period of past 
 time is alluded to or specified;, and the former can." 
 
 Ou avez-voxLS vu que les gens ruines aient des amis ? (" The French 
 Verb.") 
 
 * In French, the past definite is used to denote actions and events 
 that have occurred in the past with special reference to time, either ex- 
 pressed or clearly understood. Houget de Vlsle composa la Marseillaise 
 en 1792. Louis XVI. fut decapM en 1793. La bataille de Waterloo 
 eut lieu en 1815. Lieu crea le monde en six jours. If, in referring to 
 the past, the consideration of time is of minor importance, the past in- 
 definite expresses the idea. Hier, en travaillant d mon quatrieme dia- 
 logue, j'ai eprouve un vrai plaisir. (Mirabeau.) -Peprouvai would have 
 been the suitable form to express the sensation of a moment, a sudden 
 pain or shock, for instance ; but the use of the past indefinite indicates 
 a persistent gratification. In the absence of all allusion to time the past 
 indefinite alone can convey the idea correctly. Toutes les religions et 
 toutes les secies du monde ont eu la raison nalurelle. (Pascal.) 
 9 
 
98 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 the armies of Veii and Tarquinii he marched against the 
 Romans. (Tytler.) 
 
 This is the tense commonly used in relating historical 
 events, and hence we find it sometimes called the his- 
 torical past. Like the present, it has also an emphatic 
 form. 
 
 Anarchy and disorder did not prevail in the country, 
 because the throne was elective ; but the throne became 
 elective because the people were too jealous of their 
 privilege to admit of hereditary succession. (Alison.) 
 
 The pluperfect, I had loved, shows that something 
 was completed before something else, mentioned along 
 with it, took place. This tense corresponds to both the 
 pluperfect and preterite anterior in French, which tenses 
 in that language are not employed indiscriminately.* 
 
 He had lost his wife while he was governor of the 
 Lionnese Gaul. (Gibbon.) 
 
 He was opposed by the consuls Brutus and P. Vale- 
 rius, who had been chosen in the room of Collatinus, and 
 in the battle which ensued Brutus was killed. (Tytler.) 
 
 The future tense, I shall or will love, indicates an ac- 
 tion yet to take place, f The English language is superior 
 
 * " At first glance," says Levisac, " there appears to be little differ- 
 ence between the plus-gue-parfait and the passe anterieur. There is, 
 however, an essential difference : namely, that the action or event ex- 
 pressed by the passi anterieur is subordinate to that which follows it, 
 and to which the attention is chiefly directed : Quand j'ews reconnu mon 
 erreur, je fus honteux des precedes que j'avais eus a son 6gard. I here 
 intend to convey that I was ashamed, but not until after I had perceived 
 my error ; and that point I express by means of the passe anterieur. It 
 is just the contrary with regard to the plus-gue-parfait. For instance, if 
 I say, J'avais dejeune quand vous vintes me demander, my wish is to sig- 
 nify that I had breakfasted and that then you came, and the attention is 
 directed more particularly to the action expressed by the plus-gue-parfait 
 than to the fact of your arrival." 
 
 •f " A little reflection," says Priestley, " may, I think, suffice to con- 
 vince any person that we have no more business with a future tense in 
 
VERBS. 99 
 
 to most others in having two auxiliaries to express two 
 different shades of futurity ; * the difficulty is to distin- 
 guish these two shades correctly, and it may be doubted 
 whether the distinction has been always strictly observed 
 by even the best speakers and writers. According to 
 rule, will imports the will or purpose of the person it is 
 joined with ; shall implies the will of one who prom- 
 ises or threatens to do something, causes it to be done, 
 permits it, commands it, or the like ; with this restriction, 
 however, that, in the first person, shall simply foretells, 
 while will threatens or promises ; but, in the second and 
 third persons, will foretells, while shall promises or threat- 
 ens — a nice distinction between different shades of future, 
 but a very perplexing one to foreigners, and even to some 
 natives.f 
 
 our language than we have with the whole system of Latin moods and 
 tenses ; because we have no modification of our verbs to correspond to 
 it ; and if wc had never heard of a future tense in some other language, 
 we. should no more have given a particular name to the combination of 
 the verb with the auxiliary shall or will, than to those that are made with 
 the auxiliaries do, have, can, must, or any other." (" Rudiments of Eng- 
 lish Grammar.") 
 
 * In inflected languages this idiomatic distinction can not be ex- 
 pressed, yet the future tense in them consists of two parts. Thus the 
 French ecrirai is resolvable into two distinct words, the infinitive ecrire 
 and ai, the present tense of avoir, forming together icrir-ai, " I have to 
 write," that is, "I shall or will write." The same thing is equally true of 
 the future in the Greek and Latin, though the truth is not so obvious. 
 
 f The translators of the Bible have sometimes observed the distinc- 
 tion, and sometimes violated it. " Of the tree of the knowledge of good 
 and evil, thou shalt not eat of it ; for in the day that thou eatest thereof 
 thou shalt surely die." One instance in which they have violated it is 
 thus pointed out by Dr. Arnold. " If we speak of the great number of 
 poor persons in England as compared with the rich, we are answered by 
 a text of Scripture, misapplied as stray texts generally are, and are told 
 that God himself has said, ' That the poor shall never cease out of the 
 land.' " This may be explained, however, by the fact that, in the time 
 of the translators, shall expressed mere futurity. Dean Alvord says : " I 
 
100 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 The correct use of shall and will is shown in the fol- 
 lowing sentences : 
 
 Charles, I thank thee for thy love to me, which thou 
 shall find I will most kindly requite. (Shakespeare.) 
 
 Yes, my son, I will point out the way, and my soul 
 shall guide yours in the ascent, for we will take our 
 flight together. (Goldsmith.) 
 
 I propose to write the history of England, etc. I shall 
 recount the errors which, etc. I shall trace the course of 
 that revolution, etc. It will be my endeavor to relate, 
 etc. (Macaulay.) 
 
 The only book that I shall mention is Burnet's " His- 
 tory of the Reformation." (Hallam.) 
 
 By this process we shall be enabled to estimate the 
 depth and richness of an historian's knowledge. (Arnold.) 
 The writer of this discourse icitt feel himself happy 
 should his example stimulate any of his brethren. (Hall.) 
 If the fanaticism of religion have devastated king- 
 never knew an Englishman who misplaced shall and will ; I hardly ever 
 have known an Irishman or a Scotchman who did not misplace them 
 sometimes." Still the following quotations are from English authors : 
 
 We shall now proceed to mention some of the most famous. ... I 
 will begin with a passage of very considerable beauty. (Hallam.) 
 
 An extract from Mr. Hallam shall close the present section and intro- 
 duce the next. (Latham's "English Language.") 
 
 Now, in an inquiry into the credibility of history, the first question 
 which we will consider is, etc. (Arnold). 
 
 I will not resist, therefore, whatever it is, etc., but will forthwith set 
 down, etc. Brief I shall endeavor to be, etc. . I shall detain you no 
 longer, but conduct you, etc., where I will point you out, etc. (Milton.) 
 
 I will now for a moment go over to the position of an opponent, and 
 state his argument for him. (Taylor's " Man Responsible," etc.) 
 
 Theocritus, in an epigram, which shall be cited in the next note, dedi- 
 cates myrtles to Apollo. (Warton.) 
 
 By the fleet racers, ore the sun be set, 
 
 The turf of yon large pasture will be skimmed ; 
 
 There, too, the lofty wrestlers shall contend. (Wordsworth.) 
 
VERBS. ioi 
 
 doms, the fanaticism of irreligion will pass as a deluge of 
 blood over the field of the civilized world. (Taylor.) 
 
 But a torrent, imprudently resisted, will, in time, ac- 
 quire that impetuous force which carries everything before 
 it. (Tytler.) 
 
 Rome shall perish — write that word 
 In the blood that she has spilt. (Cowper.) 
 
 The imperative is used for entreating as well as for 
 commanding. Kill him ; Don't hurt me ; Go, and suc- 
 cess attend you ; Take it if you like, express successively 
 command, entreaty, wish, and permission ; its name, indi- 
 cating only one of its functions, is consequently defect- 
 ive. As this mood implies futurity in the action ex- 
 pressed, a future tense is often used in its place. Steal 
 not and thou shall not steal have the same signification. 
 Sometimes, also, it implies concession, as, Love me, or 
 love me not, it is all the same to me. 
 
 "When a fact is asserted, not as actual but merely as 
 possible or contingent, it is expressed by the subjunctive 
 mood, also called conjunctive, because the contingent as- 
 sertion is usually marked by a conjunction. This mood, 
 as indicated by its more usual name, is confined to the 
 expression of subordinate or subjoined propositions ; it 
 implies the existence of a primary proposition, either ex- 
 pressed or understood, on which it depends. The prin- 
 ciples which govern its use vary considerably in different 
 languages, and are often very perplexing to foreigners. 
 It rarely happens that French and English subjunctives 
 are rendered one by the other in expressing the same 
 ideas.* 
 
 * Goold Brown, in his " Grammar of Grammars," says of it : " The 
 true subjunctive mood in English is virtually rejected by some later 
 grammarians, who, nevertheless, acknowledge under that name a greater 
 number and variety of forms than has ever been claimed for it in any 
 other tongue. All that is peculiar to the subjunctive, all that should 
 
102 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 The infinitive, (liferent from the other moods, affirms 
 the existence of an attribute abstractly, and without the 
 limitation of person and number. The present of the 
 infinitive is, in most languages, used as an abstract noun 
 — a grammatical principle which is general in German, 
 Spanish, and Italian, but much restricted in French and 
 in English. 
 
 The participle denotes time and attribute divested of 
 affirmation ; it implies the existence of a subject, but 
 without designation of persons. The name participle was 
 given to this part of the verb from its partaking of the 
 nature of both the adjective and the verb. In the sen- 
 tences, He is reading ; He is a reading man, the first 
 reading represents an act going on, but the second a 
 habit. The Greek and Latin languages admit of past, 
 present, and future participles ; modern idioms have, for 
 the greater part, only the present and the past. The 
 participle is, in inflected languages, variable or invariable, 
 according as it performs the office of adjective or verb. 
 The principles which govern its variations in French, and 
 particularly those of the past participle, require a most 
 careful attention. 
 
 constitute it a distinct mood, they represent as an archaism, an obsolete 
 or antiquated mode of expression, while they willingly give to it every 
 form of both the indicative and the potential, the two other moods which 
 sometimes follow an if," etc., etc. There seems, it must be confessed, a 
 great tendency in English to avoid the use of the subjunctive altogether, 
 and it looks very much as if it were doomed to destruction. Among 
 writers of the present day wo are constantly meeting with such sentences 
 as these : 
 
 The writer's object is merely to amuse, and whether his story happens 
 to be authentic or not, etc. (Arnold.) 
 
