Years is a noun, being the name of a portion of time. Old is an adjective, qualifying the noun man understood. Hours is a noun, being the name of a division of time. If is a conjunction, connecting the clause, A man that is young in years may be old in hours,' to the following clause, When a noun ending in y is to be formed into the plural, s is added if the y is preceded by a vowel; but if a consonant goes before the y, then the y is changed into ies; thus, in boy, there is a vowel before the y, we therefore add s, boys; but in duty there is a consonant before the y, the plural therefore is duties. Nouns ending in for fe, generally form the plural by he has lost no time. As if in such cases points out the condi- changing the for fe into ves; thus, loaf, loaves; knife, tion on which the assertion going before it is to be received, it is He is a personal pronoun, standing instead of the noun man. knives; wife, wives. Hoof, hoofs; proof, proofs; roof, roofs; and a few others, are exceptions. Nouns derived from dead or foreign tongues for the Lost is a verb indicating an act. On the nature of this part of most part retain their original plurals; thus the verb we shall have more to say afterwards. No is an adjective, qualifying the noun time. But is a conjunction. It connects the two clauses, and at the same time indicates, or, to adopt the apt expression of which Mr Mill frequently makes use, connotes that the clause coming after it is in opposition to the one going before, and therefore it is called a disjunctive conjunction. From the Latin we have SINGULAR. Larva Axis From the Greek come- PLURAL. Phenomena Crises Hypotheses Criteria Automata PLURAL. Radii Larvæ Crisis Elipses Medium Nebula Nebul Analysis Metamorphoses Strata. That is a demonstrative adjective, qualifying the noun thing Genus understood. Magus Happeneth is a verb, asserting something of its subject, that thing.' Rarely is an adverb of time, modifying the verb happeneth. As an additional exercise in parsing, we shall transcribe a stanza from Campbell's beautiful ode, Farewell to Love,' containing, according to our view, ten of each of the three classes, nouns, adjectives, and verbs; five of the two, pronouns and prepositions; two conjunctions, and three adverbs. The student is requested to make a careful analysis for himself, and see how far our enumeration be consistent with his own : Hail! welcome tide of life, when no tumultuous billows roll; Than I would cross the gulf again that time has brought me o'er.' To the subject of parsing we shall return before we quit Etymology; but for the present we wish to direct the attention of the reader to the various modifications put on words to express a difference of meaning. II. INFLECTION. Theses Adam Smith remarks, that in many languages the qualities both of sex and of the want of sex are Any change made upon the termination of a word is expressed by different terminations in the nouns subcalled its accident or inflection; thus, the words, boy's, stantive which denote objects so qualified.' After harder, its, loved, and sooner, are said to be inflected showing that, in Latin, certain terminations were apforms, or simply inflections of the words boy, hard, it, propriated to expressing certain genders, he adds- The love, and soon. Of the eight parts of speech, five only-quality [of sex] appears in nature as a modification of the noun, adjective, pronoun, verb, and adverb-are declinable-that is, capable of being inflected; while the remaining three-preposition, conjunction, and interjection are indeclinable-that is, cannot be varied in such a way as to express any modification in meaning. Inflection of Nouns. The noun is varied in three ways-by Number, Gender, and Case. NUMBER shows whether one or more than one thing is meant by the noun. There are two Numbers, the Singular and the Plural. The singular expresses one of a class; as river, horse. The plural denotes more than one; as rivers, horses. The plural is generally formed from the singular, by adding the letter s; thus, table, tables; book, books. Nouns ending in any of the five following terminations, s, sh, ch (when pronounced soft), x, and o (impure-that is, preceded by a consonant), form their plural by adding es to the singular; thus, brush, brushes; church, churches; box, boxes; hero, heroes. When ch is pronounced hard, and when o is preceded by a vowel, the plural is formed by adding s; thus, monarch, monarchs; folio, folios. wards become more easily recognisable. In the following sentence it is at once perceived what relation the first in expresses, but much more difficult to get the distinct idea meant to be conveyed by the second:-' Diogenes sat in a tub, but he was generally in good-humour.' the substance; and as it is thus expressed in language by a modification of the noun substantive which denotes that substance, the quality and the subject are in this case blended together, if I may say so, in the