BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE.
It has occurred to me that some readers of The Chautauquan may have been disappointed in these articles because in their judgment they have been thus far not sufficiently “practical.” Many people, far too many, desire chiefly to find some short, straight road to knowledge. They like to have some man who is called an “authority” upon a certain subject cut his knowledge up into small parcels or “chunks” of convenient size, and arrange them with labels, alphabetically, in an article or a book, so that they maybe referred to at need, and followed like a recipe for making a pudding, and with as little thought. But there are no such recipes for acquiring real knowledge. In this way an acquaintance with facts may be made which, used blindly, may prove of some immediate service, and may not. Nothing, however, learned in this perfunctory way is worthy of the name of knowledge. For it is a barren process; it really teaches nothing; it profits nothing; it does nothing for the education of the person by whom it is adopted. Real knowledge comes only by a thoughtful learning of the relations of facts. True as to all subjects, this is eminently true as to language; because, language is eminently a subject of relations. There is hardly a word that we use which has not relations to other words, and other forms of speech; relations historical, spiritual, almost moral; to set forth which in detail would furnish occasion for a little essay. The mere learning to speak and to write a language is only a matter of memory and practice; nothing more. It is child’s work, and it is continually done, and is best done, by children. A man may speak and write English, French, German or Latin with unexceptionable correctness and fluency, and yet know no more about that language than a well instructed parrot would which had been taught to use all the words which he uses. His study would not be a study of language; and in that which he had painfully learned he might be easily and unconsciously surpassed by a child who had never studied at all. Now what I hope to do here is to help my readers to some knowledge of the English language, in so far as my own imperfect acquaintance with my mother tongue and its literature will enable me to do so.
We have seen what English is, of what stuff it is made, how it came by its present compositeness of substance; how it became strong, and full, and flexible, and fervent; let us now look a little into its structure, i. e., the way in which it is put together, in doing which we shall see by comparison how it differs from other languages. This matter of structure, the formation of the sentence, is the distinctive trait of a language. Mere words are not the essential difference between languages. Many words are common (with slight phonetic variation) to all the languages of the Aryan or Indo-European stock, as we have already seen. Multitudes of words have been adopted into all the modern tongues from other languages ancient and modern, dead and living, as most of the readers of The Chautauquan know. The bulk of English dictionaries like Webster’s and Worcester’s is composed of words which are of Latin, Greek, French or Italian origin, and which indeed are essentially the same words in all these languages; their unlikeness being merely a phonetic variation, mostly caused by difference in pronunciation, or change in termination. For example, flower is in Latin flos (genitive floris), in Italian fiore, in French fleur, in Spanish flor; each language having somewhat changed the sound of the word, according to rules or habits which are loosely called laws; but the word is in all essentially the same. A sentence—many sentences—might be written in English, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and German, in which all the words of subject-matter (all but verbs like have and be, and prepositions and conjunctions) should be essentially the same, and so like that an intelligent person with some faculty for language, and who understood any one of these languages, could apprehend the meaning of any one of the supposed sentences with little difficulty. And yet the sentences would be respectively English, Latin, French, and so forth. Why and how? It is to the reason of this, that is the why and the how of it, that we shall now give a little time and attention.
The most important and significant distinction between languages is in their grammar; that is, in the structure of the sentence. In the languages mentioned above the greatest unlikeness in this respect is manifested in English, Latin and German, or to name them in their order of grammatical importance, Latin, German and English. The term “grammar” has two senses; one large and vague, and called by some “philosophical” or “scientific” (phrases commonly used with a deplorable union of pretension and looseness), which includes all that relates to the history, the substance and the structure of a language; the other much narrower and simpler; the sense implied when the phrases “good grammar” and “bad grammar” are used. To this sense I shall here confine myself, and shall here repeat a definition of grammar which I have given before.[A]
Grammar concerns the forms of words and their dependent relations in the sentence.