 If any sentiment was deeply fixed in him, that sentiment was, etc. 
 (Macaulay.) 
 
 The audience listened with as much anxiety as if the fate of every one 
 of them was to be decided by the verdict. (Idem.) 
 
VERBS. 103 
 
 The present participle varies considerably in its appli- 
 cation in different languages ; it is used in Greet, English, 
 and German, both as an adjective and as an abstract noun ; 
 in Latin and French it may be converted into an adjec- 
 tive only, and in Italian and Spanish it is altogether 
 inconvertible. The ' present of the infinitive and the 
 present participle may become the subjects or objects of 
 a verb, according as the language admits of either part 
 of the verb being converted into a noun. In the classical 
 ancient languages the participle has given rise to certain 
 forms called gerund and supine, which admit of cases, 
 and which may be considered as verbal substantives. 
 This convertibility of the verb into a substantive is at- 
 tended with great advantage to a language ; it gives it 
 flexibility and copiousness, and affords considerable facil- 
 ity for following the generation and logical association 
 of ideas. 
 
 However limited some languages may be in the sys- 
 tem of their tenses, the deficiency is more apparent than 
 real, because all circumstances of time for which one lan- 
 guage has tenses can be rendered into one which has 
 them not by means of adverbs of time, or by combina- 
 tions of words constituting verbal phrases, thus I am 
 writing is rendered in French by Je suis a 'ecrire, or Je 
 suis en train d'ecrire. J'ecrivais des themes is expressed 
 in English by I was writing, or I used to write exercises. 
 
 To establish more closely the relation between sub- 
 ject and verb, the latter is generally made to undergo 
 changes corresponding to the number of the subject. The 
 person who speaks, the one spoken to, and the one spoken 
 of, are also known by particular final syllables, which in 
 primitive languages can be easily resolved into the addi- 
 tion of the pronoun to the simple elementary form of the 
 verb with which this pronoun has coalesced. Greek, 
 Latin, Italian, and Spanish verbs admit of inflections 
 
104 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 sufficiently distinct and sonorous to preclude the neces- 
 sity of using personal pronouns subject, so that they are 
 by themselves the collective expressions of a judgment 
 in its three essential elements — the subject, predicate, 
 and relation of co-existence with the additional ideas of 
 affirmation, time, number, and • person ; thus, in Latin, 
 studeo, I study, and, in Italian, pgrlera, he will speak, 
 constitute complete propositions. In other idioms, as 
 English, French, and German, pronouns are indispensable 
 accompaniments to the verbs, except sometimes in the 
 imperative, as parle, speak, which is equally a perfect 
 proposition; for it implies an agent and an act, while it 
 couples the idea of the act of speaking with the idea of 
 a person addressed. 
 
 Some languages carry concord so far as to admit of 
 genders in such a manner that it can be known by the 
 termination of the verb whether the subject is masculine 
 or feminine. In most modern languages this principle is 
 sacrificed to a form of politeness which consists in using 
 the plural of the second person for the singular. In 
 French, and more particularly in Italian, it is both cour- 
 teous and elegant to address strangers in the third per- 
 son ; in Spanish this form is almost generally employed. 
 But the German language surpasses all the others in 
 forms of politeness ; for, besides all these anomalies 
 which it has in common with them, it expresses a still 
 higher degree of courtesy by the use of the verb in the 
 third person plural, with a subject in the singular. In 
 Greek, a plural neuter noun often governs the verb in 
 the singular, and in English, as already noticed, a singu- 
 lar collective noun sometimes governs it in the plural. 
 
 The collection of the different moods, tenses, persons, 
 numbers, and genders which constitute a verb is called 
 conjugation. To state in succession all these different 
 parts is to conjugate. Verbs which follow general prin- 
 
VERBS. 105 
 
 ciples of analogy are said to be regular ; those which de- 
 viate from these general forms are called irregular. The 
 tendency is to be regular. Many verbs that used to have 
 two forms for their past tense, such as bore, bare, swore, 
 sware, spoJee, spalce, now take only the former. The reg- 
 ular Saxon termination for the past participle was en, and 
 it appeared in many verbs, such as proven, holpen, waxen, 
 where we now find proved, helped, waxed. Irregularities 
 that have remained, founded on considerations of eu- 
 phony, are always the remnants of some older forms of 
 language. The expediency of this subdivision into reg- 
 ular and irregular verbs is a mere matter of opinion 
 among grammarians ; but, under whatever head the con- 
 jugations are classed, the study of the various changes 
 which the verbs undergo to express all the views of the 
 mind, and the constant practice of conjugating verbs of 
 all sorts, regular and irregular, active, passive, neuter, 
 and reflective, in all moods and tenses, and in all forms, 
 affirmative, negative, interrogative, and negative - inter- 
 rogative, and above all in the formation of clauses and 
 sentences, stand foremost among the indispensable means 
 and exercises to acquire the practical knowledge of any 
 foreign language. 
 
PRONOUNS. 
 
 A peonoun is generally defined as being " a word that 
 supplies the place of a noun," yet the noun would not in 
 all cases express precisely the idea conveyed by the pro- 
 noun. Pronouns have an emphasis and . individuality 
 about them which no noun can have. They can not be 
 considered as mere substitutes for the names of the per- 
 sons for whom they stand ; and, in writing or conversa- 
 tion, no mere name will so clearly designate the person 
 intended as the appropriate pronoun. I and thou espe- 
 cially involve the notion of a person speaking and a per- 
 son spoken to, and the relation between them — an idea 
 that can not be expressed by any name. The fact, then, 
 that they prevent the too frequent repetition of the noun, 
 is to be considered rather as an accidental advantage be- 
 longing to them, than as being a full account of their 
 nature. 
 
 Pronouns may be viewed as a sort of algebraic terms, 
 having of themselves no determinate import, but taking 
 any which circumstances give them. They may apply 
 to all things and to all persons, and yet they specify in 
 the most definite manner the subject of thought so that 
 they are at the same time the most indefinite and yet the 
 most definite of all words. From their frequent use, and 
 their varied combination with the other elements of the 
 sentence, they require our special attention, the more so 
 as they are in many languages very irregular in their 
 
PRONOUNS. 107 
 
 form, concord, and place. The syntactical rules which 
 regulate the use of pronouns in different idioms present, 
 perhaps, greater contrast than those regarding any other 
 class of words. 
 
 In some respects pronouns are a species of nouns, 
 since they express the same ideas as this part of speech ; 
 but, whilst nouns represent objects by their qualities, 
 which are inherent to them, and independently of any 
 other consideration, pronouns represent them in relation 
 to the act of speaking ; they, as it we're, indicate the 
 parts, or dramatis personm, which the subjects of dis- 
 course perform. Hence substantives have been some- 
 times called absolute nouns, and pronouns relative nouns. 
 The phrase John saw James states a simple fact, without 
 showing who speaks, who is spoken to, or who is spoken 
 of ; for we may be ignorant who John and James are ; 
 but the introduction of the pronouns in I saw you, I saw 
 him, you saw me, and the like, tells both the fact and 
 the actors. 
 
 The proper noun, as already noticed, represents only 
 one individual, and the common noun all the individuals 
 of one species or one genus ; but the pronoun may repre- 
 sent everything ; its extension is greater and its compre- 
 hension smaller than any substantive ; it is not, therefore, 
 barely its substitute, as the common definition implies. 
 The extension of the pronoun being essentially unlimited, 
 its import is determined by a substantive, and sometimes 
 by an entire proposition expressed before, and of which 
 it holds the place. 
 
 Pronouns may be divided into personal, possessive, 
 relative, demonstrative, and indefinite. They all agree in 
 gender, number, and person with the nouns for which 
 they stand, and whether for this purpose they change 
 their form or not, they are in all respects treated as the 
 nouns would have been had they been used. 
 
108 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 The personal pronouns I, thou, he, she, it, we, you, 
 they, and their objectives me, thee, him, her, it, us, you, 
 them, serve to distinguish the speaker, the person spoken 
 to, and the person spoken of. It may be interesting to 
 notice the various forms of these pronouns, which are 
 very irregular ; I, for example, bearing no sort of ety- 
 mological relation to the word set down as its objective 
 me, nor the word set down as its plural we — an irregular- 
 ity existing in almost every language. The probability 
 is that I and me were originally indeclinable, and used 
 at different times or in different places both as subjects 
 and objects. This seems to be proved by the variety of 
 dialects which still prevail in different parts where these 
 forms are often used indiscriminately the one for the 
 other. We is employed instead of I by sovereigns in ad- 
 dressing their subjects, and by authors, editors, and the 
 like, with the view of avoiding the appearance of self-im- 
 portance in the use of that most personal of all words, I. 
 In German, French, Italian, and Spanish, pronouns of the 
 second person singular denote familiarity or contempt. 
 This pronoun in English is used exclusively by a religious 
 sect, or reserved for the elevated or poetical style. 
 
 The possessive pronouns mine, thine, his, hers, its, 
 ours, yours, theirs, serve to represent objects possessed. 
 They must not be confounded with the possessive deter- 
 minatives my, thy, his, her, its, our, your, their, which do 
 not represent objects possessed, but only determine the 
 sense of objects actually named, whereas possessive pro- 
 nouns supply their places by themselves. The distinction 
 is important, as in inflected languages determinatives 
 agree in gender and number with the things possessed, 
 whereas the English his, her, and its, in addition to their 
 designating the thing possessed, also indicate the gender 
 of the possessive, which peculiarity, however, applies to 
 the third person singular only, and in no way affects the 
 
PRONOUNS. 109 
 
 function of these words in the sentence, and hence not 
 their classification. 
 
