In an article written for Harper's magazine over a century ago, Mark Twain offered a humorous account of his efforts to master the Italian language. His comments on the troublesome inflections of Italian verbs--both regular and (those "pathetic outcasts") irregular--apply just as well to their counterparts in English.
Examination and inquiry showed me that the adjectives and such things were frank and fairminded and straightforward, and did not shuffle; it was the Verb that mixed the hands, it was the Verb that lacked stability, it was the Verb that had no permanent opinion about anything, it was the Verb that was always dodging the issue and putting out the light and making all the trouble.
Further examination, further inquiry, further reflection, confirmed this judgment, and established beyond peradventure the fact that the Verb was the storm-centre. This discovery made plain the right and wise course to pursue in order to acquire certainty and exactness in understanding the statements which the newspaper was daily endeavoring to convey to me: I must catch a Verb and tame it. I must find out its ways, I must spot its eccentricities, I must penetrate its disguises, I must intelligently foresee and forecast at least the commoner of the dodges it was likely to try upon a stranger in given circumstances, I must get in on its main shifts and head them off, I must learn its game and play the limit.
I had noticed, in other foreign languages, that verbs are bred in families, and that the members of each family have certain features or resemblances that are common to that family and distinguish it from the other families--the other kin, the cousins and what not. I had noticed that this family-mark is not usually the nose or the hair, so to speak, but the tail --the Termination--and that these tails are quite definitely differentiated; insomuch that an expert can tell a Pluperfect from a Subjunctive by its tail as easily and as certainly as a cowboy can tell a cow from a horse by the like process, the result of observation and culture. I should explain that I am speaking of legitimate verbs, those verbs which in the slang of the grammar are called Regular. There are others--I am not meaning to conceal this; others called Irregulars, born out of wedlock, of unknown and uninteresting parentage, and naturally destitute of family resemblances, as regards all features, tails included. But of these pathetic outcasts I have nothing to say. I do not approve of them, I do not encourage them; I am prudishly delicate and sensitive, and I do not allow them to be used in my presence.
But, as I have said, I decided to catch one of the others and break it to harness. One is enough. Once familiar with its assortment of tails, you are immune; after that, no regular verb can conceal its specialty from you and make you think it is working the past or the future or the conditional or the unconditional when it is engaged in some other line of business--its tail will give it away. I found out all these things by myself, without a teacher.
(Mark Twain, "Italian With Grammar." Harper's Monthly Magazine, August 1904)
By the way, if the style of this passage strikes you as excessively amplified--"stretched," Twain would say--keep this in mind: he was being paid a whopping 30¢ a word.
More by Mark Twain:
- Mark Twain's Latest Essay: "The Privilege of the Grave"
- Mark Twain on Words and Wordiness, Grammar and Composition
- Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
- On the Decay of the Art of Lying
Image: Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens)
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