Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg (popular books to read TXT) 📕

The assertion that correct diagrams can be made mechanically is not borne out by the facts. It is easier to avoid precision in oral analysis than in written. The diagram drives the pupil to a most searching examination of the sentence, brings him face to face with every difficulty, and compels a decision on every point.

+The Abuse of the Diagram+.—Analysis by diagram often becomes so interesting and so helpful that, like other good things, it is liable to be overdone. There is danger of requiring too much written analysis. When the ordinary constructions have been made clear, diagrams should be used only for the more difficult sentences, or, if the sentences are long, only for the more difficult parts of them. In both oral and written analysis there is danger of repeating what needs no repetition. When the diagram has served its purpose, it should be dropped.

AUTHORS’ NOTE TO REVISED EDITION.

During the years in which “Higher Lessons” has been in existence, we have ourselves had an instructive experience with it in the classroom. We have considered hundreds of suggestive letters written us by intelligent teachers using the book. We have examined the best works on grammar that have been published recently here and in England. And we have done more. We have gone to the original source of all valid authority in our language— the best writers and speakers of it. That we might ascertain what present linguistic usage is, we chose fifty authors, now alive or living till recently, and have carefully read three hundred pages of each. We have minutely noted and recorded what these men by habitual use declare to be good English. Among the fifty are such men as Ruskin, Froude, Hamerton, Matthew Arnold, Macaulay, De Quincey, Thackeray, Bagehot, John Morley, James Martineau, Cardinal Newman, J. R. Green, and Lecky in England; and Hawthorne, Curtis, Prof. W. D. Whitney, George P. Marsh, Prescott, Emerson, Motley, Prof. Austin Phelps, Holmes, Edward Everett, Irving, and Lowell in America. When in the pages following we anywhere quote usage, it is to the authority of such men that we appeal.

Upon these four sources of help we have drawn in the Revision of “Higher Lessons” that we now offer to the public.

In this revised work we have given additional reasons for the opinions we hold, and have advanced to some new positions; have explained more fully what some teachers have thought obscure; have qualified what we think was put too positively in former editions; have given the history of constructions where this would deepen interest or aid in composition; have quoted the verdicts of usage on many locutions condemned by purists; have tried to work into the pupil’s style the felicities of expression found in the lesson sentences; have taught the pupil earlier in the work, and more thoroughly, the structure and the function of paragraphs; and have led him on from the composition of single sentences of all kinds to the composition of these great groups of sentences. But the distinctive features of “Higher Lessons” that have made the work so useful and so popular stand as they have stood—the Study of Words from their Offices in the Sentence, Analysis for the sake of subsequent Synthesis, Easy Gradation, the Subdivisions and Modifications of the Parts of Speech after the treatment of these in the Sentence, etc., etc. We confess to some surprise that so little of what was thought good in matter and method years ago has been seriously affected by criticism since.

The additions made to “Higher Lessons”—additions that bring the work up to the latest requirements—are generally in footnotes to pages, and sometimes are incorporated into the body of the Lessons, which in number and numbering remain as they were. The books of former editions and those of this revised edition can, therefore, be used in the same class without any inconvenience.

Of the teachers who have given us invaluable assistance in this Revision, we wish specially to name Prof. Henry M. Worrell, of the Polytechnic Institute; and in this edition of the work, as in the preceding, we take pleasure in acknowledging our great indebtedness to our critic, the distinguished Prof. Francis A. March, of Lafayette College.

*

LESSON 1.

A TALK ON LANGUAGE.

Let us talk to-day about a language that we never learn from a grammar or from a book of any kind—a language that we come by naturally, and use without thinking of it.

It is a universal language, and consequently needs no interpreter. People of all lands and of all degrees of culture use it; even the brute animals in some measure understand it.

This Natural language is the language of cries, laughter, and tones, the language of the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the whole face; the language of gestures and postures.

The child’s cry tells of its wants; its sob, of grief; its scream, of pain; its laugh, of delight. The boy raises his eyebrows in surprise and his nose in disgust, leans forward in expectation, draws back in fear, makes a fist in anger, and calls or drives away his dog simply by the tone in which he speaks.

But feelings and desires are not the only things we wish to communicate. Early in life we begin to acquire knowledge and learn to think, and then we feel the need of a better language.

Suppose, for instance, you have formed an idea of a day; could you express this by a tone, a look, or a gesture?