 All pronouns refer to some noun, which, as it generally 
 goes before, gets the name of antecedent, but, as it may ■ 
 come after,* correlative would appear a better term. In 
 the case of one class of pronouns, the reference is so ob- 
 vious and immediate, that they have been called relative, 
 by way of distinction. They are who, whose, whom, 
 which, that, as. Of these, who is used when the refer- 
 ence is to a person ; which, when it is a thing ; that 
 and as refer either to persons or to things. Who, which, 
 and that, and their corresponding forms in all languages, 
 immediately follow the noun to which they refer, which, 
 of course, includes the adjective or adjectival phrases 
 that qualify it ; f but, between as and its correlative, other 
 words may be interposed to a limited extent. % The ob- 
 jective forms whom, which, and that are not unfrequently 
 omitted. The first school I was at is, colloquially at 
 least, as good English as the first school which I was at; 
 
 * To us who dwell on Us surface, the earth is by far the most ex- 
 tensive orb that our eyes can anywhere behold. (Addison.) 
 
 The leading principle kept in view throughout this work is, that its 
 tendency to be useful to mankind at large, is the proper criterion of the 
 propriety of any action, or the justness of any ethical opinion. (Burton's 
 "Life of Hume.") 
 
 •f Men of great and stirring powers, who are destined to mold the age 
 in which they are born, must first mold themselves upon it. (Coleridge.) 
 
 It rests on a combination of physical strength with diplomatic address, 
 of perseverance in object with versatility in means, lehich was never before 
 exhibited on the theatre of the world. (Alison.) 
 
 \ They whose voices are heard the loudest are so foolish or so un- 
 principled as to make the triumph of either an object of just apprehen- 
 sion. (Arnold.) 
 
 All who wished for a change met with a gracious reception in her 
 court, and their spirit of disaffection was nourished by such hopes and 
 promises as in every age impose on the credulity of the factious. (Rob- 
 ertson.) 
 
 10 
 
110 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 and though the omission is condemned by some gram- 
 marians, it is authorized by the usage of the best writers. 
 When the relative refers to two correlatives of different 
 genders, the omission is considered preferable ; as, The 
 lady and gentleman we met yesterday ; the man and 
 the horse we met. That is generally preferred to who or 
 which when the correlative has an adjective joined to it, 
 especially if that adjective is in the superlative, as : Solo- 
 mon was the loisest Icing that ever sat on the throne of 
 Israel. The juggler is the last person that would let the 
 spectators into his own secret. In former times, who and 
 whom, like he and him, applied also to animals and 
 things, while which was not unfrequently applied to per- 
 sons, as we find it in the Lord's Prayer ; but, now that the 
 application of each is settled, we find whose representing 
 of which almost as often as it represents of whom, of 
 which it is in reality the possessive,* corresponding to 
 the French word dont, which is likewise said of both 
 persons and things, f The relative pronoun is sometimes 
 called conjunctive, when connecting a subjoined proposi- 
 tion with its antecedents, and interrogative when relating 
 to a subjoined interrogative proposition. In form they 
 are alike, and answer the purpose of both. In Who did 
 
 * Nor could Claudius think of indulging any private resentment, till 
 he had saved an empire, whose impending ruin would crush both the army 
 and the people. (Gibbon.) 
 
 We are the more likely to guard watchfully against those faults whose 
 deformity we have seen fully displayed in another. (Whately.) 
 
 They agreed, in the main, in regarding the national voice, whose inde- 
 pendence they maintained, as expressed by the national sovereign, in 
 recognizing the king or queen as the head of the church. (Arnold.) 
 
 t Un arbre dont le fruit est excellent. (Laveaux.) 
 
 O'cst un homme dont le merite egale la naissance. (Thomas Corneille.) 
 
 lis se rappelleront celui dont Us les tienncnt. (D'Alembert.) 
 
 Dim, dont nous admirons les ceuvrcs. Les heros dont il tire son origine. 
 (L'Acadcmic.) 
 
PRONOUNS. HI 
 
 it ? who is an interrogative ; in Show me the man who 
 did it, who is a conjunctive pronoun. When what is not 
 used to ask a question, it is a compound relative pronoun 
 including both that and which. I will give you what you 
 toant is equivalent to saying I will give you the thing 
 which you want. 
 
 The demonstrative pronouns this, that, these, those, to 
 which we may add the former and the latter, must not be 
 confounded with similar words used as determinatives. 
 The distinction will be clearly shown by comparing them 
 with their corresponding French forms celui, celle, ceux, 
 celles, representing persons and objects well defined, and 
 the words ceci and cela applying to things and facts in a 
 more vague manner ; * as, celui qui vous parle, in which 
 celui represents a man ; celle qui vous aime, in which celle 
 represents a woman — quite different from ce, cet, and cette, 
 which are demonstrative determinatives, and always ac- 
 company the nouns they designate. Ci or la added to the 
 noun so designated convey the idea of proximity or dis- 
 tance, and impart the same idea to the demonstrative 
 pronoun to which they are added. They are generally fol- 
 lowed by de, qui, dont, if not by their particles ci or la. f 
 
 The indefinite pronouns are one, some, either, neither, 
 and in general all indefinite determinatives when per- 
 forming the office of nouns vaguely referred to in the 
 sentence. Among these must be classed the French 
 word on, the German man, and the English one or people, 
 all meaning exactly the same, and all used alike for a sub- 
 ject not specified, as : on dit ; man sagt ; one says, or 
 people say — all equivalent to the idiomatic passive form 
 
 * Voyez ceci ; examines cela. Que dites-vous de ceci I que pensez-vous 
 
 de cela ? Ceci m'Gtonne, cela me mrprend. 
 
 f Ce fut celui de tous lesjeunes gens que j'aimais leplus. (Fenelon.) 
 Cest celle qui demande d vous parlor. Voild ceux dont j'ai fait choix. 
 
 Voyez celle-ci, examines celleJA (Laveaux.) 
 
112 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 it is said. Notice that the English pronoun one is only 
 accidentally spelled like the unit one, its elder form in 
 Norman French being ome, omme, now written homme 
 in French, from the Latin homo. 
 
 Some of these, as we have seen, are only the deter- 
 minatives used separately from the substantives, and fill- 
 ing the office of pronouns by ellipsis, as the French articles 
 le, la, les, for instance, which stand elliptically for the 
 objective form of personal pronouns. But, although in 
 these two functions they similarly determine the extent 
 of signification of the substantives to which they relate, 
 they should not be confounded. The very absence of 
 the nouns to which such words refer only proves that 
 they are pronouns. The rule for distinguishing one spe- 
 cies from the other is this : The genuine pronoun always 
 stands by itself, and represents a noun not named, whereas 
 the genuine determinative always accompanies its noun, 
 and never appears without it. 
 
ADVEKBS. 
 
 The name adveeb is given to words which serve to 
 modify the meaning of adjectives, of other adverbs, and 
 more especially of verbs, from which they take their 
 name. The adverb is an abbreviated mode of expression, 
 and seems originally to have been contrived to express 
 compendiously in one word what must otherwise have re- 
 quired two or more. Thus, often means " many times " ; 
 when, " at what time " ; why, " for what reason " ; here, 
 " in this place " ; away, " at a distance " ; thus, " in this 
 wise," etc. Every adverb is generally equivalent to a 
 preposition and its complement ; and, therefore, when a 
 language has not a word corresponding to an adverb in 
 another language, it can always express it in that com- 
 pound way. Thus, the French adverb difficilement is 
 rendered in English by with difficulty, and the English 
 leisurely into French by a loisir. 
 
 Single-worded adverbs vary in number in different 
 languages ; those of manner are the most numerous, be- 
 ing formed almost all from adjectives by the addition of 
 an affix which implies the idea of manner, likeness, simi- 
 larity. Thus, the word truly means " in truth ; accord- 
 ing to truth," the same as vraiment in French, and vera- 
 mente in Italian, in which ment and mente, from the Latin 
 mens, have a similar meaning. Many substantives also 
 in English, by taking ly or like, contribute to the forma- 
 tion of a particular class of adverbs, as hourly, yearly, 
 
114 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 instantly, purposely, etc. In Latin, the terminations e 
 and er are the most common characteristic syllables of 
 the adverbs of manner. In Greek, all proper names of 
 places become adverbs by changes of the final syllables. 
 
 From the nature of the adverb it may be seen why 
 the French word en, " of it " ; y, " to it " ; ou, " in 
 which " ; d'ou, " from which," being the equivalents of 
 prepositions and pronouns, may be considered either as 
 pronouns in the oblique case, or as adverbs ; and why, 
 also, the ablative absolute and the supines of Latin verbs 
 are species of adverbs. The adverbs why, when, whence, 
 where, wherefore, are undoubtedly different oblique cases 
 of the pronoun which. 
 
 Negatives are also adverbial expressions denoting, 
 like other adverbs, particular circumstances of time, 
 place, quantity, manner, etc., but in a negative sense. 
 Hence we find them in some languages composed of two 
 terms, one of which is the negative proper, and the other 
 its complement, signifying the circumstance which modi- 
 fies it with relation to time, place, quantity, manner, etc., 
 and which is itself an affirmative expression. For exam- 
 ple, in ne . . . pas, ne . . . point, pas means originally 
 " pace," and point, " point " ; and as a point is less than 
 a pace, so is ne point a stronger negative than ne pas. 
 The notion, therefore, that the French requires two nega- 
 tives to express a negation, as we find it sometimes stated, 
 is altogether erroneous. In that language, as well as in 
 English, two negatives make an affirmative.* It is in 
 
 * Two negatives ought not to be used, unless affirmation is meant. 
 In this respect Bacon, Shakespeare, and Locke, and indeed all our early 
 writers, frequently offend. Usage was in their times divided ; but it has 
 now become fixed, and that on the side of metaphysical propriety. Bacon 
 says, " The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears ■ 
 they can not utter the one, nor will they not utter the other." Shake- 
 speare's "be not too tame neither," and "nor do not saw the air too 
 
ADVERBS. 115 
 
 Greek only that two negatives sometimes enforce instead 
 of destroying each other. In English, the two terms 
 which constitute the negative are generally united in one 
 word ; thus, " not ever " becomes never ; " no thing," 
 nothing ; "no one," none, etc. In French the terms re- 
 main separate, ne being placed before the verb, and its 
 complement after. It is by ellipsis that the second term 
 is sometimes used as a negative. This happens when the 
 verb is understood, and with it the first term, as : Vaimez- 
 vous ? " do you like him, her, or it ? " pas beaucoup, " not 
 much" — that is,je ne I'aimepas beaucoup. 
 
