"Grammatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... me read you a few sentences from this story, which is commonly bound up with the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' like a woollen lining to a silken mantle, but is full of stately wisdom in processions of paragraphs which sound as if they ought to have a grammatical drum-major to march before their ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... let not this discountenance or disgallant you a whit; you must not sink under the first disaster. It is with your young grammatical courtier, as with your neophyte player, a thing usual to be daunted at the first presence or interview: you saw, there was Hedon, and Anaides, far more practised gallants than yourself, who were both out, to comfort you. It is no disgrace, no more than for your adventurous reveller to fall ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. A brief history of the grammatical changes of the language and its vocabulary, with exercises on synonyms, prefixes, suffixes, word-analysis, and word-building. A text-book for high schools and colleges. ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... Cuyp's failing portions are not only evidently and demonstrably false, being in direct light, but are as disagreeable in color as false in tone, and injurious to everything near them. And the best proof of the grammatical accuracy of the tones of Turner is in the perfect and unchanging influence of all his pictures at any distance. We approach only to follow the sunshine into every cranny of the leafage, and retire only to feel it diffused over the scene, the whole picture glowing like a ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... the days when well-bred people could—and often did, naturally and without effort—improvise grammatical sentences of more than twelve words, in the course of ordinary, ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... self-educator, he gave ready encouragement to deserving youths in his employment, stimulating their talents and fostering their energies. During his own busy life, he contrived to save time to master French and Italian, of which he acquired an accurate and grammatical knowledge. His mind was largely stored with the results of a careful study of the best literature, and there were few subjects on which he had not formed for himself shrewd and accurate views. The two ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... make either a schoolmaster or an organist of him. "Old Boriskoff knew I was going to get the sack and little Lois has been chattering," he argued—nor did this line of reasoning at all console him. Sidney Geary, meanwhile, felt as though some one had suddenly applied a slab of melting ice to those grammatical nerves which ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... branch of our religious duties. When I looked, he says, into the works composed by the early writers after the Talmud on the commandments, I found that their writings can be classified under three heads. First, exposition of the Torah and the Prophets, like the grammatical and lexicographical treatises of Ibn Janah, or the exegetical works of Saadia. Second, brief compilations of precepts, like the works of Hefez ben Yazliah and the responsa of some geonim. Third, works ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... his to Lupsetus, will have civil law to be the tower of wisdom; another honours physic, the quintessence of nature; a third tumbles them both down, and sets up the flag of his own peculiar science. Your supercilious critics, grammatical triflers, note-makers, curious antiquaries, find out all the ruins of wit, ineptiarum delicias, amongst the rubbish of old writers; [730]Pro stultis habent nisi aliquid sufficiant invenire, quod ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... and having early become a fluent speaker in the Arabic, this was ever his delight. "Almost as a matter of course, his preaching was expository and didactic. In clear, lucid, logical exposition of divine truth, he had few equals. His language, though select and grammatical, was always simple, and within the comprehension of the humblest of his hearers. In regard to matter, his discourses were eminently Biblical, sound, and evangelical. In form and costume, his theology was that of Edwards, and Dwight, and Woods,—the ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... a caricature of English, a phantom speech, ghostly but familiar, such as he might hear in a land of dreams. He recognises its broad lineaments; its lesser details evade, or confuse, him. He acknowledges that the two tongues have a common basis. Their grammatical framework is identical. The small change of language—the adverbs and prepositions,—though sometimes strangely used in America, are not strange to an English ear. And there the precise resemblance ends. Accent, idiom, vocabulary give a new turn to the ancient speech. The ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... issue of the Lincoln Register there appears no fewer than forty-seven misspelled words, with numerous errors in grammatical construction and punctuation; also a scurrilous article headed "Woman vs. Man," in which the editor not only grossly misrepresents us, but assails the characters of all advocates of suffrage everywhere in a manner which shocks the moral sense of every ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the pleonastic use of tanun, of os, of os eros eipein, of ekastote; and the periphrastic use of the preposition peri. Lastly, he observes the tendency to hyperbata or transpositions of words, and to rhythmical uniformity as well as grammatical irregularity in the ...
