according to the plan which was followed by Dionysius at Rome, by Priscianus at Constantinople, by Alcuin at York; and whatever may be said of the improvements introduced into our system of education, the Greek and Latin grammars used at our public schools are mainly founded on the first empirical analysis of language, prepared by the philosophers of Athens, applied by the scholars of Alexandria, and transferred to the practical purpose of teaching a foreign tongue by the Greek professors at Rome.

CHAPTER IV.

THE CLASSIFICATORY STAGE.

WE traced, in our last chapter, the origin and

progress of the empirical study of languages from the time of Plato and Aristotle to our own school-boy days. We saw at what time, and under what circumstances, the first grammatical analysis of language took place; how its component parts, the parts of speech, were named; and how, with the aid of a terminology, half philosophical and half empirical, a system of teaching languages was established, which, whatever we may think of its intrinsic value, has certainly answered that purpose for which it was chiefly intended.

Grammatical Study of Sanskrit.

Considering the process by which this system of grammatical science was elaborated, it could not be expected to give us an insight into the nature of language. The division into nouns and verbs, articles and conjunctions, the schemes of declension and conjugation, were a merely artificial network thrown over the living body of language. We must not look in the grammar of Dionysius Thrax for a correct and well-articulated skeleton of human speech. But it is all the more curious, to observe the striking coincidences between the grammatical terminology of the

Greeks and the Hindus, which would seem to prove that there must be some true and natural foundation for the much-abused grammatical system of the schools. The Hindus are the only nation that cultivated the science of grammar without having received any impulse, directly or indirectly, from the Greeks. Yet we find in Sanskrit too the same system of cases, called vibhakti, or inflections, the active, passive, and middle voices, the tenses, moods, and persons, divided not exactly, but very nearly, in the same manner as in Greek.1 In Sanskrit, grammar is called Vyakarana, which means analysis or taking to pieces. As Greek grammar owed its origin to the critical study of Homer, Sanskrit grammar arose from the study of the Vedas, the most ancient poetry of the Brahmans. The differences between the dialect of these sacred hymns and the literary Sanskrit of later ages were noted and preserved with a religious care. We still possess the first essays in the grammatical science of the Brahmans, the so-called Prâtisâkhyas. These works, though they merely profess to give rules on the proper pronunciation of the ancient dialect of the Vedas, furnish us at the same time with observations of a grammatical character, and particularly with those valuable lists of words, irregular or in any other way remarkable, the Ganas. These supplied the solid basis on which successive generations of scholars erected that astounding structure which reached its perfection in the grammar of Pânini. There is no form, regular or irregular, in the whole Sanskrit language, which is not provided 1 See M. M.'s History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, p. 158.

for in the grammar of Pânini and his commentators. It is the perfection of a merely empirical analysis of language, unsurpassed, nay even unapproached, by anything in the grammatical literature of other nations. Yet of the real nature, and natural growth of language, it teaches us nothing.

What then do we know of language after we have learnt the grammar of Greek or Sanskrit, or after we have transferred the network of classical grammar to our own tongue?

The Facts of Grammar.

We know certain forms of language which correspond to certain forms of thought. We know that the subject must assume the form of the nominative, the object that of the accusative. We know that the more remote object may be put in the dative, and that the predicate, in its most general form, may be rendered by the genitive. We are taught that whereas in English the genitive is marked by a final 8, or by the preposition of, it is in Greek expressed by a final os, in Latin by is. But what this os and is represent, why they should have the power of changing a nominative into a genitive, a subject into a predicate, remains a riddle. It is self-evident that each language, in order to be a language, must be able to distinguish by some means or other the subject from the object, the nominative from the accusative. But how a mere change of termination should suffice to convey so material a distinction would seem almost incomprehensible. If we look for a moment beyond Greek and Latin, we see that there are in reality but few languages which have distinct forms for these

two categories of thought. Even in Greek and Latin there is no outward distinction between the nominative and accusative of neuters. The Chinese language, it is commonly said, has no grammar at all; that is to say, it has no inflections, no declension and conjugation, in our sense of these words; it makes no formal distinction of the various parts of speech, noun, verb, adjective, adverb, &c. Yet there is no shade of thought that cannot be rendered in Chinese. The Chinese have no more difficulty in distinguishing between James beats John,' and 'John beats James,' than the Greeks and Romans or we ourselves. They have no termination for the accusative, but they attain the same by always placing the subject before, and the object after the verb, or by employing words, before or after the noun, which clearly indicate that it is to be taken as the object of the verb.

1

Grammar in Chinese.

The Chinese 1 do not decline their substantives, but they indicate the cases distinctly

A. By means of particles.

B. By means of position.

1. The nominative or the subject of a sentence is always placed at the beginning.

2. The genitive may be marked

(a) By the particle tchi placed between the two nouns, of which the first is in the genitive, the second in the nominative. Example, jin tchi kiun (hominum princeps, literally, man, sign of the genitive, prince).

The statements are made on the authority of Stanislas Julien, the greatest Chinese scholar in Europe (died 1873).