CHAPTER XV. — INFINITIVE AND PARTICIPLE CONSTRUCTIONS, INFINITIVES AND PARTICIPLES, character and use of, 438. INFINITIVES, 439-451: infinitives and infinitive-phrases, 439; use and omission of the "sign" to, 440-1; constructions of the infinitive, 442; subject, predicate noun, 443; object, 444; after preposition, 445; peculiarities of infinitive in ing, 446-7; adverbial objective, 448; subject to the infinitive, 449; other cases, 450; PARTICIPLES, 452-62: participles and participle-phrases, 452; constructions, 453; EXERCISES, FOR PRACTICE IN INFINITIVE AND PARTICIPLE CONSTRUCTIONS, pp. 225-7: XXIX. Infinitive constructions. XXX. Participle constructions. INTERROGATIVE AND IMPERATIVE SENTENCES, The three kinds of sentence, 463; interrogative sentence, 464; kinds of questions, and their answers, 465-9; interrogative arrangement, 470; inverted conditional sentence, 471; change of interrogative order, 472; kinds of interrogative clause, 473; imperative mode and sentence, 474-5; kinds of imperative clause, 476; imperative-phrases, 477; other forms of imperative and optative expression, 478-80; exclamatory interrogative sentence, 481. EXERCISES, FOR PRACTICE IN INTERROGATIVE AND IMPERATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS, CHAPTER XVII. - ABBREVIATED AND INCOMPLETE EXPRESSION, Complete and incomplete sentences, 482; abbreviation, 483-4; abbreviation in co- EXERCISES, FOR PRACTICE IN ABBREVIATED EXPRESSION, pp. 250-2: XXXII. INDEX (pp. 253 – 60). ENGLISH GRAMMAR. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY: LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR. 1. The English language is the language used by the people of England, and by all who speak like them anywhere else in the world; for example, in the United States. 2. There are hundreds and hundreds of different languages in the world, and the only way we can define any one of them is to say: "It is the language used in such and such a region, or by such and such people." The people from whom our language gets its name are those living in England. Their forefathers came to that country from the northern shore of Germany, about 1500 years ago, and drove out or destroyed the people who had lived in the country before, and who had spoken a very different language (much like what the Welsh, the language of Wales, is nowadays). 3. Because the English language was brought from Germany into England, being then only a dialect of German, it is still very much like the languages of Germany, and is for this reason often called a GERMANIC language (or a TEUTONIC, which means the same thing). And all the Germanic languages, along with most of the others in Europe, and a part of those of Asia, form a great body of languages resembling one another, and hence called a "family" the INDO-EUROPEAN (or the ARYAN) family. 4. The English-speaking people of England were conquered in the eleventh century by the Normans, a French-speaking people; and, by the mixture of the two, their speech also came to be somewhat mixed, so that a part of our English comes from Germany and another large part from France, to say nothing of the words we have gotten from yet other sources. 5. The English also conquered and settled other countries : the southern part of Scotland, and, a good deal later, most of Ireland; and they have sent out colonies to all parts of the world, which of course carried their English language with them, far out of England. Some of these colonies have become great nations; so, especially, that in North America has grown and increased until it is as numerous a people as the English of England. Thus the English language is now used by many more people out of England than in it; but it still keeps everywhere its old name. 6. Our English, however, is by no means the same language that has always gone by that name, nor is it now used alike by all the people who speak it. 7. The language first brought from Northern Germany to England was so different from ours that we should not understand it at all if we heard it spoken; and we cannot learn to read it without as much study as it costs us, for example, to read French or German. The reason is, that every living language is all the time changing. Some old words go out of use; other new words come into use; some change their meaning; all, or almost all, change their pronunciation; and our phrases, also, the ways in which we put words together to express our thoughts, become by degrees different. Such changes are sometimes very slow; but they are all the time going on, everywhere. A thousand years hence, if it lives so long, the English will be so far unlike what it now is that we, if we were to come to life again, should perhaps not understand it without a good deal of trouble. 8. The oldest English that we know anything of, the English of the time of King Alfred and thereabouts (a thousand years ago), we generally call ANGLO-SAXON, to distinguish it from that of later times; and there are other names such as Old Eng lish, Early English for the language of times between Alfred's and our own. When we say simply "English," we mean the language. of our time, such as we ourselves understand and use. 9. But there are considerable differences in the language even of English speakers at the present day. Thus, almost every region has some peculiarities in the way in which its speakers use their English. There are, for example, the peculiarities of the English of Ireland, noticed by us in the Irish emigrant; those of the English of Scotland, seen in the poetry of Burns, the stories of Scott, and other such places; and those of the negro English of the Southern United States. And, in general, an Englishman can tell an American, and an American can tell an Englishman, by the way he talks. When these peculiarities amount to so much that they begin to interfere a little with our understanding the persons who have them, we say that such persons speak a DIALECT of English, rather than English itself. 10. Then there is also the difference between what we call "good English" and "bad English." By good English we mean those words, and those meanings of them, and those ways of putting them together, which are used by the best speakers, the people of best education; everything which such people do not use, or use in another way, is bad English. Thus bad English is simply that which is not approved and accepted by good and careful speakers. Every one who speaks any language "naturally," as we call it, has really learned it from those whom he heard speak around him as he was growing up. But he is liable to learn it ill, forming bad and incorrect habits of speech; or he may learn it from those who have themselves learned it ill, and may copy their bad |