expression, in the same manner as they appear to be in the object and in the idea. Hence the origin of the masculine, feminine, and neuter genders, in all the ancient languages.' Admitting the truth as well as the ingenuity of this speculation, as far as regards ancient languages, it does not appear to be the genius of the English language to assign any particular termination (as we find in the Latin) to the different genders; there are, however, some cases in which gender may be recognised from the mere termination of the noun, as will appear from the following table: Sometimes the same word is applied to males and females indiscriminately; and when we wish to distinguish the sex, we prefix another word. Thus the word servant signifies either a male or a female; but if we desire to notify which, we can use the compound words man-servant or maid-servant. Of the same kind are he-goat and she-goat, cock-sparrow and hen-sparrow, and many others. CASE. Case is that accident of a noun which points out the relation which it bears to other parts of the sentence. Nouns have three cases- - Nominative, Possessive, and Objective. The noun is said to be in the Nominative when it is the subject of discourse, and represents the person or thing of whom or which some assertion is made. Thus in the sentence, John reads,' the proper noun John is said to be in the Nominative, because it names the person of whom the assertion reads is made. The Possessive represents a vast variety of relations, but the principal one is that of ownership or possession. Thus, John's book is lost,' where John's is in the possessive, because it names the owner of the book.* The inflection of the Possessive Case (the only case in English that has an inflection) corresponds exactly in import to the preposition of. In the line, 'An angel's virtues and a woman's love,' we could easily dispense with the possessive, and The Nominative and Objective of nouns are alike in form; and it is only by observing how the noun stands related to other words, that we can say when it is in the one and when in the other. To decide on the case of a noun, we must look before and after.' The Possessive, however, may be recognised by its form, as well as by its function, as it for the most part ends with 's in the singular, and ' after the s in the plural. A noun is thus declined : Inflection of Adjectives. Men's In many languages the Adjective is changed in termination, to correspond with the noun which it qualifies; but in the English tongue there is no such modification; and here, as in many other respects, our language seems superior in metaphysical propriety to most others, because the accident of gender cannot prointro-perly belong to a quality which is itself but an accident and no self-existing thing. Gender,' it is observed by Adam Smith, 'cannot properly belong to a noun adjective, the signification of which is always precisely the same, to whatever species of substantives it is applied. When we say "a great man," "a great woman," the word great has precisely the same meaning in both cases, and the difference of the sex in the subjects to which it may be applied makes no sort of difference in its signification. Magnus, magna, magnum, in the same manner, are words which express precisely the same The virtues of an angel and the love of a woman. Adam Smith asserts that inflections would probably be made before prepositions were invented; observing very justly, that it requires much less abstraction to express the nature of the relation that subsists between two objects by a change on the name denoting one of them, than to call into use a class of words expressing relation and nothing else. To express relation by a varia-quality, and the change of the termination is accomtion in the name of the correlative object, requiring neither abstraction nor generalisation, nor comparison of any kind, would at first be much more natural and easy than to express it by those general words called prepositions, of which the first invention must have demanded some degree of all these operations.' This speculation is exceedingly ingenious; but whether it be true in general is, to say the least, doubtful; and as far as the possessive of the English noun goes, it must be allowed, we think, to be wide of the truth. The noun is in the Objective Case-1st, when it names the object on which the action expressed by a transitive verb operates; and 2d, when it names the thing shown to be related to something else by a preposition. In the sentence, John destroyed his book,' book is expressing the object on which the verbal action operates; it is therefore said to be in the objective case. Again, in the sentence, 'The cloud rises over the hill,' hill is in the objective, because it is the word shown to be related to cloud by the preposition over. panied with no sort of variation in the meaning. Sex and gender are qualities that belong to substances, but