— Laws • Plato
... Epigrammata" (one in praise of the Conqueror, vol. ii. p. 149); "Henrici archidiaconi Historiae liber undecimus" (that is, Henry of Huntingdon, fine epigram "in seipsum," vol. ii. p. 163); "Alexandri Neckham De Vita Monachorum" (the same wrote a number of treatises on theological, scientific, and grammatical subjects; see especially his "De Naturis Rerum," ed. Wright, Rolls, 1863); "Alani Liber de Planctu Naturae" (cf. "Opera," Antwerp, 1654, fol., the nationality of Alain de l'Isle is doubtful); "Joannis de Altavilla Architrenius" ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... neither grammatical nor precise," snapped Judge Halloran. "You mean we must be moving." He linked arms with Tom and fell into step with him; he clung to that rigid arm, moreover, despite Tom's surly displeasure. Not until a ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... on the other hand, of substances not capable of subsisting and being apprehended apart from others, the fact of their holding the position of attributes is ascertained only from their appearing in grammatical co- ordination.—But, an objection is raised, if it is supposed that in sentences such as 'the Self is born, as god, man, animal,' &c., the body of a man, god, &c., stands towards the Self in the relation of a mode, in the same way as in sentences such as 'the ox is broken-horned,' ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... matters, makes evidence. We hasten to add that he could be convinced of error. He had regarded a sentence of Bacon's as a veiled confession that Bacon wrote 'Richard II.,' 'which, though it grew from me, went after about in others' names.' Mr. Spedding averred that Mr. Holmes's opinion rested on a grammatical misinterpretation, and Mr. Holmes accepted the correction. But 'nothing less than a miracle' could shake Mr. Holmes's belief in the common authorship of the masque (possibly Bacon's) and the 'Midsummer Night's Dream'—so he told Mr. Spedding. To ourselves nothing short of a miracle, or the ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... supposing the bill had all the merit in the world, it would not be effective to attain the ends hoped for by its friends; and apart from that, its provisions were exceedingly dangerous. It gave married women and minors the right to make and enforce contracts. The grammatical structure of a portion of the bill was such as to enable a corrupt, passionate, or prejudiced judge to take advantage of it in order to widen the jurisdiction of the United States courts, and drag into them all the business which had heretofore occupied the State courts. This would ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... characters among the soldiers who might attempt to rob it, and the sentinel would protect it. After a visit of ten minutes, devoted exclusively to the affair, he arose and took his leave, leaving me under the impression that he was a gentleman wherever he came from, even if there were a few grammatical errors in the pass he wrote me yesterday; but "thou that judgest another, dost ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... is published by A. Poebel with transcription, commentary, etc., in Historical Texts, Philadelphia, 1914, and Historical and Grammatical Texts, ...
— The Babylonian Story of the Deluge - as Told by Assyrian Tablets from Nineveh • E. A. Wallis Budge
... original or oldest language upon earth, but that it is not even the oldest form in the Semitic group to which it belongs. To use the words of one of the most eminent modern authorities, "It is now generally recognised that in grammatical structure the Arabic preserves much more of the original forms than ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of having been carried in the greasy lining of a hat, I always felt safe in giving him a quarter and dismissing him without further questioning. I always noticed that these circular letters, when written in the vernacular, were remarkable for their beautiful caligraphy and grammatical inaccuracy, and that they all seem to have been written by the same hand. Perhaps indigence exercises a peculiar and equal effect ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... our glory, our pride, the theme of all our memories, the golden book of our traditions. Proud and free in its accent, noble and learned in its picturesque and sonorous expressions, its formation and grammatical form are both simple and sublime; add to which, the people preserve it with a ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... miracles be alleged, it is the business of understanding to ascertain the fact of their occurrence; if a book claim to be the record of a revelation, it belongs to the understanding to make out the origin of this book, the time when it was written, who were its authors, and what is the first and grammatical meaning of its language. Or, again, if any men profess to be the depositaries of divine truth, by an extraordinary commission from God, the understanding, being familiar with man's nature and motives, can judge of ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... a few moments from my arduous labors to reply. The Colorado has been on the biggest boom I have seen since '39. In the pyrotechnical and not strictly grammatical language of the