In this way we can explain how it happens that the grammar of a cultivated dialect and that of a local dialect in the same country so frequently disagree. Thus, in the dialect of West Somerset, thee is the nominative of the second personal pronoun, while in cultivated English the plural accusative you (Anglo-Saxon, eow) has come to represent a nominative singular. Both are grammatically correct within the sphere of their respective dialects, but no further. You would be as ungrammatical in West Somerset as thee is in classical English; and both you and thee, as nominatives singular, would have been equally ungrammatical in Early English. Grammatical propriety is nothing more than the established usage of a particular body of speakers at a particular time in their history.

It follows from this that the grammar of a people changes, like its pronunciation, from age to age. Anglo-Saxon or Early English grammar is not the grammar of Modern English, any more than Latin grammar is the grammar of modern Italian; and to defend an unusual construction or inflexion on the ground that it once existed in literary Anglo-Saxon, is as wrong as to import a peculiarity of some local dialect into the grammar of the cultivated speech. It further follows that different languages will have different grammars, and that the differences will be more or less according to the nearer or remoter relationship of the languages themselves, and the modes of thought of those who speak them. Consequently, to force the grammatical framework of one language upon another is to misconceive the whole nature of the latter, and seriously to mislead the learner. Chinese grammar, for instance, can nevet be understood until we discard, not only the terminology of European grammar, but the very conceptions which underlie it, while the polysynthetic idioms of America defy all attempts to discover in them “the parts of speech” and the various grammatical ideas which occupy so large a place in our school-grammars. The endeavour to find the distinctions of Latin grammar in that of English has only resulted in grotesque errors, and a total misapprehension of the usage of the English language.

It is to the Latin grammarians,—or, more correctly, to the Greek grammarians, upon whose labours those of the Latin writers were based,—that we owe the classification of the subjects with which grammar is commonly supposed to deal. The grammar of Dionysius Thrax, which he wrote for Roman schoolboys in the time of Pompey, has formed the starting-point for the innumerable school-grammars which have since seen the light, and suggested that division of the matter treated of which they have followed. He defines grammar as a practical acquaintance with the language of literary men, and as divided into six parts,—accentuation and phonology, explanation of figurative expressions, definition, etymology, general rules of flexion, and critical canons. Of these, phonology and accentuation, or prosody, can properly be included in grammar only in so far as the construction of a sentence and the grammatical meaning of a word are determined by accent or letter-change; the accentual difference in English, for example, between incense and incense belongs to the province of grammar, since it indicates a difference between noun and verb; and the changes of vowel in the Semitic languages, by which various nominal and verbal forms are distinguished from one another, constitute a very important part of their grammatical machinery. But where accent and pronunciation do not serve to express the relations of words in a sentence, they fall into the domain of phonology, not of grammar. The explanation of figurative expressions, again, must be left to the rhetorician, and definition to the lexicographer; the grammarian has no more to do with them than he has with the canons of criticism.

In fact, the old subdivision of grammar, inherited from the grammarians of Rome and Alexandria, must be given up, and a new one put in its place. What grammar really deals with are all those contrivances whereby the relations of words and sentences are pointed out. Sometimes it is position, sometimes phonetic symbolization, sometimes composition, sometimes flexion, sometimes the use of auxiliaries, which enables the speaker to combine his words together so that they shall be intelligible to another. Grammar may accordingly be divided into the three departments of composition or “word-building,” syntax, and accidence, by which is meant an exposition of the means adopted by language for expressing the relations of grammar when recourse is not had to composition or simple position.

A systematized exposition of grammar may be intended for the purely practical purpose of teaching the mechanism of a foreign language. In this case, all that is necessary is a correct and complete statement of the facts. But a correct and complete statement of the facts is by no means so easy a matter as might appear at first sight. The facts will be distorted by a false theory in regard to them, while they will certainly not be presented in a complete form if the grammarian is ignorant of the true theory they presuppose. The Semitic verb, for example, remains unintelligible so long as the explanation of its forms is sought in the conjugation of the Aryan verb, since it has no tenses in the Aryan sense of the word, but denotes relation and not time.

A good practical grammar of a language, therefore, should be based on a correct appreciation of the facts which it expounds, and a correct appreciation of the facts is only possible where they are examined and co-ordinated in accordance with the scientific method. A practical grammar ought, wherever it is possible, to be preceded by a scientific grammar.

Comparison is the instrument with which science works, and a scientific grammar, accordingly, is one in which the comparative method has been applied to the relations of speech. If we would understand the origin and real nature of grammatical forms, and of the relations which they represent, we must compare them with similar forms in kindred dialects and languages, as well as with the forms under which they appeared themselves at an earlier period of their history. We shall thus have a comparative grammar and an historical grammar, the latter being devoted to tracing the history of grammatical forms and usages in the same language. Of course, an historical grammar is only possib’e where a succession of written records exists; where a language possesses no older literature, we must be content with a comparative grammar only, and look to cognate idioms to throw light upon its grammatical peculiarities. In this case we have frequently to leave whole forms un-expla τ ned, or at most conjecturally interpreted, since the machinery by means of which the relations of grammar are symbolize! is often change! so completely during the growth of a language as to cause its earlier shape and character to be unrecognizable. Moreover, our area of comparison must be as wide as possible; where we have but t vo or three languages to compare, we are in danger of building up conclusions on insufficient evidence. The grammatical errors of the classical philologists of the last cmtury were in great measure due to the fact that their area of comparison was confined to Latin an! Greek.

