Not to this day has it been settled what sort of a difference in words shall entitle them to a separate rank as parts of speech.-HORNE TOOKE. The number and character of these recognized classes of words have varied at different eras. The earliest Greek grammarians named a few parts of speech which attracted emphatic attention, and others were added later. At last Dionysius carried "eight parts of speech" from Alexandria to Rome, and from that day to this the mystic number eight has been perpetuated. Yet the claimants to a place in the list have varied. The participle, included by Dionysius, was afterwards added to the verb. The Greeks, wiser than we, omitted the interjection, which indeed is not a part of speech, but a "whole speech," though vague and undeveloped. The infinitive has sometimes been called a part of speech. Pronouns have sometimes been classed with nouns; and again the personal pronouns have been treated as a part of speech distinct from adjective pronouns, which were classed with adjectives or articles. Lily's grammar (known as the grammar of King Henry the Eighth) included the adjectives with the noun, declaring "In speech be there eight parts following: noun, pronoun, verb, participle, declined; adverb, conjunction, preposition, interjection, undeclined." This was also the platform of some of the old Latin grammarians, though others maintained that the adjective ought not to be called a noun. Numerals have sometimes been considered . > one part of speech. The articles have often been so treated. Murray's old grammar does this, thus giving to English nine parts of speech, or one more than belong to Latin, which has no article. Not a few of the ancient grammarians divided words into three classes, which, according to Vossius, were nouns, verbs, and particles. This view also found advocates among the early English grammarians, who seem to have supposed that grammar would be rendered easier by reducing the number of the parts of speech. Murray's reply to this view, however, was as follows: "Every word in the language must be included in some class and nothing is gained by making the classes larger and less numerous. In all the artificial arrangements of science, distinctions are to be made according to the differences in things, and the simple question here is what differences among words shall be at first regarded. To overlook in our primary division the difference between a verb and a participle is merely to reserve for a sub-division or subsequent explanation a species of words which most grammarians have recognized as a distinct sort." Recent grammarians have pointed out that whatever be the number of classes recognized, they are reducible to four main types, substantives, verbs, modifiers, and connectives. The diversity which has prevailed is shown by a curious dialogue in the Diversions of Purley, by John Horne Tooke. One of the characters is made to say, "You have not informed me how many parts of speech you intend to lay down." The reply is, "That shall be as you please, either two to twenty or more." In Noah Webster's grammar of 1790, he says that eight is the best number of parts of speech that can be found. Yet in another of his grammars, he reduces the number to six, following the example of Lowth and others, who class adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions together under the common name of abbreviations or particles. Horne Tooke tells us, however, that "Particles is a convenient name for all the little words that we do not exactly understand.” The number and names of the parts of speech have at last crystallized into the eight that our grammars generally recognize, and perhaps this list is as convenient as can be made; though several of the most distinctive sub-classes, such as participles, infinitives, articles, and the different classes of pronouns, need to be taught early in the grammar course and with nearly as much distinctness as the fundamental eight classes. When all these are clearly known, and the student is able to assign each word of a sentence to its proper part of speech, the stronghold of grammar as a science may be said to have been conquered. In thus assigning words to their parts of speech it will be noticed that the nouns and verbs of a language are practically numberless; adjectives and adverbs of quality are also numerous, and their number is often increased by new word formations; but articles, pronouns of various classes, auxiliary verbs, modal adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions are limited classes, seldom added to but constantly repeated as the connective and filling-in material of all sentences. 66 The basis of the classification of parts of speech is the function which the word performs in the structure of the sentence. For this reason there can be no logical definition of any part of speech, except by giving its function. The old definition of a verb as a word which means to be, to do, or to suffer,” ignored wholly this functional element. In teaching that " a noun is a name," the student should not omit to notice the fact that this gives to the noun the grammatical quality which admits of its being the subject term of a sentence. But the quality of belonging to a part of speech in English is a very variable one. It is more a habit of the word than a fixed and innate quality. In a highly inflected language like Latin, the word is ticketed, as it were, by its form as belonging to a given part of speech. In the newly invented language Esperanto, the part of speech is shown by the termination of the word. But in English it is the sense of the sentence that must decide, and there are only a comparatively small number of words that belong always to the same part of speech. The pronouns are the most habitbound among our words, but with some of these there is variation. For these reasons it is even more true in English than in some other languages that the sentence and not the word must be regarded as the primary unit of form as well as of thought. This fact receives added |