 There are as many adverbs as there are modes of be- 
 ing that can be expressed by a preposition and its com- 
 plement. Single-worded and idiomatic adverbs, with the 
 exception of the adverbs of manner, are in all languages 
 very limited in number, but of frequent recurrence. Some 
 refer to time, as, note, sometimes, often, formerly, lately ; 
 others to place, here, there, elsewhere; quantity, little, 
 much, more ; quality, ardently, vjisely, knowingly ; man- 
 much," arc errors of the same sort. Goldsmith has frequently violated 
 the idiom of the English tongue in this respect, although he has offended 
 in good company: "Never was a fleet more completely equipped, nor 
 never had the nation more sanguine hopes of success." Never should 
 be ever. " He is not «mjust " is right, if we mean to express much the 
 same idea as is conveyed by the words, "He is just." By some it is 
 maintained that this mode of expression strengthens the affirmation, and 
 certainly it may do so in spoken language ; but it more frequently softens 
 the assertion, so as to make it less offensive or disputable. We have a 
 beautiful instance of this in Macaulay's " History of England," where, 
 referring to the " Paradise Lost," he characterizes it as " a song so sub- 
 lime and holy that it would not have misbecome the lips of those ethereal 
 virtues," etc. To have said " that it would have become " the ethereal 
 virtues, would have been too strong ; he therefore, with the art of a con- 
 summate master, says " would not have misbecome." It reminds us of 
 the restrained boldness of the psalmist, when he says, speaking of man, 
 "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels." (Campbell's 
 " Philosophy of Rhetoric") 
 
116 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 ner, well, ill, promptly, slowly, swiftly, elegantly ; inter- 
 rogation, why ? what for ? affirmation, yes, truly, certainly ; 
 negation, no, in no way, not at all ; diminution, almost, 
 nearly; doubt, possibly, perhaps; exception, only, merely, 
 singly; resemblance, as, like, likewise; diversity, differ- 
 ently, variously, otherwise ; addition, together, in the same 
 breath; division, separately, severally, distinctly, apart 
 from others; distance, hence, whence, away ; argument, 
 of course, consequently, therefore, etc. Most of these can 
 be expressed by a preposition and a noun or pronoun, 
 each of which may, by an omission of the other, become 
 accidently an adverb, as : I went and he stayed behind, 
 that is, behind me ; he stayed an hour, that is, during an 
 hour — the preposition in the first sentence and the noun 
 in the second being adverbs by ellipsis. 
 
 Adverbs, being attributive terms, take for the most 
 part the same degrees of comparison, and form them in 
 the same way as adjectives, when these admit of them. 
 From the similarity of nature in these two parts of speech, 
 it also frequently happens that a proposition and its com- 
 plement may be either an adjectival or an adverbial phrase, 
 according as it modifies a substantive or a verb ; as in 
 French, un homme a la mode, " a fashionable man " ; un 
 terrain de niveau, " a leveled ground " ; il s'habille a la 
 , mode, " he dresses fashionably " ; il les met de niveau, 
 "he puts them on a level." In the first two examples, 
 d la mode and de niveau are adjectival phrases ; in the 
 other two they are adverbial. 
 
 Sometimes an adverb and an adjective are equally ap- 
 plicable to a verb, but with a difference of meaning. I 
 found the way easy means that I walked over it, and 
 found it to be an easy way; I found the loay easily 
 would mean that I had no difficulty in finding it out, and 
 seeing how it lay. "When Shakespeare says, Uneasy lies 
 the head that wears a crown, he gives expression to an 
 
ADVERBS. 117 
 
 undisputed truth that a king, worthy of the name, is so 
 weighed down by a sense of the responsibility attached 
 to his office, that he can scarcely sleep. But if he had 
 said, Uneasily lies the head that wears a crown, he would 
 have suggested the ludicrous idea that a crown makes a 
 very bad night-cap. We sometimes hear people in their 
 prayers thank God that He has brought them safely to the 
 beginning of a new day, as if the mode of bringing them 
 over was referred to. They mean surely to thank God 
 for having brought them safe ; but then they should say 
 so. This error of using the adverb when the adjective 
 should be employed is by no means uncommon, and is 
 based on a rule, found in many grammars, that we must 
 always qualify a verb by the adverbial form, and never 
 by the adjectival. According to this rule, such expres- 
 sions as The moon shines bright ; the rose smells sweet ; 
 you look sad, are wrong, and ought to have been written 
 brightly, sweetly, sadly. But this is a mistake. There 
 may be two uses of an adverb as qualifying a verb. One 
 of these may have respect to the action indicated by the 
 verb, describing the mode of performance ; the other may 
 have respect to the result of that action, irrespective of 
 its mode of performance. Thus, we must say the moon 
 shines bright, and not brightly, for it is plain that the 
 qualifying word bright refers not to the mode in which 
 the moon performs her function of shining, but to the re- 
 sult or product of that shining ; that is, the moon is giv- 
 ing light, and that light is bright. The distinction thus 
 made between what may be called the subjective and the 
 objective use of a verb will at once point out the error of 
 such expressions as " looking sadly," " smelling sweetly," 
 " feeling queerly," and the like, for in all these we do not 
 mean to qualify the mode of acting or being, but to de- 
 scribe the result produced by the act or state. To smell 
 sweetly is not meant to describe some sweet way of per- 
 
118 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 forming the act of smelling, but is meant to describe that 
 the smell itself is sweet. In this case the verb "to smell" 
 has no reference to the faculty of perceiving by the or- 
 gans of the nose certain qualities of bodies, but to the 
 power of emitting odors possessed by certain bodies. 
 The rose smells sv>eet is, therefore, equivalent to saying 
 the odor of the rose is sweet, and no other word than an 
 adjective could convey the idea of its sweetness. If I 
 were told that Miss Brown looked beautifully last night, 
 I might wonder what she was looking at, and in what 
 way she did it ; but if I heard that she looked beautiful, 
 I might regret not having seen her on that occasion — 
 beautifully applying to the act of looking with the eye ; 
 beautiful to the fact of appearing to the eye. 
 
 The adverb is to the verb what the adjective is to the 
 noun ; the former serves to modify the signification of the 
 verb, the latter that of the noun ; and in the same way 
 as the adjective indicates an additional quality or mode 
 of being in the noun, so the adverb denotes a particular 
 mode of action which the verb has left partly undeter- 
 mined. Thus the adverb expresses a permanent modifi- 
 cation which, by imparting a special sense to the verb, is 
 thoroughly blended therewith, extending over the entire 
 duration of its action, whereas the adverbial phrase ex- 
 presses merely an accidental circumstance affecting the 
 verb for a special purpose only. The adverbial phrase 
 may be said to express a transient influence ; the adverb 
 a permanent one — the former applying to actions that are 
 casual and accidental, the latter to those that are habitual 
 and constant. This distinction, which is but seldom made 
 in English, is carefully observed in French.* 
 
 * Un autcur qui n'eerit pas <51<§gamment pcut loiilefois de temps en 
 temps rendre des perigees avec Elegance. Resistez avec courage d cette 
 tentation, et suivez toujours courageuscment le clumin de la vertu. 
 (Beauzee.) 
 
ADVERBS. 119 
 
 The position of the adverb varies considerably in 
 different languages, and in any particular language the 
 position of certain adverbs is sometimes well defined, 
 though more generally determined by circumstance. 
 Though no definite rule can be laid down for the posi- 
 tion of adverbs and adverbial phrases in general, yet it is 
 a matter of the greatest importance, so far as precision is 
 concerned, to take care that they be rightly placed, am- 
 biguity being often produced by misplacing them in such 
 a manner as to make them apply equally to the word or 
 clause going before or that coming after. There is, per- 
 haps, no word so often found misplaced, even in the 
 works of distinguished authors,* and none more so than 
 the word only and its correlative alone, the wrong placing 
 of which in a sentence is apt to alter its meaning entirely. 
 Take the following sentence, for instance : The negroes 
 are to appear at church only in boots. By this position 
 of only, it appears that the negroes were not to come to 
 church unless in boots, or with nothing else but boots ; 
 whereas the meaning intended was that they should ap- 
 pear at church, and nowhere else, in boots. The sentence 
 
 * The atrocious crime of being a young man, I shall neither attempt 
 to palliate nor deny. (Pitt.) 
 
 In England, affairs took still a worse turn during the absence of the 
 sovereign. (Hume.) 
 
 Upon this, however, it is not for us here to dilate. (Hallam.) 
 
 A master-mind was equally wanting in the cabinet and in the field. 
 (Southey.) 
 
 The happy genius of Buchanan, equally formed to excel in prose and 
 in verse, etc. (Robertson.) 
 
 This tragedy is alike distinguished for the lofty imagination it dis- 
 plays and for the tumultuous vehemence of the action. (Uazlitt.) 
 
 Thales was not only famous for his knowledge of nature, but also for 
 his moral wisdom. (Enfield's " History of Philosophy.") 
 
 In following the trail of his enemies through the forest, the American 
 Indian exhibits a degree of sagacity which almost appears miraculous. 
 (Alison.) 
 
120 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 should, therefore, have stood thus : The negroes are to 
 appear only at church in boots.* Again : Man is always 
 capable of laughing means that the risible faculty may 
 at any time be excited ; but if we rearrange the same 
 words differently, and say : Man is capable of laughing 
 always, we should mean that, if he wanted to, he could do 
 it forever. The attempt to lay down rules for the posi- 
 tion of the adverb in cases of this kind is generally futile; 
 the only practical rule is this : " Adverbs must be placed 
 so as to leave no doubt what word is intended to be 
 affected by them." 
 
 * A blunder, of which the instances are innumerable, is the misplacing 
 of the word only. A few, taken at random from any boob, will suffice to 
 show the manner in which the word is used : 
 
 " The light, sandy soil of the hills only favors the fern." 
 
 " He was elected, but only was seen twice in the House." 
 
 " I only distribute them among the lower ranks." 
 
 " They only ceased when the day was closing." 
 
 In these cases, as in thousands of others that might be cited, the 
 error consists in placing "only" before the verb, instead of after it; 
 the grammatical effect of which is to make only apply to the verb, instead 
 of to what follows the verb. 
 
 The meaning of the writer is that only the fern is favored ; that the 
 member "was seen only twice"; that the distribution was only to the 
 lower ranks ; and that " they ceased only when (that is, not until) the day 
 was closing." (E. S. Gould, " Good English.") 
 
PREPOSITIONS. 
 
 A pkeposition" is a word that connects two words to- 
 gether in such a manner as to indicate the relation which 
 the things, or ideas signified by them, bear to each 
 other. 
 