cannot belong to the qualities of substances.' But while the nature of the thing which the adjective is employed to express cannot be varied, yet it may exist in different proportions; and hence the adjective is varied to express different degrees of the quality indicated by it, and these variations are called Degrees of Comparison. When the simple quality is denoted, the adjective is said to be in the Positive Degree. When a higher degree is signified, the adjective is in the Comparative; and when the highest degree is expressed, it is said to be in the Superlative. Logically considered, indeed, the positive involves the idea of comparison as much as the comparative: thus, when we affirm of a mountain that it is lofty, we must have a tacit reference to other mountains; when we affirm of any particular river that it is rapid, we (unconsciously, perhaps, but yet actually) make a comparison between it and some other rivers. We consider it, therefore, impossible to * Concerning the origin of the possessive case English gram-state any essential difference between the degrees of marians and critics are not agreed. Some maintain that it is what we may call indigenous to the language, corresponding, they affirm, to an inflection of the Saxon noun; but we rather incline to the opinion of Addison, who thinks that the possessive termination is only a contraction for the pronoun his. Had the possessive case been native to our tongue, it is hardly conceivable that the translators of the Bible would have used such an expression as Asa his heart was perfect.' It has been ingeniously objected to Addison's explanation, that while it is very easy to see how the king his crown' might have been contracted or corrupted into the king's crown,' it is impossible to imagine that the queen her crown,' or 'the children their bread,' could have been subjected to the same contraction. But surely this objection is not unanswerable; for when the convenience of the contraction was seen in the case of singular nouns masculine, it might very easily be transferred to nouns feminine and plural. We would not be understood, however, to speak confidently on the point; and in whatever way the possessive was introduced, it is now impossiblo, supposing it were desirable, to displace it. comparison; but in addition to what we have already The whole class of Numeral Adjectives, from their very nature, cannot be in any other degree than the positive; and with respect to Attributive Adjectives, it is to be observed that those only which express a quality which may exist in greater or less proportions can be compared: for instance, if the exact ideas represented by the words circular, square, triangular, and also such words as chief, extreme, universal, true, and eternal, be apprehended by the mind, by the very act of apprehension it will be seen that it would be contradictory to their nature to admit of any increase. Let the student reflect on this, and then he will be able to dispense with rules about the use of chief, perpendicular, &c. because he will see at once, from the nature of the idea suggested by the word, whether it admits of increase or diminution. The Comparative is formed by adding er to the Positive, if it end with a consonant, and r simply, if it end in the vowel e; thus, hard, harder; large, larger. Adjectives compared in this manner are said to be Regular; but some adjectives follow no fixed rule in forming their degrees of comparison, and these are called Irregular. The following are those most commonly in use: Sometimes the same idea is conveyed by prefixing an adverb to the adjective in its simple state: thus instead of saying juster, we might say more just; but it is not therefore to be inferred that more just is the comparison of just. Were this principle admitted, we should soon have inextricable confusion. In such cases, more is an adverb in the comparative, qualifying the adjective just, and the two words should be parsed separately. The prefixing of an adverb cannot, with any justice, be called a variation of the adjective. A few adjectives have a plural form, particularly the demonstrative, this and that; in the plural, these and those one, other, and another, are also sometimes varied by number or case. : Inflection of Pronouns. Inflection of Verbs. The Verb is varied in four ways—namely, by Number, Person, Mood, and Tense. There are two Numbers-singular and plural-as in the case of the noun; and three Persons, as in the pronouns. The Moods are generally reckoned five in number the Indicative, the Subjunctive, the Potential, the Imperative, and the Infinitive. But it may well be questioned if there is any real ground for such distinction, as far at least as the Subjunctive and Potential are concerned. The Subjunctive, as it is called, is merely an elliptical mode of expression, and the Potential is made up of two or more verbs, and therefore it can with no propriety be called an inflection of any one of them. This leaves us the Indicative, by which simple assertions are made; the Imperative, by which commands are issued; and the Infinitive, which is neither more nor less than the name of the verb, and in use corresponds exactly to a noun. The Tenses are two in number-the Present and the Past: the Future is not expressed by any inflection of the verb in English, as it is in Latin, French, and other languages, but by the help of another verb; and it is surely absurd to force a distinction upon the English verb merely because it exists in Latin.