The historical grammar of a single language or dialect, which traces the grammatical forms and usagée of the language as far back as documentary evidence allows, affords material to the comparative grammarian, whose task it is to compare the grammatical forms and usages of an allied group of tongues, and thereby reduce them to their earliest forms and senses. The work thus carried out by the comparative grammarian within a particular family of languages is made use of by universal grammar, the object of which is to determine the ideas that underlie all grammar whatsoever, as distinct from those that are peculiar to special families of speech. Universal grammar is sometimes known as “the metaphysics of language,” and it has to decide such questions as the nature of gender, or of the verb, the true purport of the genitive relation, or the origin of grammar itself. Such questions, it is clear, can only be answered by comparing the results gained by the comparative treatment of the grammars of various groups of language. What historical grammar is to comparative grammar, comparative grammar is to universal grammar.

Universal grammar, as founded on the results of the scientific study of speech, is thus essentially different from that “universal grammar” so much in vogue at the beginning of the present century, which consisted of a series of a priori assumptions based on the peculiarities of European grammar and illustrated from the same source. But universal grammar, as conceived by modern science, is as yet in its infancy; its materials are still in the process of being collected. The comparative grammar of the Aryan languages is alone in an advanced state, those of the Semitic idioms, of the Ugro-Altaic tongues, and of the Bâ-ntu or Kaffre dialects of southern Africa, are still in a backward condition; and the other families of speech existing in the world, with the exception of the Malayo-Polynesian, and the Sonorian of North America, have not as yet been treated scientifically. Chinese, it is true, possesses an historical grammar, and Mr Van Eys, in his comparative grammar of Basque, has endeavoured to solve the problems of that interesting language by a comparison of its various dialects; but in both cases the area of comparison is too small for more than a limited success to be attainable. Instead of attempting the questions of universal grammar therefore, it will be better to confine our attention to three points,— the fundamental differences in the grammatical conceptions of different groups of languages, the main results of a scientific investigation of Aryan grammar, and the light thrown by comparative philology upon the grammar of our own tongue.

The proposition or sentence is the unit and starting-point of speech, and grammar, as we have seen, consists in the relations of its several parts one to another, together with the expression of them. These relations may be regarded from various points of view. In the polysynthetic languages of America the sentence is conceived as a whole, not composed of independent words, but, like the thought which it expresses, one and indivisible. What we should denote by a series of words is consequently denoted by a single long compound,— kuligatchis in Delaware, for instance, signifying “give me your pretty little paw,” and aglekkigiartor-asuαrniρok, in Eskimo, “he goes away hastily and exerts himself to write.” Individual words can be, and often are, extracted from the sentence; but in this case they stand, as it were, outside it, being represented by a pronoun within the sentence itself. Thus, in Mexican, we can say not only ni-sotsi-temoa, “I look for flowers,” but also ni-k-teιnoa sotsitl, where the interpolated guttural is the objective pronoun. As a necessary result of this conception of the sentence the American languages possess no true verb, each act being expressed as a whole by a single word. In Cherokee, for example, while there is no verb signifying “to wash” in the abstract, no less than thirteen words are used to signify every conceivable mode and object of washing. In the incorporating languages, again, of which Basque may be taken as a type, the object cannot be conceived except as contained in the verbal action. Hence every verbal form embodies an objective pronoun, eventhough the object may be separately expressed. If we pass to an isolating language like Chinese, we find the exact converse of that which meets us in the polysynthetic tongues. Here each proposition or thought is analysed into its several elements, and these are set over against one another as so many independent words. The relations of grammar are consequently denoted by position, the particular position of two or more words determining the relation they bear to each other. The analysis of the sentence has not been carried so far in agglutinative languages like Turkish. In these the relations of grammar are represented by individual words, which, however, are subordinated to the words expressing the main ideas intended to be in relation to one another. The defining words, or indices of grammatical relations, are, in a large number of instances, placed after the words which they define; in some cases, however, as, for example, in the Bâ-ntu languages of southern Africa, the relation is conceived from the opposite point of view, the defining words being prefixed. The inflexional languages call in the aid of a new principle. The relations of grammar are denoted symbolically either by a change of vowel or by a change of termination, more rarely by a change at the beginning of a word. Each idea, together with the relation which it bears to the other ideas of a proposition, is thus represented by a single word; that is to say, the ideas which make up the elements of a sentence are not conceived severally and independently, as in Chinese, but as always having a certain connexion with one another. Inflexional languages, however, tend to become analytical by the logical separation of the flexion from the idea to which it is attached, though the primitive point of view is never altogether discarded, and traces of flexion remain even in English and Persian. In fact, there is no example of a language which has wholly forsaken the conception of the sentence and the relation of its elements with which it started, although each class of languages occasionally trespasses on the grammatical usages of the others. In language, as elsewhere in nature, there are no sharp lines of division, no sudden leaps; species passes insensibly into species, class into class. At the same time the several types of speech—polysynthetic, isolating, agglutinative, and inflexional—remain clear and fixed; and even where two languages belong to the same general type, as, for instance, an Aryan and a Semitic language in the inflexional group, or a Kaffre and a Turkish language in the agglutinative group, we find no certain example of grammatical interchange. A mixed grammar, in which the grammatical procedure of two distiuct families of speech is intermingled, is almost, if not altogether, unknown.