Statesman—"The cruel, devastating flood swept, on a dreadful holocaust of swollen, turbid waters, surging and dashing in mad fury which have never been equalled in human history. A pitiable sight was seen the morning after the ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... baggy old alpaca coat as though it were a silken robe. And, as has been heretofore remarked, he had for his official and his private lives two different modes of speech. As His Honor, presiding, his language was invariably grammatical and precise and as carefully accented as might be expected of a man whose people never had very much use anyway for the consonant "r." As William Pitman Priest, Esq., citizen, taxpayer, and Confederate veteran he mishandled the king's English as though he had but small ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... English language, as it is spoken by the uneducated everywhere, without reference to provincial idioms, might possibly be the best medium. It offers, at least, the advantage of simplicity, of a directness of expression which overlooks grammatical rules, of natural pathos, even,—and therefore, so far as these traits go, may reproduce them without detracting seriously from the original. Those other qualities of the poems which spring from the character of the people of whom and for whom they were written must depend, for their recognition, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... our libraries already abound;—not a mere philosophical investigation of what is general or universal in grammar, nor yet a minute detail of what forms only a part of our own philology; for either of these plans falls very far short of such a purpose;—not a mere grammatical compend, abstract, or compilation, sorting with other works already before the public; for, in the production of school grammars, the author had early performed his part; and, of small treatises on this subject, we have long had a superabundance ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... meat and drink to Miss Mapp: Tuesday morning, the day on which she paid and disputed her weekly bills, was as enjoyable as Sunday mornings when, sitting close under the pulpit, she noted the glaring inconsistencies and grammatical errors in the discourse. After the bills were paid and business was done, there was pleasure to follow, for there was a fitting-on at the dress-maker's, the fitting-on of a tea-gown, to be worn at winter-evening ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... remarks (L'Annee Psychologique, 1898, p. 203), "as we live in a world of light and of sound. But smell yields us no distinct ideas grouped in regular order, still less that are fixed in the memory as a grammatical discipline. Olfactory sensations awake vague and half-understood perceptions, which are accompanied by very strong emotion. The emotion dominates us, but the sensation which was the cause of it remains unperceived." ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... following grammatical puzzle among some old papers. I forget from what book I copied it many years ago. Perhaps it may be new ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 231, April 1, 1854 • Various
... subservient to things, must surely be acknowledged by every liberal mind, and will alone be disputed by him who has spent the prime of his life, and consumed the vigour of his understanding, in verbal criticisms and grammatical trifles. And, if this is the case, every lover of truth will only study a language for the purpose of procuring the wisdom it contains; and will doubtless wish to make his native language the vehicle of it to others. For, since all truth is eternal, its nature can never ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... three hundred was the number which composed the retinue of Mynyddawg, and that a hundred thousand, a large round figure, is chosen to denote the preponderance of the enemy's forces that were arrayed in opposition. This view seems more in unison with reason, as well as with the grammatical construction of the passage, ("emdaflawr" being a middle verb) than the supposition that the "milcant a thrychant" formed the total of the army of ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin
... elements of the gentile organization. It was aggravated by a further tendency to divergence of speech, which was inseparable from their social state and the large areas of their occupation. An oral language, although remarkably persistent in its vocables, and still more persistent in its grammatical forms, is incapable of permanence. Separation of the people in area was followed in time by variation in speech; and this, in turn, led to separation in interests and ultimate independence. It was not the work of a brief period, but of centuries of time, aggregating finally into ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... a grammatical education, and been brought up as a peruke-maker from my earliest years—besides having seen a deal of high life, and the world in general, in carrying false curls, bandeaux, and other artificial head-gear paraphernalia, in bandboxes to boarding schools, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... The original appearance and wording is reproduced in the html version. For the text version, more meaningful and