Yet it is axiomatic that facts should precede attempts to explain them, and in all such cases the facts of older usage are immediately and vitally connected with usage of the present.
A consideration of historical English grammar would put an end to most of the profitless discussions which occupy the time of teachers’ conventions, or find space in newspapers and less scholarly literary journals. Such discussions almost invariably consider the expression or usage in question from the logical standpoint only. Now language is essentially not logical but conventional. It represents not what ought to be, but what has come to be under certain natural or artificial influences. The historical factor, therefore, becomes of primary importance in considering correctness of present usage.
Many illustrations of this fact might be given. On a purely logical basis no one can support the modern English “I have come,” rather than “I am come.” The history of usage, however, shows how “have” has naturally taken its place as the only correct auxiliary for expressing a particular tense of the verb. In considering the correctness or incorrectness of such an expression as “I am granted permission,” the history of usage and the past and present influences of analogy must not be so totally disregarded as they were by the literary journals which devoted much space to the above expression during the past year.
More than all else, a proper regard for the history of the language must show the importance of separating the usage of different periods, and the impossibility of explaining the usage of one period by influences belonging wholly to another era. English grammar in the schools of today should be a description of the usage of this century, as distinct in many respects from that of the seventeenth or eighteenth century. I note with pleasure that one recent text-book lays special emphasis upon this point, the author choosing examples from present English writers, admitting much diversity of usage, and not attempting to explain the usage of former times by that of today.
The Spoken Language
Not only should English grammar be taught with reference to the nature of language and the history of English, but it should also take account of the spoken, as distinct from the written, form. The reasons for this seem to me many and excellent. For instance, it is a misfortune that the English language makes its appeal to the educated mind, mainly through the written and printed form. The appeal to the ear and the appeal to the eye, which should strengthen one another, are thus distinctly separate and divergent. Our orthography encourages this separation. It is therefore the more important that text-books of grammar should make some attempt to counteract this tendency.
In accordance with this principle, text-books should describe the grammar of our language in terms which apply to the spoken as well as to the written form. That this is not done at present is fairly evident. Let anyone try, for example, to get an idea of the formation of the plural in spoken English from the descriptions of most of our school grammars. The same disregard of the spoken forms is exemplified by descriptions of the formation of the preterit tense. In these cases little confusion is produced in spoken English, because little attention is paid to the grammatical description. But it would be impossible to determine from most books what is the correct spoken form for the possessive singular of words ending in s, a case in which spoken usage greatly differs. The most serious effect of the neglect of the spoken form is the aid which it gives to the so-called orthoëpist in his conspiracy to force pronunciation into conformity with print.
Again, the grammarian should consider, not only spoken forms, but also spoken usage. Let me illustrate what I mean by an example taken almost at random. In one of our recent text-books occurs this statement: “The term verb is from the Latin verbum meaning word: hence it is the word of the sentence. A thought cannot be expressed without a verb.” I pass over the faulty logic of the proposition, that because verb meant “word” in Latin it must be the word in an English sentence. Etymology is important, but it is not as important as this implies. Besides this lack of sequence in the logic, the statement is only partly true for written English, since sentences without verbs do occur occasionally in good writers; and for the spoken language it is far from true, since sentences without verbs occur in the speech of each one of us every day. Of course the grammarian gets round the difficulty by saying that “when the child says ‘Apple!’ it means, See the apple! or, I have an apple.” But in thus explaining the exception to this self-established rule, the grammarian is dealing with a logical, not a grammatical, fact. Grammar deals with what is, not what may be, expressed. Of slight importance as is this particular example, it is but one of many indications of an almost total neglect of spoken variations from written usage.
Consideration of spoken English implies some attention to phonology, or phonetics, a subject often though not always omitted in our text-books. This, however, would certainly not be unwise, especially in a nation so devoted to the dictionary and to what we call good spoken English. If phonology should be properly discussed by our grammarians we might hope some time to get rid of the misleading alphabetic description of sounds, which hinders more than it helps correct pronunciation.
But the best reason for the recognition of the spoken, as distinct from the written, language is in the enlivening and vivifying of grammatical teaching which would result. Instead of memorizing numerous rules and definitions, and applying them in a more or less lifeless manner to the conventional written form, the pupil could be taught to observe speech about him, to study its forms as the scientist studies other natural phenomena, and to understand the laws of its existence and development. I cannot believe that English studied in this way need be less lacking in interest and pleasure than the study of the other phenomena of nature and of life.
Concluded on page four