If you wish to tell me the fact that yesterday was cloudy, or that the days are shorter in winter than in summer, you find it wholly impossible to do this by means of Natural language.

To communicate, then, your thoughts, or even the mental pictures we have called ideas, you need a language more nearly perfect.

This language is made up of words.

These words you learn from your mothers, and so Word language is your mother-tongue. You learn them, also, from your friends and teachers, your playmates and companions, and you learn them by reading; for words, as you know, may be written as well as spoken.

This Word language we may, from its superiority, call +Language Proper+.

Natural language, as was said, precedes this Word language, but gives way as Word language comes in and takes its place; yet Natural language may be used, and always should be used, to assist and strengthen Word language. In earnest conversation we enforce what we say in words, by the tone in which we utter them, by the varying expression of the face, and by the movements of the different parts of the body.

The look or the gesture may even dart ahead of the word, or it may contradict it, and thus convict the speaker of ignorance or deception.

The happy union of the two kinds of language is the charm of all good reading and speaking. The teacher of elocution is ever trying to recall the pupil to the tones, the facial expression, and the action, so natural to him in childhood and in animated conversation.

+DEFINITION.—_Language Proper_ consists of the spoken and the written words used to communicate ideas and thoughts+.

+DEFINITION.—_English Grammar_ is the science which teaches the forms, uses, and relations of the words of the English language.+

*

LESSON 2.

A TALK ON THOUGHTS AND SENTENCES.

To express a thought we use more than a single word, and the words arranged to express a thought we call a sentence.

But there was a time when, through lack of words, we compressed our thought into a single word. The child says to his father, up, meaning, Take me up into your lap; or, book, meaning, This thing in my hand is a book.

These first words always deal with the things that can be learned by the senses; they express the child’s ideas of these things.

We have spoken of thoughts and sentences; let us see now whether we can find out what a thought is, and what a sentence is.

A sentence is a group of words expressing a thought; it is a body of which a thought is the soul. It is something that can be seen or heard, while a thought cannot be. Let us see whether, in studying a sentence, we may not learn what a thought is.

In any such sentence as this, Spiders spin, something is said, or asserted, about something. Here it is said, or asserted, of the animals, spiders, that they spin.

The sentence, then, consists of two parts,—the name of that of which something is said, and that which is said of it.

The first of these parts we call the +Subject+ of the sentence; the second, the +Predicate+.

Now, if the sentence, composed of two parts, expresses the thought, there must be in the thought two parts to be expressed. And there are two: viz., something of which we think, and that which we think of it. In the thought expressed by Spiders spin, the animals, spiders, are the something of which we think, and their spinning is what we think of them. In the sentence expressing this thought, the word spiders names that of which we think, and the word spin tells what we think of spiders.

Not every group of words is necessarily a sentence, because it may not be the expression of a thought. Spiders spinning is not a sentence. There is nothing in this expression to show that we have formed a judgment, i.e., that we have really made up our minds that spiders do spin. The spinning is not asserted of the spiders.

Soft feathers, The shining sun are not sentences, and for similar reasons. Feathers are soft, The sun shines are sentences. Here the asserting word is supplied, and something is said of something else.

The shines sun is not a sentence; for, though it contains the asserting word shines, the arrangement is such that no assertion is made, and no thought is expressed.

*

LESSON 3.

A TALK ON SOUNDS AND LETTERS.

We have already told you that in expressing our ideas and thoughts we use two kinds of words, spoken words and written words.

We learned the spoken words first. Mankind spoke long before they wrote. Not until people wished to communicate with those at a distance, or had thought out something worth handing down to aftertimes, did they need to write.

But speaking was easy. The air, the lungs, and the organs of the throat and mouth were at hand. The first cry was a suggestion. Sounds and noises were heard on every side, provoking imitation, and the need of speech for the purposes of communication was imperative.

Spoken words are made up of sounds. There are over forty sounds in the English language. The different combinations of these give us all the words of our spoken tongue. That you may clearly understand these sounds, we will tell you something about the human voice.

In talking, the air driven out from your lungs beats against two flat muscles, stretched, like bands, across the top of the windpipe, and causes them to vibrate up and down. This vibration makes sound. Take a thread, put one end between your teeth, hold the other with thumb and finger, draw it tight and strike it, and you will understand how voice is made. The shorter the string, or the tighter it is drawn, the faster will it vibrate, and the higher will be the pitch of the sound. The more violent the blow, the farther will the string vibrate, and the louder will be the sound. Just so with these vocal