grammatical captions have been provided as the original captions comprised a series of separate breed or species names used to label the animals ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... a fairly definite impression of his personality, profession, and social grade. But he was baffling; reticent, but self-assured, authoritative even, and, in a quiet way, watchful. He smoked a good cigar, mixed a good drink, seemed used to travel, but produced a coarse-grained effect, made grammatical errors, and on the whole was a person from whom, once ashore, ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... to enter into any elaborate discussion of this complicated subject, but we will state briefly the reasons given by Keyser and others for believing that these men had a hand in preparing the Prose Edda. In the first place, we find that the writer of the grammatical and rhetorical part of the Younger Edda distinctly mentions Snorre as author of Hattatal (the Clavis Metrica), and not only of the poem itself, but also of the treatise in prose. In the second place, the Arne Magnan parchment manuscript, which dates back ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... you've got something to say?" The important thing is to say something, and if you do really say something, and do really completely and precisely express it, as far as a painter is concerned it will be grammatical. If not to-day, the grammar will come round to it to-morrow. Henry Ward Beecher is reported to have answered to a criticism on grammatical slips in the heat of eloquence, "Young man, if the English language gets in the way of the expression of my thought, so much the ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... and unobtrusive disposition. He never raises his voice to a high pitch, or makes a noise when performing any little job that requires skill. It would seem as if his good parents were inspired in bestowing a name upon him. They called him Lifter. We have slightly varied the name, took a small grammatical liberty with it, so to speak. We call him The Lifter. Let me, Mr. Gray, introduce you to The Lifter.' Roland bowed with the same air of haughtiness and disgust. But now that he was among the unholy crew he felt ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... Liberty and Equality. In like manner, what, in a reign of Liberty and Equality, can these words, 'Sir,' 'obedient Servant,' 'Honour to be,' and such like, signify? Tatters and fibres of old Feudality; which, were it only in the Grammatical province, ought to be rooted out! The Mother Society has long since had proposals to that effect: these she could not entertain, not at the moment. Note too how the Jacobin Brethren are mounting new symbolical headgear: the Woollen Cap or Nightcap, bonnet de laine, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... buildings. The contents, to be sure, are multifarious; but the book is we think made of a series of books to be purchased separately. Every page has a coloured cut of a very gay order. Cottages have yellow roofs and pink doors; and shopkeepers are dressed in crimson and orange. Some of the grammatical illustrations are droll: a heavy old fellow, cross-legged, with his hands folded on a stick is myself; Punch is an active verb; a wedding might have illustrated the conjunction; four in hand is a preposition. In punctuation, a child asking what o'clock it is, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various
... outside of the two Triposes, there was no career for a man of any ability. To parody a famous phrase of Hume's, Cambridge virtually said to its pupils, 'Is this a treatise upon geometry or algebra? No. Is it, then, a treatise upon Greek or Latin grammar, or on the grammatical construction of classical authors? No. Then commit it to the flames, for it contains nothing worth your study.' Now, in both these arenas Fitzjames was comparatively feeble. He read classical books, not only at Cambridge but in later life, when he was pleased to ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... instinctively that her companion was attracting more attention than her bonnet; and twitching her dress bade her sit down. Sal obeyed; but she had no opportunity that morning of deciding whether the sermon were grammatical or not, for she was constantly on the look out, and whenever she saw any one scrutinizing Mary or herself more closely than they ought, a shake of her fist and a horrid face warned them to desist. Twice during church time Mary thought, nay felt sure that she caught her sister's eye, ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... that the Morvan language is a Celtic tongue. No; it is only a French patois, very interesting and peculiar in its grammatical forms. I understand it partly when spoken, and can read it with some little difficulty. My daughter understands it very well. Our servants speak it among themselves. Their French is very pure, though somewhat limited ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Art in this respect consists in his removing the Adjective, the Substantive, and even the Verb, from the Line or Verse in which the Sense is previously contained, and the grammatical Construction inverted, to the Beginning of the next Line. This has a wonderful Effect; especially when the ...