It is obvious, therefore, that grammar constitutes the surest and most important basis for a classification of languages. Words may be borrowed freely by one dialect from another, or, though originally unrelated, may, by the action of phonetic decay, come to assume the same forms, while the limited number of articulate sounds and conceptions out of which language wa3 first developed, and the similarity of the circumstances by which the first speakers were everywhere surrounded, naturally produce a resemblance between the roots of many unconnected tongues. Where, however, the fundamental conceptions of grammar, and the machinery by which they are expressed are the same, we may have no hesitation in inferring a common origin.

The main results of scientific inquiry into the origin and primitive meaning of the forms of Aryan or Indo-European grammar may be summed up as follows. We start with stems or themes, by which are meant words of two or more syllables which terminate in a limited number of sounds. These stems can be classed in groups of two kinds, one in which the groups consist of stems of similar meanings and similar initial syllables, and another in which the final syllables alone coincide. In the first case we have what are termed roots, the simplest elements iuto which words can be decomposed; in the second case stems proper, which may be described as consisting of suffixes attached tc roots. Roots, therefore, are merely the materials out of which speech can be made, the embodiments of isolated conceptions with which the lexicographer alone has to deal, whereas stems present us with words already combined in a sentence and embodying the relations of grammar. If we would rightly understand primitive Aryan grammar, we must conceive it as having been expressed or implied in the suffixes of the stems, and in the order according to which the stems were arranged in a sentence. In other words, the relations of grammar were denoted partly by juxtaposition or syntax, partly by the suffixes of stems.

These suffixes were probably at first unmeaning, or rather clothed with vague significations, which changed according to the place occupied in the sentence by the stem to which they were joined. Gradually this vagueness of signification disappeared, and particular suffixes came to be set apart to represent particular relations of grammar. What had hitherto been expressed by mere position now attached itself to the terminations or suffixes of stems, which accordingly became full-grown words. Some of the suffixes denoted purely grammatical ideas, that is to say, were flexions; others were classificatory, serving to distinguish nouns from verbs, presents from aorists, objects from agents, and the like; while others, again, remained unmeaning adjuncts of the root. This origin of the flexions explains the otherwise strange fact that the same suffix may symbolize wholly different grammatical relations. In Latin, for instance, the context and dictionary will alone tell us that mus-as is the accusative plural of a noun, and am-as the second person singular of a verb, or that mus-a is the nominative singular of a feminine substantive, bon-a the accusative plural of a neuter adjective. In short, the flexions were originally merely the terminations of stems which were adapted to express the various relations of words to each other in a sentence, as these gradually presented themselves to the consciousness and were extracted from what had been previously implied by position. Necessarily, the same suffix might be used sometimes in a classificatory, sometimes in a flexional sense, and sometimes without any definite sense at all. In the Greek dative-locative 7τ0δ-eσ-σt, for example, the suffix -eç is classificatory; in the nominative τr0δ-ev, it is flexional.

When a particular termination or suffix once acquired a special sense, it would be separated in thought from the stem to which it belonged, and attached in the same sense to other stems and other terminations. Thus in modern English we can attach the suffix -ize to almost any word whatsoever, in order to give the latter a transitive meaning, and the Greek 7r0δeσσt, quoted above, really contains no less than three suffixes, «ç, -συ, and -ι, the last two both denoting the locative, and coalescing, through <rA, into a single syllable -σι. The latter instance shows us how two or more suffixes denoting exactly the same idea may be tacked on one to another, if the original force and signification of the first of them comes to be forgotten. Thus, in Old English sang-estre was the feminine of sang-ere, “singer,” but the meaning of the termination has so entirely died out of the memory that we have to add the Romanic -ess to it if we would still distinguish it from the masculine singer. A familiar example of the way in which the full sense of the exponent of a grammatical idea fades from the mind and has to be supplied by a new exponent is afforded by the use of expletives in conversational English to denote the superlative. “Very warm” expresses little more than the positive, and to represent the intensity of his feelings the Englishman...