 A relation always implies two terms, between which 
 is usually placed the preposition which connects them. 
 The one preceding the preposition has been called its 
 antecedent, the one that follows its complement, because 
 it completes the idea of relation expressed by that prepo- 
 sition. 
 
 Sometimes a relation is indicated by the place alone 
 which the words occupy in the sentence, as that, for in- 
 stance, between a transitive verb and its direct object. 
 Thus, in James resembles his brother, the relation be- 
 tween resembles and its direct object brother is clearly 
 expressed by the latter being placed after the verb ; but 
 in French the corresponding verb ressembler is neuter, 
 whijjh, not having a direct object, requires a preposition 
 to reach it, as, Jacques ressemble cl son frire. Preposi- 
 tions, then, are necessary when relation can not _be indi- 
 cated by relative position alone. 
 
 In some languages the most common relations are in- 
 dicated by inflections ; but, in general, and especially in 
 modern idioms, all such conceptions of the mind are ex- 
 pressed by prepositions. Thus : " Moses gave the law of 
 
 God to the Jewish people " would be expressed in French 
 11 
 
122 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 by Mohse donna la loi de Dieu au peuple juif, but in 
 Latin by Moses dedit legem Dei populo judaico. Each 
 of these relations has its exponent, but this exponent is 
 not, like in English and in French, a separate word ; it 
 is, in the first, the final syllable em of the word legem ; 
 in the second, the final i of the word Dei ; and, in the 
 third, the final o of the words populo judaico. These 
 terminations are called cases. Other relations, less com- 
 mon than these, are also expressed by cases, but then 
 they are more distinctly specified by appropriate prepo- 
 sitions. Thus, in eo adurbem, "I got to the city," and 
 venio ah urbe, " I come from the city," the nature of the 
 relation which is between eo, "I go," and urbe, "the 
 city," is' determined both by the preposition ad, "to," 
 and the termination em of the word urbem ; and that 
 which exists between venio, "I come," and the same 
 noun, by the preposition ab, " from," and the termination 
 e of the word urbe. 
 
 Considered by themselves alone, prepositions are only 
 general and undetermined signs of relations, independ- 
 ently of any antecedent or complement. Still, no prepo- 
 sition finds a place in the sentence without applying to 
 some antecedent, the sense of which it restricts by the 
 idea of which it is the sign, and without being followed 
 by a complement which specifies the relation that is in- 
 dicated in a vague and undetermined manner by the 
 preposition. *• 
 
 The words that can be antecedents of prepositions 
 are : 1. Nouns, as : " What is the matter with your 
 brother " ; " He has an opportunity of displaying his 
 talents"; "He has no taste for music. " 2. Adjectives, 
 as : "A parent anxious about the welfare of his child " ; 
 " Happiness is not consistent with wickedness " ; " He is 
 equal to any emergency." 3. Verbs, as : " The school- 
 master is abroad, and I trust to him " ; " Montague was 
 
PREPOSITIONS. 123 
 
 rewarded by the king, for his services, with the place of 
 chancellor " ; " The style of Johnson abounds in words 
 of foreign origin." 4. Adverbs, as : " The Latin cities to 
 which the Latins sent colonists equally with the Romans"; 
 " I have heard of a work of a foreign officer who took a 
 survey of the European armies previously to the Revolu- 
 tionary War." In the same way, every preposition has 
 necessarily for complement either a noun — as, " He is 
 fond of money " ; " They admitted him into college " — or 
 a pronoun, as, " Be not angry with me " ; "I called on 
 him this morning " — or a verb, as, " I am anxious to see 
 you"; "I am not ambitious of seeing the ceremony." A 
 verb thus used after a preposition is used substantively. 
 In English it can be either the present participle or the 
 present infinitive ; in Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and 
 German, it is always the latter. The particle to, which is 
 the sign of the English present infinitive, must not be 
 confounded with the preposition to / the former always 
 disappears when the latter is used, meaning in order to, 
 as : I came to see you ; I did that to please you, and the 
 like. The sign to is also omitted after the following 
 verbs : Bid, can, care, dare, do, feel, hear, let, make, may, 
 must, need, shall, will, see, behold, and is beginning to be 
 omitted after several others, particularly after verbs that 
 are synonymous with to see, such as perceive, observe, etc. 
 In some cases it is a difference of meaning which deter- 
 mines the omission or retention of to, as : I dare do all 
 that may become a man, and J dare you to do it ; in the 
 first example, dare has the sense of having courage ; in 
 the second it means to challenge, to defy, which reach 
 their complement by the preposition to. 
 
 The true place of a preposition being between its an- 
 tecedent and its complement, it is only by inversion that 
 it can be placed sometimes at the head of a sentence. 
 Thus, By patience and perseverance the work will be com- 
 
124 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 pleted is an inverted construction, the object of which is 
 to emphasize the words patience and perseverance ; its 
 logical order is : " The work will be completed by patience 
 and perseverance." In the same way, In my Father's 
 house are many mansions is equivalent to "there are 
 many mansions in my Father's house," which is its log- 
 ical" construction. From this it will be observed that 
 prepositions and their complements form, in many in- 
 stances, adverbial phrases answering the questions why? 
 where? whence? in the same way as adjectives in one lan- 
 guage frequently take the prepositional form in another. 
 Thus, "a glass bottle" is in French une bouteillede verre; 
 " an ink-bottle," une bouteille a encre. 
 
 In a great number of languages the relation between 
 two nouns is indicated by placing the complement imme- 
 diately before the antecedent, with which it forms, as it 
 were, a single word, as " flower-pot," in French pot a 
 fleurs ; " sea-side," bord de la mer ; and such a relation 
 may even be expressed by several nouns placed- in suc- 
 cession, as " Indian church altar ornaments," for instance, 
 which in French would be rendered by ornaments des 
 autels des 'eglises des Indes. In cases like these the terms 
 antecedent and complement, or consequent, as the latter is 
 sometimes called, seem to be in contradiction with the 
 order of the words in the sentence, but they are not so 
 in reference to the order of the ideas. Thus, in the latter 
 example, it is the idea of ornaments which presents itself 
 first to the mind, and is modified by that of altar, which 
 in turn is modified by the idea of church, as the latter is 
 modified by that of Indian. 
 
 The number of single-worded prepositions amounts to 
 about forty-five in Latin and German, forty-four in French, 
 forty-two in English, thirty-three in Italian, eighteen in 
 Greek, and only sixteen in Spanish ; they do not much 
 exceed the highest of these numbers in any language. 
 
PREPOSITIONS. 125 
 
 Relations for which there are particular words in one 
 idiom may always be expressed in another by preposi- 
 tional phrases formed of adverbs or adverbial phrases 
 and a single preposition ; so, the Latin prce is rendered in 
 English by comparatively with, and in French by en com- 
 paraison de ; the French for above is au-dessus de ; the 
 English for moyennant is by means of, by the help of. 
 
 In some languages, as Greek, Latin, and German, 
 prepositions vary in their government, being followed by 
 different cases ; but in modern idioms they govern their 
 complements as direct objects, with the exception of the 
 French d and de, corresponding generally to the English 
 to and of, the latter being in many instances expressed 
 by the possessive case in preference. The reason of prep- 
 ositions in modern languages usually governing their com- 
 plements as direct objects is owing to their being mostly 
 derived from active verbs, which origin can be easily 
 traced in a few, as except, save, touching, considering, 
 concerning, respecting. This origin, however, escapes 
 observation in most of them, in consequence of the many 
 changes and contractions which they have undergone in 
 the course of time, and in passing from one language into 
 another. 
 
 The relations which the objects of thought bear to 
 each other, considered apart from these objects, are, per- 
 haps, the most abstract notions which can be conceived, 
 and hence the reason why such relations were originally 
 marked by modifications in the noun before words were 
 instituted for that purpose.* The difficulty of determin- 
 
 * " Though the original use of prepositions was to denote the rela- 
 tions of place, they could not be confined to this office only. They by 
 degrees extended themselves to subjects incorporeal, and came to denote 
 relations as well intellectual as local. Thus, because, in place, he who is 
 above has commonly the advantage over him who is below, hence we trans- 
 fer over and wider to dominion and obedience. Of a king, we say, ' he 
 
126 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 ing in a definite manner the exact comprehension of Buch 
 words has introduced much confusion in their applica- 
 tion. It would be impossible to tell all that is included 
 under the most familiar prepositions. In all languages 
 the same prepositions often serve to express various and 
 even opposite relations, and the same relations are fre- 
 quently expressed by different prepositions. Thus, in 
 English we say "at the hour" ; "on the day" ; "in the 
 year " ; and in French, ttre dans le royaume ; Ure en 
 Italic J itre a Rome. Again, " to listen to " is in French 
 'ecouter, and "to think of" penser a. Salle a manger 
 means " dining-room " ; maison a louer, " house to let " ; 
 and maison a vendre, " house for sale." JEtre a pied, a 
 eheval, is " to be on foot, on horseback " ; recevoir quel- 
 qu'un a bras ouverts is "to receive one with open arms." 
 Le palais du roi is " the king's palace," but les mouve- 
 ments du corps, "the movements of the body." "To 
 snatch one from death " is arracher quelqu'un a la mort, 
 and " to drink out of a glass " is in French boire dans un 
 verre. The dissimilarity which exists in the mode of 
 using this part of speech in different languages presents 
 to foreigners a perplexity which nothing but persevering 
 practice can overcome. 
 
 A rule, however, which is common to all languages is 
 this, that in every case the preposition must be suggested 
 by its antecedent, as : "Every new institution should 
 be but a fuller development of, or an addition to, what 
 already exists." "The citizens of one country could 
 
 ruled over his people ' ; of a common soldier, ' he served under such a 
 general.' So, too, we say, with thought, without attention, thinking over 
 a subject, etc. All which instances, with many others of the like kind, 
 show that the first words of men, like their first ideas, had an immediate 
 reference to sensible objects ; and that in after-days, when they began to 
 discern with their intellect, they took those words which they found al- 
 ready made, and transferred them by metaphor to intellectual concep- 
 tions." (Hermes, book II, ch. iii.) 
 