* The Participles of the verb are likewise two in number-the Perfect and the Imperfect. They are often called the Present and Past, but in themselves they have no reference to time, and merely indicate the completion or non-completion of an action. According to this view of the verb-the only consistent one-it has no such thing as a passive voice. What is called the passive voice is not formed by any variety of termination, and so cannot be acknowledged as an inflection, without opening a door to all manner of confusion. The English verb,' says Crombie in his Treatise on the Etymology and Syntax of the English Language,' has only one voice-namely, the active. Dr Lowth, and most other grammarians, have assigned it two voices-active and passive. Lowth has in this instance not only violated the simplicity of our language, but has also advanced an opinion inconsistent with his own principles. For if he has justly excluded from the number of cases in nouns, and moods in verbs, those which are not formed by inflection, but by the addition The Pronoun, like the Noun, is varied by Gender, of prepositions and auxiliary verbs, there is equal reaNumber, Person, and Case. The Personal Pronouns are thus declined : : OBJECTIVE. Me OBJECTIVE. Us You Them. Ye or you They By inspecting the two following lines, the student will understand what we meant by saying, that the Possessive Pronouns, or, as we prefer calling them, Pronominal Adjectives, were derived from, and corresponded with, the personal pronouns : I thou he sho it we you they mine thine his hers its ours yours theirs. The Relative and Interrogative Pronouns, who and which, are alike in both numbers, and are thus declined : : Who. Nominative. Who Possessive. Which. Which Whose Whose son for rejecting a passive voice, if it be not formed by variety of termination. Were I to ask him why he denies from a king to be an ablative case, or I may love to be the potential mood, he would answer, and very truly, that those only can be justly regarded as cases or moods which, by a different form of the noun or verb, express a different relation or a different mode of existence. If this answer be satisfactory, there can be no good reason for assigning to our language a passive voice, when that voice is formed not by inflection, but by an auxiliary verb. Doceor [being an inflection of the word doceo] is truly a passive voice; but I am taught cannot, without impropriety, be considered as such.' By conjugating a verb is meant mentioning the present and past tenses and the perfect participle. The past tense and perfect participle are formed from the present tense by adding ed if it end in a consonant, as rain, rained; and simply d if it end in a vowel, as change, changed. If these parts are formed in any other way, the verb * A little reflection may, I think, suffice to convince any person that we have no more business with a future tense in our language than we have with the whole system of Latin moods and tenses; because we have no modification of our verbs to correspond to it; and if we had never heard of a future tense in some other language, we should no more have given a particular name to the combination of the verb with the auxiliary shall or will, than to those that are made with the auxiliaries do, have, can, must, or any other.-PRIESTLEY'S Rudiments of English Grammar. 3. They may. 3. He might. 2. Thou mightst 2. Ye might 3. They might. 3233 3. He may. larly are marked with an r. Thus the past tense of awake is 2. Thou mayst 2. Ye may either awoke or awaked; of build, builded, or buill. The student will now be able to parse a sentence, mentioning not merely what part of speech any word is, but what inflection it has undergone, and how it stands related to other words. By way of example, we shall parse one sentence from Bacon: 'A single life doth well with churchmen; for charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool.' A, a numeral adjective, qualifying the noun life. It is commonly called the indefinite article. Single, an attributive adjective, designating the noun life. It cannot be compared. Life, a noun, singular number, neuter gender, and the nominative case, because it is the thing of which something is asserted. The plural of life is lives. Doth, a verb, because it asserts something of the noun life: it is in the present tense, indicativo mood, and the third person