[1] Valuable information will also be found in Bulletin No. 38 (1905), “Crop Export Movement and Port Facilities on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts”; in Bulletin No. 49 (1907), “Cost of Hauling Crops from Farms to Shipping Points”; and in Bulletin No. 69 (1908), “European Grain Trade.”
GRAM, or Chick-pea, called also Egyptian pea, or Bengal gram (from Port. grão, formerly gram, Lat. granum, Hindi Chanā, Bengali Chholā, Ital. cece, Span. garbanzo), the Cicer arietinum of Linnaeus, so named from the resemblance of its seed to a ram’s head. It is a member of the natural order Leguminosae, largely cultivated as a pulse-food in the south of Europe, Egypt and western Asia as far as India, but is not known undoubtedly wild. The plant is an annual herb with flexuose branches, and alternately arranged pinnately compound leaves, with small, oval, serrated leaflets and small eared stipules. The flowers are borne singly in the leaf-axils on a stalk about half the length of the leaf and jointed and bent in the middle; the corolla is blue-purple. The inflated pod, 1 to 1½ in. long, contains two roundish seeds. It was cultivated by the Greeks in Homer’s time under the name erebinthos, and is also referred to by Dioscorides as krios from the resemblance of the pea to the head of a ram. The Romans called it cicer, from which is derived the modern names given to it in the south of Europe. Names, more or less allied to one another, are in vogue among the peoples of the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, Armenia and Persia, and there is a Sanskrit name and several others analogous or different in modern Indian languages. The plant has been cultivated in Egypt from the beginning of the Christian era, but there is no proof that it was known to the ancient Egyptians. Alphonse de Candolle (Origin of Cultivated Plants, p. 325) suggests that the plant originally grew wild in the countries to the south of the Caucasus and to the north of Persia. “The western Aryans (Pelasgians, Hellenes) perhaps introduced the plant into southern Europe, where, however, there is some probability that it was also indigenous. The western Aryans carried it to India.” Gram is largely cultivated in the East, where the seeds are eaten raw or cooked in various ways, both in their ripe and unripe condition, and when roasted and ground subserve the same purposes as ordinary flour. In Europe the seeds are used as an ingredient in soups. They contain, in 100 parts without husks, nitrogenous substances 22.7, fat 3.76, starch 63.18, mineral matters 2.6 parts, with water (Forbes Watson, quoted in Parkes’s Hygiene). The liquid which exudes from the glandular hairs clothing the leaves and stems of the plant, more especially during the cold season when the seeds ripen, contains a notable proportion of oxalic acid. In Mysore the dew containing it is collected by means of cloths spread on the plant over night, and is used in domestic medicine. The steam of water in which the fresh plant is immersed is in the Deccan resorted to by the Portuguese for the treatment of dysmenorrhoea. The seed of Phaseolus Mungo, or green gram (Hind. and Beng. moong), a form of which plant with black seeds (P. Max of Roxburgh) is termed black gram, is an important article of diet among the labouring classes in India. The meal is an excellent substitute for soap, and is stated by Elliot to be an invariable concomitant of the Hindu bath. A variety, var. radiatus (P. Roxburghii, W. and Arn., or P. radiatus, Roxb.) (vern. urid, māshkalāi), also known as green gram, is perhaps the most esteemed of the leguminous plants of India, where the meal of its seed enters into the composition of the more delicate cakes and dishes. Horse gram, Dolichos biflorus (vern. kulthi), which supplies in Madras the place of the chick-pea, affords seed which, when boiled, is extensively employed as a food for horses and cattle in South India, where also it is eaten in curries.
See W. Elliot, “On the Farinaceous Grains and the various kinds of Pulses used in Southern India,” Edin. New Phil. Journ. xvi. (1862) 16 sq.; H. Drury, The Useful Plants of India (1873); U. C. Dutt, Materia Medica of the Hindus (Calcutta, 1877); G. Watt, Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (1890).
GRAMMAR (from Lat. grammatica, sc. ars; Gr. γράμμα, letter, from γράφειν, to write). By the grammar of a language is meant either the relations borne by the words of a sentence and by sentences themselves one to another, or the systematized exposition of these. The exposition may be, and frequently is, incorrect; but it always presupposes the existence of certain customary uses of words when in combination. In what follows, therefore, grammar will be generally employed in its primary sense, as denoting the mode in which words are connected in order to express a complete thought, or, as it is termed in logic, a proposition.
The object of language is to convey thought, and so long as this object is attained the machinery for attaining it is of comparatively slight importance. The way in which we combine our words and sentences matters Scope of grammar. little, provided that our meaning is clear to others. The expressions “horseflesh” and “flesh of a horse” are equally intelligible to an Englishman and therefore are equally recognized by English grammar. The Chinese manner of denoting a genitive is by placing the defining word before that which it defines, as in koue jin, “man of the kingdom,” literally “kingdom man,” and the only reason why it would be incorrect in French or Italian is that such a combination would be unintelligible to a Frenchman or an Italian. Hence it is evident that the grammatical correctness or incorrectness of an expression depends upon its intelligibility, that is to say, upon the ordinary use and custom of a particular language. Whatever is so unfamiliar as not to be generally understood is also ungrammatical. In other words, it is contrary to the habit of a language, as determined by common usage and consent.
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 (A.-S. 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 never 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 Subdivision of grammar. 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 íncense and incénse 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.