The Grammar of English Grammars by Goold Brown (free ebook reader .txt) 📕

The formation of just methods of instruction, or true systems of science, is work for those minds which are capable of the most accurate and comprehensive views of the things to be taught. He that is capable of "originating and producing" truth, or true "ideas," if any but the Divine Being is so, has surely no need to be trained into such truth by any factitious scheme of education. In all that he thus originates, he is himself a Novum Organon of knowledge, and capable of teaching others, especially those officious men who would help him with their second-hand authorship, and their paltry catechisms of common-places. I allude here to the fundamental principle of what in some books is called "The Productive System of Instruction," and to those schemes of grammar which are professedly founded on it. We are told that, "The leading principle of this system, is that which its name indicates—that the child should be regarded not as a mere recipient of the ideas of others, but as an agent capable of collecting, and originating, and producing most of the ideas which are necessary for its education, when presented with the objects or the facts from which they may be derived."—Smith's New Gram., Pref., p. 5: Amer. Journal of Education, New Series, Vol. I, No. 6, Art. 1. It ought to be enough for any teacher, or for any writer, if he finds his readers or his pupils ready recipients of the ideas which he aims to convey. What more they know, they can never owe to him, unless they learn it from him against his will; and what they happen to lack, of understanding or believing him, may very possibly be more his fault than theirs.

[45] Lindley Murray, anonymously copying somebody, I know not whom, says: "Words derive their meaning from the consent and practice of those who use them. There is no necessary connexion between words and ideas. The association between the sign and the thing signified, is purely arbitrary."—Octavo Gram., Vol. i, p. 139. The second assertion here made, is very far from being literally true. However arbitrary may be the use or application of words, their connexion with ideas is so necessary, that they cannot be words without it. Signification, as I shall hereafter prove, is a part of the very essence of a word, the most important element of its nature. And Murray himself says, "The understanding and language have a strict connexion."—Ib., Vol. i, p. 356. In this, he changes without amendment the words of Blair: "Logic and rhetoric have here, as in many other cases, a strict connexion."—Blair's Rhet., p. 120.

[46] "The language which is, at present, spoken throughout Great Britain, is neither the ancient primitive speech of the island, nor derived from it; but is altogether of foreign origin. The language of the first inhabitants of our island, beyond doubt, was the Celtic, or Gælic, common to them with Gaul; from which country, it appears, by many circumstances, that Great Britain was peopled. This Celtic tongue, which is said to be very expressive and copious, and is, probably, one of the most ancient languages in the world, obtained once in most of the western regions of Europe. It was the language of Gaul, of Great Britain, of Ireland, and very probably, of Spain also; till, in the course of those revolutions which by means of the conquests, first, of the Romans, and afterwards, of the northern nations, changed the government, speech, and, in a manner, the whole face of Europe, this tongue was gradually obliterated; and now subsists only in the mountains of Wales, in the Highlands of Scotland, and among the wild Irish. For the Irish, the Welsh, and the Erse, are no other than different dialects of the same tongue, the ancient Celtic."—Blair's Rhetoric, Lect. IX, p. 85.

[47] With some writers, the Celtic language is the Welsh; as may be seen by the following extract: "By this he requires an Impossibility, since much the greater Part of Mankind can by no means spare 10 or 11 Years of their Lives in learning those dead Languages, to arrive at a perfect Knowledge of their own. But by this Gentleman's way of Arguing, we ought not only to be Masters of Latin and Greek, but of Spanish, Italian, High- Dutch, Low-Dutch, French, the Old Saxon, Welsh, Runic, Gothic, and Islandic; since much the greater number of Words of common and general Use are derived from those Tongues. Nay, by the same way of Reasoning we may prove, that the Romans and Greeks did not understand their own Tongues, because they were not acquainted with the Welsh, or ancient Celtic, there being above 620 radical Greek Words derived from the Celtic, and of the Latin a much greater Number."—Preface to Brightland's Grammar, p. 5.

[48] The author of this specimen, through a solemn and sublime poem in ten books, generally simplified the preterit verb of the second person singular, by omitting the termination st or est, whenever his measure did not require the additional syllable. But his tuneless editors have, in many instances, taken the rude liberty both to spoil his versification, and to publish under his name what he did not write. They have given him bad prosody, or unutterable harshness of phraseology, for the sake of what they conceived to be grammar. So Kirkham, in copying the foregoing passage, alters it as he will; and alters it differently, when he happens to write some part of it twice: as,

   "That morning, thou, that slumberedst not before,
    Nor slept, great Ocean! laidst thy waves at rest,
    And hushed thy mighty minstrelsy."—Kirkham's Elocution, p. 203.

Again:

   "That morning, thou, that slumberedst not before,
    Nor sleptst, great Ocean, laidst thy waves at rest,
    And hush'dst thy mighty minstrelsy."—Kirkham's Elocution, p. 44.

[49] Camenes, the Muses, whom Horace called Camænæ. The former is an English plural from the latter, or from the Latin word camena, a muse or song. These lines are copied from Dr. Johnson's History of the English Language; their orthography is, in some respects, too modern for the age to which they are assigned.

[50] The Saxon characters being known nowadays to but very few readers, I have thought proper to substitute for them, in the latter specimens of this chapter, the Roman; and, as the old use of colons and periods for the smallest pauses, is liable to mislead a common observer, the punctuation too has here been modernized.