PREPOSITIONS. 127 
 
 neither intermarry with, nor inherit nor purchase land 
 from, those of any other." Inherit happens to take the 
 same preposition after it as purchase, else it would have 
 required a different one immediately after it also — all ap- 
 plying to the same complement, those of any other. The 
 French is even more strict, and requires that in such a 
 case all prepositions shall govern their complement in the 
 same manner, or else that, after every preposition, its 
 complement shall be repeated or represented by a pro- 
 noun. Thus, un homme qui 'ecrit, selon les circonstances 
 pour et contre un parti, est un homme Men m'eprisable, is 
 correct, because pour and contre govern their comple- 
 ment both as their direct object — that is, we can say 
 equally well pour un parti as contre un parti ; but we 
 can not say celui qui ecrit en faveur et contre un parti, 
 because en faveur needs to be followed by the preposition 
 de, whereas contre does not need any.* 
 
 The name preposition, given to this part of speech 
 from the accidental fact of its being placed before its 
 
 * In French almost all prepositions of one syllable are repeated be- 
 fore their complements, whenever there are many, as : La lecture sert a 
 orner V esprit, a regler les mmurs, et k former le jugemenl. Lapalrie a dcs 
 droits sur vos talents, sur vos vertus, sur vos sentiments, et sur toutes vos 
 actions. 
 
 Z'7iomme de Men, modesle avec courage, 
 
 Et la beaute spirituelle et sage, 
 
 Sans biens, sans mom, sans tons ces titres vains, 
 
 Sont d mes yeux les premiers des humains. 
 
 (Volt., "Nan.," act I, so. i, 113.) 
 The repetition of the prepositions en and de may be dispensed with 
 in making enumerations. 
 
 Toujours logh en de trk-beaux cli&teaicx 
 De princes, dues, comtes et cardinaux, 
 H voit partout de grands pr&dicateurs, 
 Riches prelais, casuistes, docteurs, 
 Moines oVEspagne el nonnains d'ltalie. 
 
 (Voltaire.) 
 
128 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 complement, is apt to lead to misapprehension as regards 
 its nature. In many instances it is even incorrect, as in 
 certain Oriental idioms it comes always after its comple- 
 ment, and in Latin,* Greek, f and German, J it occa- 
 sionally also occupies this place. Instances of thus 
 placing the preposition are quite numerous in English, 
 as : hats off; hands off; he is well or ill off; they cut his 
 head off; he is an ugly fellow to deal with; he is never to 
 be depended upon ; this is a good rule to go by ; the thing 
 is not to be thought of; this is a good place to live in ; 
 he has nothing to live for; he has no one to go to, and the 
 like. It is more particularly when the ohject is a relative 
 or interrogative pronoun that in English the preposition 
 is thrown to the end, as : What are we coming to? What 
 are you talking about? I know what you are after. 
 What will you sell that horse for ? Whom do you speak 
 to? Whom do you ask for ? Whom did you give it to ? 
 etc. And so with interrogative constructions in general. 
 Whence come you ? is grammatically correct, but no one 
 
 * Antiochus . . . Tauro tonus regnare jussus est. 
 
 (Cic, "Pro rege Dejot.," 13, 36.) 
 Aqua Trebise erat pectoribus tenus. (Livy, 21, 54, 9.) 
 Quibus de scriptum est. (Cic, " De Invent.," ii, 48, 141.) 
 Quos ad . . . (Cic, "De Nat. Deorum," ii, 4, 10.) 
 Hunc post . . . (Cic, " Quasst. Tuac," ii, 6, 16.) 
 Hominem propter. (Tacitus.) 
 f apfia Aio/tiiSous juera. (Eurip., " Alcest ," v, 483.) 
 irvp irv&ovai fiuKT'iipayv &tto. (Id., v, 493.) 
 'IfrdxTiv k&to, Koipweovcri. (Horn., " Od.," 1, 247.) 
 In Attic prose only irepf is so found, but this very often. 
 irpuTov jitex avSpmrotifff/jiov iripi. (Plat, " Kep.," v, p. 469, B.) 
 iiv iyi> oiSh oBte fieya oStc tr/UKphp irepi evdta. (Plat., " Apol.," p. 
 
 19, C.) 
 
 toAtov a-<pi e/j.e\e vipi. (Herod., vi, 101.) 
 
 % <£x lefcte fetttem ©tiutbe gemdg fctyr cinfnm. (Goethe.) 
 
 3Utf3 erfte bemfe id) metnem ©ott burd) Sefum <£§ri|lum eurer aUer fatten. 
 
 (Luther.) 
 
PREPOSITIONS. 129 
 
 would ever say so. The only way of putting that in- 
 quiry is, Where do you come from? Where are you go- 
 ing to? is also the usual mode of asking the question, 
 although the preposition is here not absolutely necessary, 
 this adverb of rest, where, being used in the sense of the 
 adverb of motion, whither. The question, Were you 
 going to do it ? is likewise in conversational style prop- 
 erly answered by I was going to, or I was not going 
 to, as the case may be, leaving do it out by ellipsis. This 
 kind of colloquial abbreviation comprehends several 
 more phrases in common use, such as ought to, want to, 
 neglect to, object to, and the like — some of them not very 
 elegant, but all quite unobjectionable on the score of 
 grammar. In some cases there is a choice whether the 
 preposition shall precede or follow its complement, and it 
 is then generally determined by considerations of euphony. 
 Thus, we may say : The man to whom I had written, or 
 the man I had written to. In this particular instance 
 the former term, if not more correct, would probably be 
 more usually employed, but in many others an inversion 
 would be better liked. Thus : You are the man I wanted 
 to have some talk with, would be most always said ; You 
 are the man with whom Iioanted to have some talk, sel- 
 dom. These sentences, it is true, are colloquial, but not 
 the less good English, and show that the usual definition 
 of the preposition as " a word placed before a noun or 
 pronoun to show its relation to some other word of the 
 sentence," is incorrect, and the name itself a misnomer, as 
 it neither expresses the nature of the word, nor indicates 
 the place it occupies in the sentence. 
 
CONJUNCTIONS. 
 
 The different parts of speech thus far considered — 
 verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and preposi- 
 tions — all enter into the formation of propositions, show- 
 ing the relations that exist between their component parts ; 
 in like manner propositions may be related to each other 
 in various ways, the nature of which needs also to be indi- 
 cated by distinct and appropriate signs. 
 
 Sometimes a proposition stands in contrast with a pre- 
 ceding clause ; at other times it depends upon the one 
 that follows as a necessary condition ; and then again it 
 requires a second proposition to develop its meaning fully. 
 Make haste, or you will miss the train • I know it, and I 
 can prove it ; You may say so, but J know better ; I will 
 call this evening, if you are disengaged ; She is persuaded 
 that every one admires her, though she is rather homely, 
 are sentences composed of two or more propositions which, 
 though complete in themselves, express their relations and 
 mutual dependence only by means of the words or, and, 
 but, if, that, and though, which link them together, and 
 hence are called conjunctions. 
 
 Not only do conjunctions serve to connect clauses and 
 sentences, but even two or more propositions may often 
 by their aid be condensed into one, as : Honor thy father 
 and thy mother ; He or I must go ; Be neither a miser 
 nor a spendthrift, each of which can be resolved into two 
 clauses : Honor thy father and honor thy mother ; He 
 
CONJUNCTIONS. 131 
 
 must go or I must go ; Be not a miser and be not a 
 spendthrift. 
 
 Like prepositions, so conjunctions are primarily ad- 
 verbs used in a demonstrative and relative sense. Hence 
 most of the conjunctions are worn and petrified cases of 
 pronouns. The relation between two propositions was 
 originally expressed by simply setting them side by side ; 
 afterward, by employing a demonstrative at the begin- 
 ning of the second clause, to refer to the whole preceding 
 one. The relative pronoun can be shown to have been 
 in the first instance a demonstrative ; indeed, we can still 
 use that in English in a relative sense. Since the demon- 
 strative at the beginning of the second clause represented 
 the first clause, and was, consequently, an attribute of the 
 second, it had to stand in some case, and in course of 
 time the case became a conjunction. How closely allied 
 the adverb and the conjunction- are may be seen from 
 Greek and Latin, where w? or quum can be used as either 
 the one or the other. The English and, it may here be 
 observed, has probably the same root as the Greek kt«, and 
 originally signified " going further." 
 
 In the same way as the number of prepositions in any 
 language is inadequate to express all relations that can 
 exist between words, so the number of single-worded 
 conjunctions is insufficient to express all relations that 
 may exist between different propositions ; the deficiency, 
 however, is easily supplied by conjunctional phrases 
 formed with verbs, prepositions, or adverbs, as, so that ; 
 suppose that ; except that ; for fear that ; as soon as ; 
 as long as ; as much as ; instead of ; for want of ; this 
 is why, etc. In fact, conjunctions, like most other rela- 
 tional words, are elliptical and contracted phrases, an 
 origin so obvious in some of them, that they may with 
 equal propriety be called words or phrases. 
 
 For logical purposes, and as far as reasoning is con- 
 
132 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 cerned, no part of speech is of more consequence than 
 the one under consideration. Different from prepositions, 
 the meaning of conjunctions is generally well defined, and 
 seldom fails to indicate, in a clear and distinct manner, 
 the nature of the relation that exists between the clauses 
 which they join together. An exception to this is the 
 conjunction and, which in its frequent recurrence is some- 
 times connective, at other times cumulative, then again 
 redundant, and often without meaning. For instance, 
 God spake, and it was done ; he commanded, and it stood 
 fast. Here are four propositions, forming each a perfect 
 sense, and coupled in pairs by the conjunction and, the 
 office of which in the one pair is to indicate that the 
 creation of all things was the consequence of a word of 
 God ; and in the other, that the effect expressed in the 
 second clause was the result of God's command. Speak- 
 ing of the cheapness of Bibles at the present day, a writer 
 says : The only revelation of God's will to mankind, and 
 the only record of God's dealings with men, is now to be 
 obtained for a sum which a laboring man might save out 
 of one day's wages. Here one thing, and not two, is the 
 subject of the sentence. If and were used as a connective 
 for the purpose of superadding a second clause to the 
 first, the verb would be in the plural, and the sentence 
 would convey the idea that the writer was speaking of 
 twoi books — one containing the only revelation of God's 
 will, and the other the only record of his dealings ; but 
 this is not the meaning, and the real subject of the verb 
 is is to be found in the words that are omitted, and 
 which, being reproduced, would make the sentence read : 
 That book, which is the only revelation, etc. The ellipsis 
 is often much disguised, and apt to mislead by two or 
 more of its complements appearing as a complex subject ; 
 the mistake is, however, easily corrected when the verb 
 is in the singular, as in the following examples from the 
 
CONJUNCTIONS. 133 
 
 French, in which the form of the verb directly points to 
 the subject prefacing each sentence : Aimer Dieu et vivre 
 suivant ses passions, c'est une chimlre ; that is : I? action 
 de — A imer Dieu, etc. Ne craindre ni Dieu ni les kommes, 
 ni le t'emoignage de sa conscience, c'est le caractere d'un 
 sc'elkrat qui doit dtreproscrit de la societe. 
 
