The Grammar of English Grammars - Goold Brown (spiritual books to read TXT) 📗

[60] William C. Woodbridge edited the Journal, and probably wrote the article, from which the author of "English Grammar on the Productive System" took his "Preface."

[61] Many other grammars, later than Murray's, have been published, some in England, some in America, and some in both countries; and among these there are, I think, a few in which a little improvement has been made, in the methods prescribed for the exercises of parsing and correcting. In most, however, nothing of the kind has been attempted. And, of the formularies which have been given, the best that I have seen, are still miserably defective, and worthy of all the censure that is expressed in the paragraph above; while others, that appear in works not entirely destitute of merit, are absolutely much worse than Murray's, and worthy to condemn to a speedy oblivion the books in which they are printed. In lieu of forms of expression, clear, orderly, accurate, and full; such as a young parser might profitably imitate; such as an experienced one would be sure to approve; what have we? A chaos of half-formed sentences, for the ignorant pupil to flounder in; an infinite abyss of blunders, which a world of criticism could not fully expose! See, for example, the seven pages of parsing, in the neat little book entitled, "A Practical Grammar of the English Language, by the Rev. David Blair: Seventh Edition: London, 1815:" pp. 49 to 57. I cannot consent to quote more than one short paragraph of the miserable jumble which these pages contain. Yet the author is evidently a man of learning, and capable of writing well on some subjects, if not on this. "Bless the Lord, O my soul!" Form: "Bless, a verb, (repeat 97); active (repeat 99); active voice (102); infinitive mood (107); third person, soul being the nominative (118); present tense (111); conjugate the verb after the pattern (129); its object is Lord (99)."—Blair's Gram., p. 50. Of the paragraphs referred to, I must take some notice: "107. The imperative mood commands or orders or intreats."—Ib., p. 19. "118. The second person is always the pronoun thou or you in the singular, and ye or you in the plural."—Ib., p. 21. "111. The imperative mood has no distinction of tense: and the infinitive has no distinction of persons."—Ib., p. 20. Now the author should have said: "Bless is a redundant active-transitive verb, from bless, blessed or blest, blessing, blessed or blest; found in the imperative mood, present tense, second person, and singular number:" and, if he meant to parse the word syntactically, he should have added: "and agrees with its nominative thou understood; according to the rule which says, 'Every finite verb must agree with its subject or nominative, in person and number.' Because the meaning is—Bless thou the Lord." This is the whole story. But, in the form above, several things are false; many, superfluous; some, deficient; several, misplaced; nothing, right. Not much better are the models furnished by Kirkham, Smith, Lennie, Bullions, and other late authors.

[62] Of Dr. Bullions's forms of parsing, as exhibited in his English Grammar, which is a modification of Lennie's Grammar, it is difficult to say, whether they are most remarkable for their deficiencies, their redundancies, or their contrariety to other teachings of the same author or authors. Both Lennie and Bullions adopt the rule, that, "An ellipsis is not allowable when it would obscure the sentence, weaken its force, or be attended with an impropriety."—L., p. 91; B., p. 130. And the latter strengthens this doctrine with several additional observations, the first of which reads thus: "In general, no word should be omitted that is necessary to the full and correct construction, or even harmony of a sentence."—Bullions, E. Gr., 130. Now the parsing above alluded to, has been thought particularly commendable for its brevity—a quality certainly desirable, so far as it consists with the end of parsing, or with the more needful properties of a good style, clearness, accuracy, ease, and elegance. But, if the foregoing rule and observation are true, the models furnished by these writers are not commendably brief, but miserably defective. Their brevity is, in fact, such as renders them all bad English; and not only so, it makes them obviously inadequate to their purpose, as bringing into use but a part of the principles which the learner had studied. It consists only in the omission of what ought to have been inserted. For example, this short line, "I lean upon the Lord," is parsed by both of these gentlemen thus: "I, the first personal pronoun, masculine, or feminine, singular, the nominative—lean, a verb, neuter, first person singular, present, indicative—upon, a preposition—the, an article, the definite—Lord, a noun, masculine, singular, the objective, (governed by upon.)"—Lennie's Principles of English Gram., p. 51; Bullions's, 74. This is a little sample of their etymological parsing, in which exercise they generally omit not only all the definitions or "reasons" of the various terms applied, but also all the following particulars: first, the verb is, and certain definitives and connectives, which are "necessary to the full and correct construction" of their sentences; secondly, the distinction of nouns as proper or common; thirdly, the person of nouns, first, second, or third; fourthly, the words, number, gender, and case, which are necessary to the sense and construction of certain words used; fifthly, the distinction of adjectives as belonging to different classes; sixthly, the division of verbs as being regular or irregular, redundant or defective; seventhly, sometimes, (Lennie excepted,) the division of verbs as active, passive, or neuter; eighthly, the words mood and tense, which Bullions, on page 131, pronounces "quite unnecessary," and inserts in his own formule on page 132; ninthly, the distinction of adverbs as expressing time, place, degree, or manner; tenthly, the distinction of conjunctions as copulative or disjunctive; lastly, the distinction of interjections as indicating different emotions. All these things does their completest specimen of etymological parsing lack, while it is grossly encumbered with parentheses of syntax, which "must be omitted till the pupil get the rules of syntax."—Lennie, p. 51. It is also vitiated with several absurdities, contradictions, and improper changes of expression: as, "His, the third personal pronoun;" (B., p. 23;)—"me, the first personal pronoun;" (Id., 74;)—"A, The indefinite article;" (Id., 73;)—"a, an article, the indefinite;" (Id., 74;)—"When the verb is passive, parse thus: 'A verb active, in the passive voice, regular, irregular,' &c."—Bullions, p. 131. In stead of teaching sufficiently, as elements of etymological parsing, the definitions which belong to this exercise, and then dismissing them for the principles of syntax, Dr. Bullions encumbers his method of syntactical parsing with such a series of etymological questions and answers as cannot but make it one of the slowest, longest, and most tiresome ever invented. He thinks that the pupil, after parsing any word syntactically, "should be requested to assign a reason for every thing contained in his statement!"—Principles of E. Grammar, p. 131. And the teacher is to ask questions as numerous as the reasons! Such is the parsing of a text-book which has been pronounced "superior to any other, for use in our common schools"—"a complete grammar of the language, and available for every purpose for which Mr. Brown's can possibly be used."—Ralph K. Finch's Report, p, 12.

