extensively employed as a food for horses and cattle in South India, where also it is eaten in curries.
See W. Elliot, “On the Farinaceous Grains and the various kinds of Pulses used in Southern India,” Edin. New Phil. Journ. xvi. (1862) 16 sq.; H. Drury, The Useful Plants of India (1873); U. C. Dutt, Materia Medica of the Hindus (Calcutta, 1877); G. Watt, Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (1890).
GRAMMAR (from Lat. grammatica, sc. ars; Gr. γράμμα, letter, from γράφειν, to write). By the grammar of a language is meant either the relations borne by the words of a sentence and by sentences themselves one to another, or the systematized exposition of these. The exposition may be, and frequently is, incorrect; but it always presupposes the existence of certain customary uses of words when in combination. In what follows, therefore, grammar will be generally employed in its primary sense, as denoting the mode in which words are connected in order to express a complete thought, or, as it is termed in logic, a proposition.
The object of language is to convey thought, and so long as this object is attained the machinery for attaining it is of comparatively slight importance. The way in which we combine our words and sentences matters Scope of grammar. little, provided that our meaning is clear to others. The expressions “horseflesh” and “flesh of a horse” are equally intelligible to an Englishman and therefore are equally recognized by English grammar. The Chinese manner of denoting a genitive is by placing the defining word before that which it defines, as in koue jin, “man of the kingdom,” literally “kingdom man,” and the only reason why it would be incorrect in French or Italian is that such a combination would be unintelligible to a Frenchman or an Italian. Hence it is evident that the grammatical correctness or incorrectness of an expression depends upon its intelligibility, that is to say, upon the ordinary use and custom of a particular language. Whatever is so unfamiliar as not to be generally understood is also ungrammatical. In other words, it is contrary to the habit of a language, as determined by common usage and consent.
In this way we can explain how it happens that the grammar of a cultivated dialect and that of a local dialect in the same country so frequently disagree. Thus, in the dialect of West Somerset, thee is the nominative of the second personal pronoun, while in cultivated English the plural accusative you (A.-S. eow) has come to represent a nominative singular. Both are grammatically correct within the sphere of their respective dialects, but no further. You would be as ungrammatical in West Somerset as thee is in classical English; and both you and thee, as nominatives singular, would have been equally ungrammatical in Early English. Grammatical propriety is nothing more than the established usage of a particular body of speakers at a particular time in their history.
It follows from this that the grammar of a people changes, like its pronunciation, from age to age. Anglo-Saxon or Early English grammar is not the grammar of Modern English, any more than Latin grammar is the grammar of modern Italian; and to defend an unusual construction or inflexion on the ground that it once existed in literary Anglo-Saxon is as wrong as to import a peculiarity of some local dialect into the grammar of the cultivated speech. It further follows that different languages will have different grammars, and that the differences will be more or less according to the nearer or remoter relationship of the languages themselves and the modes of thought of those who speak them. Consequently, to force the grammatical framework of one language upon another is to misconceive the whole nature of the latter and seriously to mislead the learner. Chinese grammar, for instance, can never be understood until we discard, not only the terminology of European grammar, but the very conceptions which underlie it, while the polysynthetic idioms of America defy all attempts to discover in them “the parts of speech” and the various grammatical ideas which occupy so large a place in our school-grammars. The endeavour to find the distinctions of Latin grammar in that of English has only resulted in grotesque errors, and a total misapprehension of the usage of the English language. It is to the Latin grammarians—or, more correctly, to the Greek grammarians, upon whose labours those of the Latin writers were based—that we owe the classification of the subjects with which grammar is commonly supposed Subdivision of grammar. to deal. The grammar of Dionysius Thrax, which he wrote for Roman schoolboys in the time of Pompey, has formed the starting-point for the innumerable school-grammars which have since seen the light, and suggested that division of the matter treated of which they have followed. He defines grammar as a practical acquaintance with the language of literary men, and as divided into six parts—accentuation and phonology, explanation of figurative expressions, definition, etymology, general rules of flexion and critical canons. Of these, phonology and accentuation, or prosody, can properly be included in grammar only in so far as the construction of a sentence and the grammatical meaning of a word are determined by accent or letter-change; the accentual difference in English, for example, between íncense and incénse belongs to the province of grammar, since it indicates a difference between noun and verb; and the changes of vowel in the Semitic languages, by which various nominal and verbal forms are distinguished from one another, constitute a very important part of their grammatical machinery. But where accent and pronunciation do not serve to express the relations of words in a sentence, they fall into the domain of phonology, not of grammar. The explanation of figurative expressions, again, must be left to the rhetorician, and definition to the lexicographer; the grammarian has no more to do with them than he has with the canons of criticism.
In fact, the old subdivision of grammar, inherited from the grammarians of Rome and Alexandria, must be given up and a new one put in its place. What grammar really deals with are all those contrivances whereby the relations of words and sentences are pointed out. Sometimes it is position, sometimes phonetic symbolization, sometimes composition, sometimes flexion, sometimes the use of auxiliaries, which enables the speaker to combine his words in such a way that they shall be intelligible to another. Grammar may accordingly be divided into the three departments of composition or “word-building,” syntax and accidence, by which is meant an exposition of the means adopted by language for expressing the relations of grammar when recourse is not had to composition or simple position.
A systematized exposition of grammar may be intended for the purely practical purpose of teaching the mechanism of a foreign language. In this case all that is necessary is a correct and complete statement of the facts. But Modes of treatment. a correct and complete statement of the facts is by no means so easy a matter as might appear at first sight. The facts will be distorted by a false theory in regard to them, while they will certainly not be presented in a complete form if the grammarian is ignorant of the true theory they presuppose. The Semitic verb, for example, remains unintelligible so long as the explanation of its forms is sought in the conjugation of the Aryan verb, since it has no tenses in the Aryan sense of the word, but denotes relation and not time.
A good practical grammar of a language, therefore, should be based on a correct appreciation of the facts which it expounds, and a correct appreciation of the facts is only possible where they are examined and co-ordinated in accordance with the scientific method. A practical grammar ought, wherever it is possible, to be preceded by a scientific grammar.
Comparison is the instrument with which science works, and a scientific grammar, accordingly, is one in which the comparative method has been applied to the relations of speech. If we would understand the origin and real nature of grammatical forms, and of the relations which they represent, we must compare them with similar forms in kindred dialects and languages, as well as with the forms under which they appeared themselves at an earlier period of their history. We shall thus have a comparative grammar and an historical grammar, the latter being devoted to tracing the history of grammatical forms and usages in the
