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BY PROF. WILLIAM SWINTON, A.M.,
AUTHOR OF "WORD-ANALYSIS,'
‚” “WORD-BOOK,'
"RAMBLES AMONG WORDS,'
"CONDENSED

HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES," "FIRST LESSONS IN OUR COUNTRY'S
""CAMPAIGNS OF THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC,"

HISTORY,

66 DECISIVE BATTLES OF THE WAR," ETC.

ETYMOLOGY HISTORICALLY TREATED.

PRACTICAL SYNTAX.

ANALYSIS AND CONSTRUCTION.

ENGLISH COMPOSITION.

NEW YORK:

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,

FRANKLIN SQUARE.

AIMBOTLIAD

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by

HARPER & BROTHERS,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

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PREFACE.

THE present course of English Grammar, forming a part of Harper's Language-Series, is embodied in two books: 1. The "First Lessons in English ;"

2. The "Progressive English Grammar."

The two are not necessarily connected; either may be used by itself. The "First Lessons," however, is designed to meet the wants of the lower classes of graded schools, while this text-book will connect with the "First Lessons," and, at the same time, furnish by itself a complete grammatical course for ungraded and for private schools.

Learning our mother tongue ought to be the most interesting of school studies; and yet, for nearly a century, countless numbers of technical grammars, all modeled after Lindley Murray, have been, by turns, the object of aver-` sion to successive generations of school children. This is not to be wondered at. The traditional rules of syntax, and the time-honored nomenclature of etymology, have come down to us a heritage from the elder grammarians, who, writing before philology became a science, put forth all their strength in a too successful endeavor to subject our simple and peculiar English speech to the vassalage of Latin forms.

The introduction, some thirty years ago, of the method

of Sentential ANALYSIS, devised by the German philologist Becker, and adapted to American school use in the meritorious works of Professor Greene and others, marks the only considerable innovation, in this country, on the Murray system. The new doctrine excited great interest, and soon ran into a wide currency. When we consider, however, that Analysis is the syntax of English to no greater a degree than it is the syntax of any other speech; that it is, in point of fact, general or universal syntax, it is not strange that it failed to realize the brilliant results claimed for it by its early champions, and that of late it is falling out of favor with judicious teachers, who find that Analysis, while a curious and interesting study, and not without its value as a means of mental discipline, fails to accomplish the professed design of English grammar, which design now is, and always has been, to teach "the art of speaking and writing the English language with propriety."

In the mean time, in the results of modern linguistic study and research, materials have been rapidly accumulating, from which methods of treatment ought to be developed very different from the complications of AngloLatin syntax on the one hand, and from the abstractions of Analysis on the other. If the present work shall be found to possess any merit, that merit will be due to the fact that modern philology has made English grammar possible by showing us what the English speech really is.

In this text-book, of the four mediæval "branches" of grammar, two have been lopped off—to wit, Orthography and Prosody. These do not properly belong to English grammar, and, indeed, they came into the grammatical horn-books at a period when the awful mysteries of "grammairie" were ranked with the black arts. This exclusion

leaves for treatment the two proper departments of grammar-Etymology and Syntax; to which have been added Analysis and Construction, and English Composition.

I.

In the treatment of ETYMOLOGY three prominent points will be noticed:

1. A graduated method of unfolding the parts of speech, which are shown upon three successive and ascending planes. The parts of speech are first taken up and defined merely. Then all the parts of speech are again taken up, and their subdivisions set forth. Lastly, all the parts of speech are taken up for the third time, and their inflections (if they possess any) are exhibited. The superiority of this plan of gradual approach over the old way of crowding every thing in a confused mass of bewildering nomenclature upon the child must be evident on even a cursory examination.

2. The brief, simple, and practical definitions of the parts of speech and of grammatical terms in general. Grammarians, it is true, have been in the habit of magnifying the importance of abstract logical definitions, constructed with all the subtlety of the schoolmen. But is it not manifest that in an art like grammar the sole end of definition is to teach uses? Now it is believed that the school-boy, by the aid of such simple (though, it is true, empirical) definitions as NOUNS NAME THINGS, VERBS MAKE STATEMENTS, will learn to detect nouns and verbs much sooner than he possibly could, were he ever so cunning in the repetition of wire-. drawn definitions that may, indeed, be theoretically exhaustive, but that are practically unintelligible.

3. The historical treatment of English inflections. The

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