[51] Essay on Language, by William S. Cardell, New York, 1825, p. 2. This writer was a great admirer of Horne Tooke, from whom he borrowed many of his notions of grammar, but not this extravagance. Speaking of the words right and just, the latter says, "They are applicable only to man; to whom alone language belongs, and of whose sensations only words are the representatives."—Diversions of Purley, Vol. ii, p. 9.

[52] CARDELL: Both Grammars, p. 4.

[53] "Quoties dicimus, toties de nobis judicatur."—Cicero. "As often as we speak, so often are we judged."

[54] "Nor had he far to seek for the source of our impropriety in the use of words, when he should reflect that the study of our own language, has never been made a part of the education of our youth. Consequently, the use of words is got wholly by chance, according to the company that we keep, or the books that we read." SHERIDAN'S ELOCUTION, Introd., p. viii, dated "July 10, 1762," 2d Amer. Ed.

[55] "To Write and Speak correctly, gives a Grace, and gains a favourable Attention to what one has to say: And since 'tis English, that an English Gentleman will have constant use of, that is the Language he should chiefly Cultivate, and wherein most care should be taken to polish and perfect his Stile. To speak or write better Latin than English, may make a Man be talk'd of, but he would find it more to his purpose to Express himself well in his own Tongue, that he uses every moment, than to have the vain Commendation of others for a very insignificant quality. This I find universally neglected, and no care taken any where to improve Young Men in their own Language, that they may thoroughly understand and be Masters of it. If any one among us have a facility or purity more than ordinary in his Mother Tongue, it is owing to Chance, or his Genius, or any thing, rather than to his Education or any care of his Teacher. To Mind what English his Pupil speaks or writes is below the Dignity of one bred up amongst Greek and Latin, though he have but little of them himself. These are the learned Languages fit only for learned Men to meddle with and teach: English is the Language of the illiterate Vulgar."—Locke, on Education, p. 339; Fourth Ed., London, 1699.

[56] A late author, in apologizing for his choice in publishing a grammar without forms of praxis, (that is, without any provision for a stated application of its principles by the learner,) describes the whole business of Parsing as a "dry and uninteresting recapitulation of the disposal of a few parts of speech, and their often times told positions and influence;" urges "the unimportance of parsing, generally;" and represents it to be only "a finical and ostentatious parade of practical pedantry."—Wright's Philosophical Gram., pp. 224 and 226. It would be no great mistake to imagine, that this gentleman's system of grammar, applied in any way to practice, could not fail to come under this unflattering description; but, to entertain this notion of parsing in general, is as great an error, as that which some writers have adopted on the other hand, of making this exercise their sole process of inculcation, and supposing it may profitably supersede both the usual arrangement of the principles of grammar and the practice of explaining them by definitions. It is asserted in Parkhurst's "English Grammar for Beginners, on the Inductive Method of Instruction," that, "to teach the child a definition at the outset, is beginning at the wrong end;" that, "with respect to all that goes under the name of etymology in grammar, it is learned chiefly by practice in parsing, and scarcely at all by the aid of definitions."— Preface, pp. 5 and 6.

[57] Hesitation in speech may arise from very different causes. If we do not consider this, our efforts to remove it may make it worse. In most instances, however, it may be overcome by proper treatment, "Stammering," says a late author, "is occasioned by an over-effort to articulate; for when the mind of the speaker is so occupied with his subject as not to allow him to reflect upon his defect, he will talk without difficulty. All stammerers can sing, owing to the continuous sound, and the slight manner in which the consonants are touched in singing; so a drunken man can run, though he cannot walk or stand still."—Gardiner's Music of Nature, p. 30.

   "To think rightly, is of knowledge; to speak fluently, is of nature;
    To read with profit, is of care; but to write aptly, is of practice."
                                    Book of Thoughts, p. 140.

[58] "There is nothing more becoming [to] a Gentleman, or more useful in all the occurrences of life, than to be able, on any occasion, to speak well, and to the purpose."—Locke, on Education, §171. "But yet, I think I may ask my reader, whether he doth not know a great many, who live upon their estates, and so, with the name, should have the qualities of Gentlemen, who cannot so much as tell a story as they should; much less speak clearly and persuasively in any business. This I think not to be so much their fault, as the fault of their education.—They have been taught Rhetoric, but yet never taught how to express themselves handsomely with their tongues or pens in the language they are always to use; as if the names of the figures that embellish the discourses of those who understood the art of speaking, were the very art and skill of speaking well. This, as all other things of practice, is to be learned, not by a few, or a great many rules given; but by EXERCISE and APPLICATION according to GOOD RULES, or rather PATTERNS, till habits are got, and a facility of doing it well."—Ib., §189. The forms of parsing and correcting which the following work supplies, are "patterns," for the performance of these practical "exercises;" and such patterns as ought to be implicitly followed, by every one who means to be a ready and correct speaker on these subjects.

[59] The principal claimants of "the Inductive Method" of Grammar, are Richard W. Green, Roswell C. Smith, John L. Parkhurst, Dyor H. Sanborn, Bradford Frazee, and, Solomon Barrett, Jr.; a set of writers, differing indeed in their qualifications, but in general not a little deficient in what constitutes