 In mentioning persons or things, and for the purpose 
 of enumeration in general, and is usually placed before 
 the last term named, as : two, four, and six are even num- 
 bers. It has here evidently no meaning, and is only an 
 expletive. The same idiomatic use of and occurs in count- 
 ing, as : two and four and six is twelve. Here and has 
 the meaning of the sign (+) set between numbers and 
 quantities, signifying that they are to be added to- 
 gether, and with this meaning it is difficult to call it a 
 conj unction. The sentence, John and James went to town, 
 may be resolved into two clauses, John went to town and 
 James went to town, which may have been at the same 
 time or at different times ; it is only by an adverb, and 
 not by the conjunction, that it can be specified whether 
 they went separately or together. John and James car- 
 ried a basket seems to indicate that they did it conjointly, 
 but only by inference, as in the case of many articles be- 
 ing removed, such as one trunk, one valise, and two bas- 
 kets. I might say that Patrick carried the trunk, William 
 the valise, John and James a basket, which would indicate 
 that John carried one basket and James the other. The 
 case would be somewhat different if, instead of a basket, 
 I had said the basket ; but, even then, if the basket hap- 
 pened to be a heavy one, John and James might have 
 carried it alternately, instead of conjointly. The fact is, it 
 is only predicated that John carried and that James car- 
 ried ; but what they carried, and the manner in which they 
 carried it, must be expressed by a noun and some appro- 
 priate adverb, if ambiguity is to be avoided. Often, how- 
 12 
 
134 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 ever, this is not necessary, and even not desirable, when 
 the context, usage, or good common sense readily supplies 
 the words that are omitted. This is especially the case 
 in scientific formulas and general expressions for resolving 
 problems, as, for instance, Let ABandBC and C D form 
 a triangle, which evidently means, " Let A B, B C, and C D 
 he so placed as to form a triangle " — the words omitted 
 being so clearly understood, that to every mind it is the 
 letters that indicate the combination, and not the words 
 and, which are mere signs of enumeration, and which 
 could be perfectly dispensed with, as they are in many 
 languages,* without altering the meaning of the sentence. 
 When Lsay, The wheel and axle is a mechanic power, the 
 very use of the verb is in the singular shows my mind 
 not to view the wheel and the axle separately, but as a 
 combination, designated by a single word in French, le 
 treuil. f 
 
 Though sentences like these may not be logically cor- 
 rect, it would be idle, even in the sense of grammar, to 
 criticise expressions that have been sanctioned by usage, 
 for it is evident that the grammatical correctness or in- 
 
 * Etant dowries A B, BO, CD, construire un triangle. A B, B C, 
 CD feien t>ie ©etten etneS SiretecES. 
 
 f " Some languages are more elliptic than others, that is, the habits 
 of thought of some nations will bear the omission of certain members of 
 a sentence, better than the habits of thought of other nations. In Eng- 
 lish we should say, ' At the Equinox the sun rises at six and sets at six.' 
 But if we were speaking in French, we should say, ' At the time of the 
 Equinox the sun rises at six hours of the morning, and sets at six hours of 
 tlie evening.' Now here there is no doubt that the Frenchman has the 
 advantage in fullness and propriety of expression. Any one disposed to 
 cavil at our English sentence might say, ' rises at six and sets at six ! 
 Six what ? Six miles, or six minutes, or six occasions ? ' But we do not 
 in practice thus cavil, because we are in the enjoyment of common sense, 
 and we are prepared, in the daily use of our language, to omit that which 
 the thought would naturally supply." (Dean Alford, " A Plea for the 
 Queen's English.") 
 
CONJUNCTIONS. 135 
 
 correctness of an expression depends upon its intelligi- 
 bility, that is to say, upon the ordinary use and custom 
 of a particular language.. Whatever is so unfamiliar as 
 not to be generally understood is ungrammatical ; in 
 other words, it is contrary to the habits of a language as 
 determined by usage and common consent. Viewed in 
 this way, we can explain how it happens that the gram- 
 mar of a cultivated idiom so frequently disagrees with 
 that of another. Thus, for instance, the French word ou 
 may be placed before as many alternatives as there are in 
 the sentence ; in English, according to some grammarians, 
 the corresponding word or can refer to one alternative 
 only ; yet we read in a distinguished writer : Either the 
 words were idiomatic, or were not intelligible, or were not 
 needed, or looked ill, or sounded ill, or some other valid 
 reason existed against them* The negative ni in French 
 may be repeated before as many words as depend upon 
 the same negation ; in English, its corresponding neither, 
 nor, were originally dual words, but are now freely ex- 
 tended to three and even more alternatives, as : Logic 
 neither observes, nor invents, nor discovers, but proves. 
 The rector was neither laborious, nor obliviously self- 
 denying, nor yet very copious in alms-giving. f It will be 
 observed that, while all lexicographers agree in defining 
 either as " one or the other," and neither as " not the one 
 or the other," yet the repetition of their' correlatives or 
 and nor to introduce two or more co-ordinate clauses, 
 though perhaps a Gallicism, allows them to be expressed 
 with an emphasis that could not well be obtained by any 
 other arrangement of the sentence. 
 
 The usual definition of the conjunction as a word 
 which connects sentences and parts of sentences to indi- 
 cate their relation and mutual dependence, falls short of 
 
 * Dean Trench, " English Past and Present." 
 
 f Bain, " English Grammar as bearing upon Composition.'' 
 
136 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 precision in the case of the conjunction that, which indi- 
 cates not merely a junction of two ideas, or a simple rela- 
 tion of dependence, hut an intimate union of two ideas, 
 one of which is always the indispensable complement of 
 the other. Thus : I believe that the soul is immortal ; I 
 doubt that one can be happy without being virtuous ; I 
 observed that you did not speak to him; I hope that you 
 may succeed. In each of these sentences the verb de- 
 mands a complement expressing something, which, being 
 developed into a regular clause, is linked to the leading 
 clause by the word that. But even as the relation be- 
 tween propositions was originally expressed by mere jux- 
 taposition, so this conjunction, which is always expressed 
 in French, is often omitted in English, as with a few 
 verbs also in German. I hope that you may succeed ; I 
 wish that you may get it ; I know that you are right, 
 are expressions equally correct with or without the con- 
 junction. And not only are complementary ideas often 
 expressed in English without this conjunction and the 
 verb in a personal mood, but sometimes also with the 
 verb in the infinitive, as : I believe him to be honest ; 
 What do you want me to do? I want you to be just j 
 the same as in Latin : "Volo vos essejustos. Credo Deum 
 esse omnipotentem, and the like. 
 
 No word is a conjunction without an antecedent, 
 whether expressed or understood ; for to link, join, or 
 couple affirmations, two terms at least are necessary. If, 
 therefore, a conjunction commences a sentence, it is by 
 inversion, which is sometimes resorted to for the purpose 
 of placing emphasis on the depending clause, as : If he is 
 guilty, his punishment will be severe. Since it rains, I 
 will have to stay at home. To express these clauses in 
 regular order would certainly be very feeble. When a 
 sentence is composed of two propositions joined by a con- 
 junction, harmony has often much to do with their rela- 
 
CONJUNCTIONS. 137 
 
 tive position, especially in French, which generally re- 
 quires the shorter clause to be placed first, as : Zorsqu r on 
 est honnete homme, on a bien de la peine d soupponner les 
 autres de ne Vitre pas. Puisque la nature se contente de 
 peu, a quoi ton tine table servie aveo somptuosit'e et pro- 
 fusion? It will require but little taste or literary dis- 
 crimination to see at once the inadequacy of the following 
 regular construction : On a Men de la peine a soupponner 
 son semblable de n'Stre pas honnSte homme, lorsqu'on Vest 
 soi-m&me. A quoi bon une table servie aveo somptuosit'e 
 et profusion, puisque la nature se contente de peu? In 
 English, the conjunctions when, while, whereas, since, un- 
 less, before, after, and a few others, often commence, on 
 the same ground, the sentence by inversion. And, but, 
 for, thus, are found sometimes at the head of the sen- 
 tence without any apparent correlative clause, but then 
 the substance of such a clause is found in the previous 
 sentence, which is tacitly referred to by the writer or 
 speaker to render more forcible the words that follow. 
 
 The government of conjunctions is, in the study of a 
 language, a source of much perplexity, which the rules 
 given in grammar are not always able to remove. In 
 most languages the rule is that they govern the subjunc- 
 tive or the indicative, according as they imply contin- 
 gency or not, which would be easy enough if the dis- 
 tinction were always clear ; but it is not, and the shades 
 of difference are sometimes so delicate as to escape the 
 writer's attention. Even in English, where the use of 
 the subjunctive is well-nigh dispensed with entirely, and 
 observed only with the conjunctions if and whether, con- 
 siderable uncertainty often prevails as regards their im- 
 port. Here, however, the general rule is plain enough, 
 that when matter of fact is concerned, we should use 
 the indicative ; when matter of doubt, the subjunctive. 
 Whether I be master or you, one thing is plain, indicates 
 
138 PRINCIPLES OF GENERAL GRAMMAR. 
 
 ' uncertainty as to which is master ; You shall soon see 
 whether I am master, or you, leaves no doubt as to the 
 fact, at least not in the mind of the speaker. The follow- 
 ing method of determining the amount of doubt expressed 
 in a conditional proposition is recommended as useful : 
 " Insert, immediately after the conjunction, one of the 
 two following phrases : (1) as is the case ; (2) as may or 
 may not be the case. By ascertaining which of these two 
 supplements expresses the meaning of the speaker, we as- 
 certain the mood of the verb which follows. When the 
 first formula is the one required, there is no element of 
 doubt, and the verb should be in the indicative mood. 
 If (as is the case) he is gone, I must follow him. When 
 the second formula is the one required, there is an ele- 
 ment of doubt, and the verb should be in the subjunctive 
 mood. If (as may or may not be the case) he be gone, I 
 must follow him.'" * This rule, which is good for English, 
 in no way applies to any other idiom, for the government 
 of conjunctions varies not only for the different conjunc- 
 tions of one language, but for the corresponding conjunc- 
 tions in different languages. " When you come to-morrow," 
 in which when governs the present indicative in English, 
 has for corresponding conjunction quand governing the 
 future tense in French : Quand vous viendrez demain. 
 In " If he should come," the English conditional has for 
 corresponding tense the imperfect of the indicative in 
 French, s'«7 venait. " Before you came," indicative in 
 English, is rendered by, Avant que vous vinssiez, with 
 the verb in the subjunctive mood, in French. 
 
