Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/48

Rh 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 com position, 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 &quot; word-building,&quot; syntax, and accidence, by which is meant an exposition of the means adopted by language for expressing the relations of grammar when re course 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 f a foreign language. In this case, all that is necessary 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 presup pose. The Semitic verb, for example, remains unintelligible so long as the explanation of its forms is sought in the con jugation 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 ac cordance 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 gram mar 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 : ned, or at most conjecturally interpreted, since the mxchinery by means of which the relations of grammar are symbolized is often changed so completely during the growth of a language as to cause its earlier shape and character to be unrecognizable. Moreover, our area of com parison must ba 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 cintury were in great measure due to the fact that their area of comparison was confined to Latin an 1 Greek. The historical grammar of a single language or dialect, which traces the grammatical forms and usages 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 com parative 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 whatso ever, as distinct from those that are peculiar to special families of speech. Universal grammar is sometimes known as &quot; the metaphysics of language,&quot; 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 his torical 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 &quot;universal grammar&quot; so much in vogue at the begin ning 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 uni versal 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 lan guages is alone in an advanced state, those of the Semitic idioms, of the Ugro-Altaic tongues, and of the Ba-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, poss3S 3S 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 scien tific 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 lan guages of America the sentence is conceived as a whole, not composed of independent words, but, like the thought which by a series of words is consequently denoted by a single long compound, kuligatcJvis in Delaware, for instance, signi fying &quot;give me your pretty little paw,&quot; and aglekkigiartor- asuarnipok, in Eskimo, &quot; he goes away hastily and exerts himself to write.&quot; Individual words can be, and often are, extracted from the sentence ; but in this case they stand, j 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, &quot; I look for flowers,&quot; but also ni-k-temoa sotsitl, where the interpolated guttural is the objective pro noun. As a necessary result of this conception of the sen tence 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 &quot;to wash&quot; in the abstract, no less thin 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, even though the object may be separately expressed. If we pass to an isolating lan guage like Chinese, we find the exact converse of that which meets us in the polysynthetic tongues. Here each proposi- Unh- gram Diffe: in gr; mar ( uuall lantru
 * it expresses, one and indivisible. What we should denote