— Letters Concerning Poetical Translations - And Virgil's and Milton's Arts of Verse, &c. • William Benson
... phrase: "This medley of glory and honor,"—the value of the word medley can and must be changed; but a gesture is necessary, for speech is only a feeble echo of gesture. Only gesture can justify a value other than that indicated in this demonstration. This value is purely grammatical, but the gesture may give it a superlative idea, which we call additional value. The value of consonants may vary in the pronunciation according to ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... appears from Gal. iv. 13. Mr Ellicott asserts that "the first time" is here the preferable translation of [Greek: to proteron], and yet, rather inconsistently, adds, that "no historical conclusions can safely be drawn from this expression alone." See his "Critical and Grammatical Commentary on ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... the logical force of recognised grammatical forms is the least of a logician's difficulties in bringing the discourses of men to a plain issue. Metaphors, epigrams, innuendoes and other figures of speech present far greater obstacles to a lucid reduction whether for approval or refutation. ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... certain grammatical forms older than those of the old Frisian; e.g., the Dutch infinitives and the Dutch weak substantives, in their oblique cases, end in -en; those of the Old Frisian in -a: the form in -en being ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... already well-developed, and from that fact, as well as from the names of the numerous deities, it is clear that it began with the former race—the Sumero-Akkadians—who spoke a non-Semitic language largely affected by phonetic decay, and in which the grammatical forms had in certain cases become confused to such an extent that those who study it ask themselves whether the people who spoke it were able to understand each other without recourse to devices such as the "tones" to which the Chinese resort. ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... system adopted by my brother-players, I carefully commit the whole of my part to memory, noting the grammatical errors, which are numerous, and the fragments of English which occasionally appear. I am punctual in my attendance at the rehearsals, which is more than some of my fellow-comedians can say. When an actor of the Teatro Real de Cuba is absent ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... stairs, Snipe was going over in his own mind the different grammatical meanings of the words, "I'll give it you." And concluding at last that, in the mouth of his master, it meant nothing but a horsewhipping, he resolved, with the magnanimity of many other virtuous characters who find treachery unproductive, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... romantic aspect of scenery never engages their attention. It is even known that Julius Caesar, when he returned to his legions in Gaul, employed his time while crossing the Alps in writing his grammatical treatise 'De Analogia.'" ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... greatest vigilance, bringing to the office every morning as much as the printers could set up during the day, and taking it away in the evening, forbidding also any alteration. The foreman, John H. Gilbert, found the manuscript so poorly prepared as regards grammatical construction, spelling, punctuation, etc., that he told them that some corrections must be made, and ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... dance! that was well expressed, Mr. Hycy; but it was not for nothing that you broke grammatical ground under Patricius Finigan—ah, no; the early ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... translations could not be made sufficiently accurate to answer all the purposes, either of history or of the useful arts. It is admitted that the case is quite different, if there be a mystery in these writings, the truth of which depends on literary criticism, or grammatical exactness; but if these writings are nothing more than the bare opinions and discoveries of men, and of men too, as liable to error as ourselves, and if no one was to view them in a different light, I apprehend there would be all ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... corrupt jargon of Persian, Turkish, Arabic, and Hindu words, first used by the Mongols, after the conquest, in their intercourse with the natives. Many of the principal languages of Asia are totally unconnected with the Sanscrit, both in words and grammatical structure; these are mostly of the great Tartar family, at the head of which there is good reason for placing the Chinese ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... here expressed may seem commonplace and the language hardly grammatical, yet this extract clearly reveals the darling ambition that was now haunting the heart of Burns. It was the same wish which he expressed better in rhyme at a later day in his Epistle to the Gude ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... writing such a clear, sensible, grammatical letter, supporting her husband and self on five shillings per week! Mr. Holmes visited her. He had to squeeze to get into the room. There lay her sick husband; there she worked all day long; there she cooked, ate, washed, and slept; and there her husband and she performed all the ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... Julius Pollux, frequently adopted by Euripides in his tragedies, who so far forgot himself on some of these occasions, that in the Danaidae, for instance, the chorus, which consisted of females, made use of grammatical inflections which belonged only ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... strong natural talent for writing will be found conjoined with an extraordinary lack of education and training. An excellent piece of English—pithy, forcible, and even elegant—will often shatter on some simple grammatical reef, such as the use of "as" for "that" ("he did not know as he could"), or of the plural for the singular ("a long ways off"). Mr. James Lane Allen, the author of a series of refined and delicately ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... adopt an Address which exhibits more of the ingenuity of philologists than of the policy of statesmen—before they found a censure of the Government for its conduct in negotiations of transcendent practical importance, upon