singular, to agree with its noun life. Doth is now almost obsolete, docs being the word in common use. The verb To Do is conjugated thus: Present Tense, Do; Past, Did; Perfect Participle, Done. Well, an adverb, expressing how a single life doth.' Well is in the positive degree, and is compared thus: Positive, Well; Comparative, Better; Superlative, Best. With, a preposition, used in a metaphorical sense, to connect churchmen with single life. Churchmen, a noun plural, masculine, and the objective; being the object shown to be related to something else by the preposition with. The singular is churchman. All nouns, it should be remembered, are of the third person. For, a conjunction, connecting the clause that follows with the one which went before. Charity, a noun, being primarily the name of a disposition of mind, and secondarily of the course of action resulting from that disposition; singular number, neuter gender, and the nominative to the verb will. Will, a verb, present tense, singular number, and third person, to agree with charity. Hardly is an adverb of degree, qualifying the verb water. Water is a verb in the infinitive mood. To, the sign of the infinitive, is suppressed after a great number of verbs, and will is one of them. Will is a defective verb, and is conjugated thus:Present Tense, Will; Past Tense, Would. in the same way as it was after will, in the former part of the sentence. A, a numeral adjective, or indefinite article, designating the noun pool. Pool, a noun, singular, neuter, and objective case, being the thing affected by the transitive verb fill. Additional Remarks.- Before quitting this division of our subject, we must inform the reader that the same word is frequently used in different ways, and consequently belongs to different parts of speech. Nothing can be more certain than that every word must have been originally significant of only one idea; but in the progress of language other ideas attach themselves to it, and the grammarian must not resist this extension of meaning, but carefully observe it. To discover, then, what class of words any word belongs to, we must look before and after;' but a few examples will illustrate our meaning best. 'Come out of the wet." Here wet is a noun, because it is a name expressive of a certain state of the elements. 'John threw off his wet clothes.' Here wet is an adjective, because it qualifies the noun clothes. 'A shower came on and wet the ground.' Here wet is a verb, because it expresses an action. The shower did something-wet the ground.' On the following examples let the student exercise himself, in satisfying himself as to the justness of our assertions with regard to the class of those words which may belong to one or more : 1. The sun is the great source of light (noun). Feathers are light (adjec.). And nightly lights (verb) the waters with her sheen. 2. Beloved, let us love (verb) one another; for love (noun) is of God. 3. Then he arose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm (noun). Thy brow is calm (adjec.) and bright, To still the pang that conscience can impart, 5. Thy nightly (adjec.) visits to my chamber made. 6. Yes, there are charms that (rel. pron.) scorn the spoiler Time! Blessed are those, Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled, man That (rel. pron.) is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 7. The common still (noun) can only be employed, &c. Is this the Talbot so much feared abroad, That with his name the mothers still (verb) their babes? It hath been anciently reported, and is still (adverb) re The, a numeral adjective, or definite article, qualifying the ceived, &c. noun ground. Ground, a noun, singular, neuter, and the objective, being the thing which is affected by the verb water. Where is of the nature of a conjunction, since it unites the two members of the last clause; but it also has in it the force of an adverb, being equivalent to in the case in which. We may therefore call it a conjunctive adverb. It is a personal pronoun, singular, neuter, and third person, supplying the place of the noun charity. It is the nominative to the verb must. Must is a verb, asserting something of the pronoun it. It is in the present tense, and third person singular. First is an adverb of time, qualifying the verb fill. John has been very foolish, still (conjunc.) I will not dismiss him. Let the student further exercise himself in what respects one part of speech resembles another, and wherein it differs. He will find that the noun and junction, resemble each other in some respects, but pronoun, adjective and adverb, preposition and conthat they yet are quite distinct. We conclude this subject with two brief extracts from Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding,' book iii. chap. 7 :- Besides words which are names of Fill is a verb in the infinitive, to being understood after must, ideas in the mind, there are a great many others that |