To illustrate this: It is “bad grammar,” ludicrously, monstrously bad grammar, to say in Latin, Nos habeo bonus mater, and yet these Latin words, literally and simply translated in their order, mean, We have a good mother, which in English is perfectly “good grammar.” In the Latin (to call it Latin) every word is wrong; in English every word is right. The reason of this is that in Latin words change their forms according to their relations, not according to their essential meaning. Habeo means have; but it can not be used to express a plural having; that requires for we (nos) the form habemus. Bonus means good; but it can not be used to express the goodness of a feminine object, for which the form bona is required. Yet further: Even bona can not be used to qualify a noun which is the object of a verb, or, as we say, in the objective (or accusative) case, for which the form bonam is required. Mater means mother, but as the object of the verb have, mater must change its form to matrem. By these required changes of form the Latin sentence becomes, Nos habemus bonam matrem, which is “good grammar,” although poor Latin, but which, after all the changes, means simply, We have a good mother; nothing more nor less. Yet further: The sentence, as written above, although grammatical, is poor Latin because it is at variance with the habit, or as it is sometimes called the spirit, or even the genius, of the Latin language. In Latin the word habemus (although like habeo it means simply, have) is so positively and distinctively limited in use to the first person plural that the pronoun nos—we—is quite superfluous, and is never used unless with an emphatic purpose; habemus, without the nos, means, we have. Moreover it was the Latin habit of speech to place the object generally before the verb; and good Latin for, We have a good mother would be, bonam matrem habemus—i. e., A good mother we have, or rather (literally) Good mother we have for the Latin strangely has no articles, or none which correspond to our an (or a) and the, and which may be translated by them.
This illustration, brief and simple although it be, is sufficient, I think, to make the great and essential distinction between English and Latin, and measurably between English and all other modern civilized tongues, clear to the readers of these articles. The essential difference is not one of words but of the construction of the sentence. In Latin and other languages that construction depends not upon the thought and the meaning of the words, but upon the forms of the words—their inflections. Now the distinctive trait of English is that it is a language without inflections—not absolutely so, but so to all intents and purposes; and, being without inflections, it is therefore without grammar, which, as we have seen, concerns the forms of words and their dependent relations in the sentence. Nos habeo bonus mater is bad grammar because the forms of the words are incorrect according to the usage of the Latin language. Bonus means good; but for the expression of the quality good in its barest, simplest idea bonus takes on five forms in Latin; bonus for masculine goodness in the singular, bona for feminine singular, bonum for neuter singular; boni masculine plural; bonæ feminine plural, bona neuter plural. To be brief; for use in various relations, this word bonus takes on no less than thirteen forms, of which more need not here be given. Mater—mother—takes on eight of these forms or inflections, which are called cases. But in English good has but one form. Singular, plural, masculine, feminine, neuter, nominative, possessive, dative, objective, vocative—in whichever of these senses the word which it qualifies is used it has but one form—good. Thus it is with all English adjectives, and with articles (an and the) which are a kind of adjective. In all other languages adjectives and articles have various forms adapted to the various numbers, genders, and cases of nouns. In English nouns have two cases (strictly but one, the nominative not being a true case), the second of which is the possessive: e. g., mother’s; and they have a singular and a plural form, e. g., mother, mothers.
In other languages the verb is inflected into a multitude of forms, expressive of voice (active and passive), person, number and time of action. In English the variations of form in the verb are very few. There is no passive voice. The English has but one passive verb; the obsolete hight, which means, is called. As to time, there are only the forms of present and perfect, e. g., love and loved; as to person and number, inflections only in the present tense, e. g., love, lovest, loves; and of these one, lovest, is obsolete, or very obsolescent. To these inflected forms there is to be added only the present or indefinite participle loving. Beyond this there are in English, by way of inflection, only the cases of the pronouns, e. g., he, his, him, who, whose, whom, etc. And it is here to be remarked that almost all the questions of “good grammar” and “bad grammar” that arise in English relate to the use of pronouns. (For surely we may leave out of consideration here the difficulties of those who say I see or I seen him, for I saw him, or I have went for I have gone, and the like.) Here, therefore, we have set forth, although very succinctly, the distinctive grammatical position of the English language.
That position is briefly this: In English words have (with the few exceptions mentioned above) but one form; and as grammar is concerned only with the formal relations of words in the sentence, English has no grammar. Among languages it is the grammarless tongue.