refinements of grammatical nicety—I beg that they will at least except from the proposed censure, the transactions at Verona, where I think I have shown that a tone of reproach and invective was unnecessary, and, therefore, ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... or take care of themselves. The more the English and Danes mixed with each other, the oftener they met at church, at games, and in the market-place, the more rapidly would this process of stripping go on,— the smaller care would both peoples take of the grammatical inflexions which they had brought with them into ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... "primar-ily" and "temporar-ily." Here there is no question of right or wrong, refinement or vulgarity. The one accentuation is as good as the other. It may be argued, indeed, that our accentuation throws into relief the root, the idea, the soul of the word, not the mere grammatical suffix, the "limbs and outward flourishes;" but on the other hand, it may be contended with equal truth that the American accentuation has the Latin precedent in its favour. Neither advantage is conclusive; neither, indeed, is, ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... say this is English Literature, not English. Are the two so very far apart? English as a language is taught to make literature available. "Example is better than precept." Reading good literature for the love of it will bring in the habit of grammatical speaking and writing far more effectively than what is known as "a thorough grounding in the principles of English grammar." I doubt if the knowledge of, and facility in, English can be built up on such a basis; rather the laws should ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... notion of tarrying, and is applied to a large and important dwelling-house. where, in which: the antecedent is separated from the relative, a frequent construction in Milton (comp. lines 66, 821, etc.). So in Latin, where the grammatical connection would generally be sufficiently indicated by the inflection. shapes ... spirits. An instance of the manner in which Milton endows spiritual beings with personality without making them too distinct. "Of all the poets who have introduced into their works the agency ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... had once a grammatical sanction, for "uon" or "un" was the Early English for "one," and "uns" was more than the one. In many parts of the South are found the expressions, "you-uns" and "we-uns." The mountaineer says "you-uns" when he ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... is a ludicrous pedantry about the elaborate categories of Hindoo sages: they make grammatical rules even for every department of erotics: as if it were necessary for ladies to learn the grammar of the subject, before ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... mechanically and as a piece of news that had brought evil tidings. Then, suddenly, another aspect of it struck him—an aspect to which the shock of its reception had until this tardy moment blinded him. The letter was perfectly grammatical and penned in a hand of copy-book roundness and evenness. The address, the body of the missive, and the signature, were all in one chirography. She would not have intrusted the writing of this ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... at any rate to the outer eye. The mise-en-scene of external life is less rich in colour and in contrast. Magnificence, squalor, oddity, historic survivals, and picturesque personalities grow rarer year by year. Everybody writes a grammatical letter in conventional style, wears the clothes in fashion, and conforms to the courtesies of life. It is right, good, and wise: but a little dull. It is the lady-like age, the epoch of the dress-coat, of the prize lad and the girl of the period. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... case, for I shall be very glad to receive this same tripartite Grammar which Mr. Brandram is hunting for, my ideas respecting Mandchou construction being still very vague and wandering, and I should also be happy if you could and would procure for me the original grammatical work of Amyot, printed in the Memoires, etc. Present my kind regards to Mr. Hattersley, and thank him in my name for his kind letter, but at the same time tell him that I was sorry to learn that he was putting himself to the trouble of transferring into Mandchou characters the ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... which the English traveller in the States now notices are little things; as life is made up of little things, he is noting differences all day long, because everything that he sees is different. Speech is different: the manner of enunciating the words is different; it is clearer, slower, more grammatical; among the better sort it is more careful; it is even academical. We English speak thickly, far back in the throat, the voice choked by beard and moustache, and we speak much more carelessly. Then the way of living at the hotels is different; the rooms are much—very ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... required so many alterations to bring it up to the ordinary standard of epistolary, grammatical, and orthographical accuracy, that it is thought best to give it in word and letter, precisely as it was ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... rhetorician in the first century after Christ; tutor of Tiberius, first in Rome, afterwards in Rhodes, from which town he called himself a Rhodian, and where Tiberius during his exile diligently attended his instruction. He was the author of various grammatical and other works, but his fame chiefly rested on his abilities as a teacher, in which capacity he seems to have had great influence (Pauly). He was the author of that famous description of Tiberius which is given by Suetonius (Tib. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... standpoints of paryaya-naya, which represent grammatical and linguistic points of view, are s'abda-naya, samabhiru@dha-naya, and evambhula-naya. See ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... scepticism. Two names, Ernesti(678) at Leipsic, and Michaelis(679) at Goettingen, represent the first class; the former applying criticism chiefly to the New Testament, the latter to the Old. The endeavour of both, especially of Ernesti, was to revive the grammatical and literary mode of interpreting scripture, as opposed to the dogmatic previously in use. Their spirit was not sceptical, but was that of men who felt the sceptical opinions round them; ethical and cold, like that of the Arminians of the ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... of learning, these restorers of ancient texts, these disentanglers of grammatical subtleties, these divers among ancient chronicles and forgotten charters—what is it that they do but to multiply and revive useless knowledge, and to make it increasingly difficult for a man to arrive at a broad and philosophical view, or ever attack his subject at ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a means to an end, but rather the infrequency with which misspelled words appear in the composition work, letter writing, and other written work of the pupil. Similarly in language and grammar, it is not sufficient to instruct in rules of syntax. This is but the initial process. Grammatical rules function effectively only when they function automatically. So long as one must think and judge and reflect upon the form of one's expression, the expression is necessarily ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... complex, rules of grammar. This being so, the Indian, pursuing the study of oratory, needs not to undertake the mastery of unelastic and difficult rules, like those which our own language comprehends; or to acquire correct models of grammatical construction for his guidance; and, being fairly secure against his accuracy in these regards being impeached by carping critics, even among his own brethren, can better and more readily uphold a claim to good oratory than one of ourselves, ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... grammatical construction would be "el cual cliente"; but however much some grammarians disclaim this employment of cuyo, it is in the language and found in the best books and ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... transport agents for the imperial troops they may have been amalgamated into a fresh caste with other Hindus and Muhammadans doing the same work, just as the camp language formed by the superposition of a Persian vocabulary on to a grammatical basis of Hindi became Urdu or Hindustani. The readiness of the Charans to commit suicide rather than give up property committed to their charge was not, however, copied by the Banjaras, and so far as I am aware ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... distinctions of a language which contains half a dozen different forms of address. The illiterate peasant is no whit behind the man of culture in the purity of his Portuguese. In no country in Europe is the language kept freer from dialect, and this notwithstanding the fact that it is one of involved grammatical forms. In France the use of the imperfect subjunctive is given up by the lower classes and by foreigners, but in Portugal the peasant has still deeper subtleties of speech at the end of his tongue. Add to this that he has a vocabulary of abuse before which the Spaniard or the California ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... thousand miles further over the mighty waters, and there they saw the tip of a great mountain coming up out of the sea, and the great serpents were coiled around the top and were sliding down the sides into the waters, and there was not a cracker there for John. And so, with scarcely a grammatical sentence and with most unfitting words, he went on for an hour with a discourse full of wildness and weirdness, and full of untruth, while the people looked on with amazement at the wonderful knowledge and power of the man. Twenty or thirty years ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 1, March, 1898 • Various
... in his grammatical exposition of this verse. The meaning, however, is scarcely clear. The identity of the Understanding or intelligence with the senses and the mind may be allowed so far as the action of the three qualities in leading all of them to worldly attachments ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... there is a limit to the powers of the memory, single words, like whole languages, gradually become extinct. As Max Muller (69. 'Nature,' January 6th, 1870, p. 257.) has well remarked:—"A struggle for life is constantly going on amongst the words and grammatical forms in each language. The better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand, and they owe their success to their own inherent virtue." To these more important causes of the survival of certain words, mere novelty and fashion may be added; for there is in the mind ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... not a time for strictly grammatical negatives, and I am afraid that the girl's characteristically familiar speech, even when pathetically corrected here and there by the influence of the convent, endeared her the more to him. And when ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... may be either from the ancient English or the low Dutch; if the one, by tradition, if the other, from the use of it by medical men. Cancrum is an odd grammatical blunder; being, in reality, nothing but the accusative of Cancer, put instead of the nominative. The latter name was, as is well known, frequently applied by the older surgeons, in a vague manner, to any terrific and unmanageable ulcer; and, in particular, it was often applied to gangrene. ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... is possessed also by alphabetic; the second o in the word too is strictly a determinative, to distinguish the adverb too from the preposition to, both pronounced alike. Tibetan has an elaborate system of silent letters used as grammatical determinatives.) And then Egyptian writing finally has pure ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... capacity, he calls her "his left hand." (2) In June 1559, at the headiest moment of the Reformation in Scotland, he writes regretting the absence of his helpful colleague, Goodman, "whose presence" (this is the not very grammatical form of his lament) "whose presence I more thirst, than she that is my own flesh." (3) And this, considering the source and the circumstances, may be held as evidence of a very tender sentiment. He tells us himself in his history, on the occasion of a certain meeting at the ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to Cook's translation of Sievers' Anglo-Saxon Grammar, and to the Grammatical Introduction to Sweet's Reader have been taken out, as Wright's or Wyatt's Old English Grammar will have taken their ...