[63] There are many other critics, besides Murray and Alger, who seem not to have observed the import of after and before in connexion with the tenses. Dr. Bullions, on page 139th of his English Grammar, copied the foregoing example from Lennie, who took it from Murray. Even Richard Hiley, and William Harvey Wells, grammarians of more than ordinary tact, have been obviously misled by the false criticism above cited. One of Hiley's Rules of Syntax, with its illustration, stands thus: "In the use of the different tenses, we must particularly observe to use that tense which clearly and properly conveys the sense intended; thus, instead of saying, 'After I visited Europe, I returned to America;' we should say, 'After I had visited Europe, I returned to America."—Hiley's Gram., p. 90. Upon this he thought it needful to comment thus: "'After I visited Europe, I returned to America;' this sentence is incorrect; visited ought to be had visited, because the action implied by the verb visited WAS COMPLETED before the other past action returned."—Ib., p. 91. See nearly the same thing in Wells's School Grammar, 1st Edition, p. 151; but his later editions are wisely altered. Since "visited and was completed" are of the same tense, the argument from the latter, if it proves any thing, proves the former to be right, and the proposed change needless, or perhaps worse than needless. "I visited Europe before I returned to America," or, "I visited Europe, and afterwards returned to America," is good English, and not to be improved by any change of tense; yet here too we see the visiting "was completed before" the return, or HAD BEEN COMPLETED at the time of the return. I say, "The Pluperfect Tense is that which expresses what had taken place at some past time mentioned: as, 'I had seen him, when I met you.'" Murray says, "The Pluperfect Tense represents a thing not only as past, but also as prior to some other point of time specified in the sentence: as, I had finished my letter before he arrived." Hiley says, "The Past-Perfect expresses an action or event which was past before some other past action or event mentioned in the sentence, and to which it refers; as, I had finished my lessons before he came." With this, Wells appears to concur, his example being similar. It seems to me, that these last two definitions, and their example too, are bad; because by the help of before or after, "the past before the past" may be clearly expressed by the simple past tense: as, "I finished my letter before he arrived."—"I finished my lessons before he came." "He arrived soon after I finished the letter."—"Soon after it was completed, he came in."

[64] Samuel Kirkham, whose grammar is briefly described in the third chapter of this introduction, boldly lays the blame of all his philological faults, upon our noble language itself; and even conceives, that a well-written and faultless grammar cannot be a good one, because it will not accord with that reasonless jumble which he takes every existing language to be! How diligently he laboured to perfect his work, and with what zeal for truth and accuracy, may be guessed from the following citation: "The truth is, after all which can be done to render the definitions and rules of grammar comprehensive and accurate, they will still be found, when critically examined by men of learning and science, more or less exceptionable. These exceptions and imperfections are the unavoidable consequence of the imperfections of the language. Language as well as every thing else of human invention, will always be imperfect. Consequently, a perfect system of grammatical principles, would not suit it. A perfect grammar will not be produced, until some perfect being writes it for a perfect language; and a perfect language will not be constructed, until some super-human agency is employed in its production. All grammatical principles and systems which are not perfect are exceptionable."—Kirkham's Grammar, p. 66. The unplausible sophistry of these strange remarks, and the palliation they afford to the multitudinous defects of the book which contains them, may be left, without further comment, to the judgement of the reader.

[65] The phrase complex ideas, or compound ideas, has been used for the notions which we have of things consisting of different parts, or having various properties, so as to embrace some sort of plurality: thus our ideas of all bodies and classes of things are said to be complex or compound. Simple ideas are those in which the mind discovers no parts or plurality: such are the ideas of heat, cold, blueness, redness, pleasure, pain, volition, &c. But some writers have contended, that the composition of ideas is a fiction; and that all the complexity, in any case, consists only in the use of a general term in lieu of many particular ones. Locke is on one side of this debate, Horne Tooke, on the other.

[66] Dilworth appears to have had a true idea of the thing, but he does not express it as a definition; "Q. Is an Unit of one, a Number? A. An Unit is a number, because it may properly answer the question how many!"—Schoolmaster's Assistant, p. 2. A number in arithmetic, and a number in grammar, are totally different things. The plural number, as men or horses, does not tell how many; nor does the word singular mean one, as the author of a recent grammar says it does. The plural number is one number, but it is not the singular. "The Productive System" teaches thus: "What does the word singular mean? It means one."—Smith's New Gram., p. 7.

[67] It is truly astonishing that so great a majority of our grammarians could have been so