The English verb suffers very few inflections or changes of termination, to express the different circumstances of person, number, time and mode. Its inflections are confined to the three persons of the singular number, in the present tense, indicative mode, and the first and second persons of the past tense; unless we consider the irregular participles as a species of inflection belonging to the verb. All the other varieties of person, number, time and mode, are expressed by prefixing other words, by various combinations of words, or by a particular manner of utterance.
This simplicity, as it is erroneously called, is said to render our language easy of acquisition. The reverse however of this is true; for the use of auxiliaries or combinations of words, constitutes the most perplexing branch of grammar; it being much easier to learn to change the termination of the verb, than to combine two, three or four words for the same purpose.
Grammarians have usually divided the English verbs into active, passive and neuter. "Active verbs," say they,[105] "express action, and necessarily imply an agent and an object acted upon." But is not a man passive in hearing? Yet hear is called an active verb.
"A verb neuter expresses being, or a state or condition of being; when the agent and object coincide, and the event is properly neither action nor passion, but rather something between both." But is there neither action nor passion in walking, running, existing? One would think that running at least might be called action.
The common definitions, copied, in some measure, from the Latin Grammars, are very inaccurate. The most correct and general division of English verbs, is, into transitive and intransitive; the former term comprehending all verbs that may be followed by any object receiving the action, or of which any thing is affirmed; the latter, all those verbs, the affirmation in which is limited to the agent. Thus hear is a transitive verb, for it affirms something of an object; I hear the bell.
Run is an intransitive verb, for the action mentioned is confined to the agent; he runs. Yet the last is an active verb, and the first, strictly speaking, is not;[106] so that there is a distinction to be made between a verb active and transitive.
In strict propriety, we have in English no passive verb; that is, we have no single word which conveys the idea of passion or suffering, in the manner of the Greek or Latin passive verb. It may be useful, in teaching English to youth or foreigners, to exhibit a specimen of the combinations of the verb be, with the participles of other verbs in all their varieties; but each word should be parsed as a distinct part of speech; altho two or more may be necessary to convey an idea which is expressed by a single word in another language.