— A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary - For the Use of Students • John R. Clark Hall
... any rate so intimately connected with it that to have passed them over would have been merely pedantic. Even the sections on references to notes and on the correction of proofs may not be considered altogether out of place. As few grammatical terms as possible have been made use of. Some have been found necessary in order to secure the brevity of statement proper to a little work ...
— "Stops" - Or How to Punctuate. A Practical Handbook for Writers and Students • Paul Allardyce
... neither of us could eat a morsel of the food they had there—did you ever hear of such a thing as having pie and preserves for breakfast?—and Oliver says it used to make him sick to see me in the midst of all of those people. They came from all over the country, and hardly anybody could speak a grammatical sentence. The man who sat next to me always said "he don't" and "I ain't feeling good to-day" and once even "I done it"—can you imagine such a thing? Every other word was "guess," and yet they had the impertinence ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... N. Y., whose husband is a laboring man, and, like herself, in humble circumstances. She has quite a large family, lives in a small tenement, and is obliged to labor daily for a subsistence for herself and family. When she came to this country from Ireland, she could scarcely write a grammatical sentence; and all the information of history and the classics which she has, she has derived from such books as have accidentally fallen in her hands. She is extremely modest and retiring, and does not seem to be at ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of formal grammar has little or no place in the grades of the elementary school. The grammatical relations of the language are complicated and beyond the power of the child at an early age. Nor does the study of such relations result in efficiency in the use of language, as is commonly supposed. Children are compelled in many schools to waste weary years ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... Fremont has treated her subject. It is novel, but not ineffective. Zagonyi tells much of the story in his own words; and we are sure that it loses nothing of vividness from his terse and vigorous, though not always strictly grammatical language. "Zagonyi's English," says some one who has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Gypsy at present exists only in dialects more or less like the language originally spoken by the Gypsy or Zingaro race. Several dialects of the Gypsy are to be found which still preserve along with a considerable number of seemingly original words certain curious grammatical forms, quite distinct from those of any other speech. Others are little more than jargons, in which a certain number of Gypsy words are accommodated to the grammatical forms of the languages of particular ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... neighbours do, the man who makes his living by doing what other people cannot do, must always be a marked figure. Look at modern society. It cannot toil nor spin; it can hardly put together ten words in a grammatical sequence. But it can clothe itself. The man of letters can both toil and write good English, but his taste in tailoring frequently leaves much to be desired. If he would put himself in the hands of Poole, and hold his tongue, he might almost pass for a ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... showed further that modern Persian is not derived from Zend, but from a dialect closely connected with it; and, lastly, he showed what was still more important, that Zend was not derived from Sanscrit. As to the system of its sounds, Zend approaches Persian rather than Sanscrit; and as to its grammatical forms, if they often remind one of Sanscrit, they also often remind one of Greek and Latin, and frequently have a special character of their own. Rask also gave the paradigm of three Zend nouns, belonging to different declensions, ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various |