 Prepositions, adverbs, and conjunctions having, in 
 many instances, a common origin, and being often con- 
 verted one into the other, are easily confounded. To dis- 
 criminate correctly between these three species of words, 
 we must bear in mind that prepositions have always for 
 
 * Latham, " History of the English Language." 
 
CONJUNCTIONS. 139 
 
 their complements nouns, pronouns, and verbs in the in- 
 finitive mood when used substantively ; -whereas adverbs 
 generally follow,, and conjunctions precede verbs when 
 used as such. Thus, in the following sentences : " He 
 went out before me," II sortit avant moi, " before " and 
 avant are prepositions. In " He went out before I saw 
 him," II sortit avant que je le visse, " before " is a con- 
 junction, and avant que a conjunctional phrase. In " He 
 went out before,'''' II sortit auparavant, "before" and 
 auparavant are adverbs. Prepositions govern personal 
 pronouns only as their objects ; but conjunctions are fol- 
 lowed by personal pronouns as subjects, as : "Have a fire 
 for me, for I am cold," Ayez du feu pour moi, car fai 
 froid. 
 
 Furthermore, adverbs, different from prepositions, do 
 not connect words, nor do they connect propositions like 
 conjunctions. They mark no relations between substan- 
 tives or sentences, but modify the import of verbs, ad- 
 jectives, and adverbs, and can always be changed into 
 phrases formed of a preposition with its complement, 
 which is not the case with prepositions and conjunctions. 
 Prepositions require nouns or pronouns, and conjunctions 
 require verbs, to complete the ideas of relation which they 
 express ; whereas adverbs have no complement, but serve 
 themselves to complete or modify the idea expressed by 
 the verb. Verbs can not be used interrogatively with 
 their governing conjunctions ; but they may be used so 
 with the adverbs which complete or modify their meaning. 
 
 To complete the distinction between adverbs, preposi- 
 tions, and conjunctions, we may add that prepositions are 
 to substantives what conjunctions are to verbs, and that 
 adverbs are to verbs, adjectives, and adverbs what adjec- 
 tives are to nouns. 
 
INTEKJECTIONS. 
 
 It is only to conform to common practice that we 
 place this class of words among the parts of speech, since 
 they should be considered rather as vague sounds than as 
 distinct, definite words. They are naturally indicative, 
 not conventionally representative, of emotions. They 
 have not the fixity of real words ; for they vary in into- 
 nation and quantity with every emotion that gives them 
 birth. They follow not the laws of language, but those 
 of nature ; they are, like the other signs of language of 
 action, common to all languages and intelligible to. all 
 men. The neighing of a horse, the lowing of a cow, the 
 barking of a dog, the purring of a cat, sneezing, cough- 
 ing, groaning, shrieking, and any other involuntary con- 
 vulsion with oral sound, have almost as good a title to be 
 called parts of speech as interjections have. The person 
 who uses interjections uses them as he would a gesture — 
 to express surprise, pain, joy, contempt, or any other 
 emotion ; but, although he uses them thus, he makes no 
 affirmation. He no more affirms that he is surprised, or 
 that he is in pain, or that he is scornful or happy, than 
 if he started back, wrung his hands in agony, smiled, 
 or curled his lip contemptuously. In like manner the 
 hearer understands his meaning, but he would have un- 
 derstood the gesture as well. Nothing is affirmed or de- 
 nied by this class of words, if words they can be called ; 
 neither do they enter into propositions wherein anything 
 
INTERJECTIONS. 141 
 
 is affirmed or denied. They never affect the grammatical 
 structure of a sentence, and are wholly independent of 
 propositions, as much so as the hiss of a snake or the 
 roar of a lion — rexpressions of which we infer the mean- 
 ing, but expressions as to the meaning whereof we are 
 not informed in the way we are informed by proposi- 
 tions. These remarks, of course, apply to what are called 
 interjections proper, such as, ah! aha! eh I oh! ho! lo! 
 alas! etc. ; the words, help! fire! dear me! strange! 
 welcome ! adieu ! and the like, often used like interjec- 
 tions, properly belong to other parts of speech. 
 
CONCLUSION. 
 
 Aftee carefully perusing these pages, which are ad- 
 dressed to his reason and not to his memory, the student 
 should, in reviewing them, test his understanding of the 
 principles unfolded by illustrations and examples made 
 by himself, and to the extent of his ability, in any lan- 
 guage he happens to be acquainted with. By adhering 
 to this advice, he will to a remarkable degree develop his 
 powers of observation and criticism, which will enable 
 him not only to perceive more distinctly what he should 
 learn to understand and imitate, but also to sum up cor- 
 rectly the result of his investigations. If, for instance, a 
 number of individual expressions be presented in which 
 the same peculiarity of arrangement prevails, he will be 
 struck by the resemblance, readily imitate that peculiarity 
 of arrangement when required to construct other sen- 
 tences of the same sort, and easily of himself infer the 
 rule which governs them all. This analytical mode of 
 studying grammar, similar to the intellectual process by 
 which we arrive at a knowledge of all natural laws, is the 
 most rational and the most favorable to mental discipline ; 
 it consists in observing facts, comparing them, remarking 
 their resemblances and differences, and afterward bring- 
 ing into the same class all similar facts. Those which 
 may be generalized constitute the rules, and those which 
 are not comprised within any class form the exceptions. 
 Thus observation, comparison, and generalization are the 
 essential means of arriving at the knowledge of any par- 
 ticular grammar. It is by this inductive process that all 
 grammars have been made. 
 
ENGLISH GRAMMAR. 
 
 Quackenbos's Illustrated Lessons in Our Language. De- 
 signed to teach children English Grammar without its Technicalities, 
 in a common-sense way, chiefly by practical exercises. 16mo. 200 
 pages. 
 
 Quackenbos's First Book in English Grammar. 16mo. 120 
 pages. 
 
 Quackenbos's English. Grammar. 12mo. 288 pages. 
 
 Cobbett's English. Grammar, carefully revised and annotated by 
 Alfred Atees, author of " The Orthoepist," " The Verbalist," etc. 
 With Index. 18mo. 254 pages. 
 Mr. Ayres makes a feature of the fact that Who and Which are 
 
 properly the co-ordinating relative pronouns, and that That is properly 
 
 the restrictive relative pronoun. 
 
 Covell's Digest of English Grammar. Synthetical and Analyt- 
 ical ; classified and methodically arranged. Accompanied by a Chart 
 of Sentences. 12mo. 219 pages. 
 
 Elementary Lessons in Historical English Grammar. Con- 
 taining Accidence and Word-formation. By the Rev. Eichaed Mor- 
 ris, LL. D., President of the Philological Society, London. 18mo. 
 254 pages. 
 
 Mary's Grammar. Interspersed with Stories, and intended for the 
 Use of Children. 12mo. 240 pages. 
 
 Mulligan's Structure of the English Language. Being an 
 Attempt to furnish an Improved Method of teaching Grammar. Large 
 12mo. 574 pages. 
 
 Primer of English Grammar. By the Rev. Richard Morris, M. A., 
 LL. D. 18mo. Literature Primer Series. 
 
 English Grammar Exercises. By Morris and Bowen. Litera- 
 ture Primer Series. 
 
 Words, and how to put them together. By Harlan H. Bal- 
 lard. Flexible cloth, 83 pages. 
 
 The 'Word-writer : an Exercise Book, designed to accompany " Words, 
 and how to put them together." By Harlan H. Ballard. 
 This book, though written to accompany the author's text-book, can 
 be used with any grammar. ' 
 
 D. APPLETON & CO,, Publishers, 
 
 NEW YORK, BOSTON, CHICAGO SAN FRANCISCO. 
 
ORTHOGRAPHY AND ORTHOEPY. 
 
 Webster's Elementary Spelling-Book. 16mo. 173 pages. 
 
 The enormous sale and remarkable popularity of this famous Speller 
 are among the marvels of the age. .,...,. , ko „ 
 
 The original of this work, by Noah Webster, was published m 1783, 
 and since that time nearly 50,000,000 copies of it have been made and 
 sold. It would be impossible to say how many of the men and women of 
 our country, now living, and under sixty years of age, began their educa- 
 tion with this book, learned from its pages to distinguish between the 
 shapes of those terrible tormentors of child-life, the twenty-six letters of 
 the alphabet, and were initiated into the great mysteries of a, b — ab, and 
 kindred combinations. The number is very large, but of the rising genera- 
 tion certainly a great majority will be of this class. We still print con- 
 siderably over 1,000,000 copies of the famous old " Blue Back " per an- 
 num. 
 
 Jacob's Learning to Spell, to Read, to Write, and to Compose — all 
 at the same time. 16mo. 332 pages. 514 Illustrations. 
 
 The Orthoepist : A Pronouncing Manual, containing about three 
 Thousand Five Hundred Words, including a Considerable Number of 
 the Names of Foreign Authors, Artists, etc., that are often mispro- 
 nounced. By Alfred Ayres. 18mo. 208 pages. School Edition. 
 (Edition for general use. Cloth, gilt or red edges, $1.00.) 
 
 The Verbalist : A Manual Devoted to Brief Discussions of the Eight 
 and the Wrong Use of Words, and to some other matters of interest 
 to those who would speak and write with propriety. By Alfred 
 Atres. 18mo. 220 pages. 
 
 Errors in the Use of English. By the late William B. Hodgson, 
 LLi. D., Fellow of the College of Preceptors, and Professor of Polit- 
 ical Economy in the University of Edinburgh. American revised 
 edition. 12mo. 246 pages. 
 
 The aim of this volume is to cultivate a correct use of the English 
 language (particularly in writing) by pointing out many breaches of com- 
 mon rules made by writers of high reputation. The value of the work 
 lies in " its orderly arrangement of the different classes of errors to be 
 avoided, its wide range of examples, and its lucid and learned exposition 
 of principles." 
 
 A copious index, forming a complete topical guide to its contents is a 
 valuable feature of this work. ' 
 
 D. APPLETON & GO., Publishers, 
 
 NEW YORK, BOSTON, CHICAGO, SAN FRANCISCO.