AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

The first edition of the present work was laid before the public with the intention of rep¬resenting in a form as systematic as the extent of the subject would allow those views con¬cerning the structure and relations of the English language which amongst such scholars as had studied them with the proper means and opportunities were then generally re¬ceived; and which so being received might take their stand as established and recognized facts. With the results of modern criticism as applied to his native tongue it was conceived that an educated Englishman should be familiar. To this extent the special details of the language were exhibited; and to this extent the work was strictly a Grammar of the English Language. But besides this it was well known that the current grammarians and the critical phi¬lologists had long ceased to write alike upon the English or indeed upon any other lan¬guage. For this reason the sphere of the work became enlarged; so that on many occasions general principles had to be enounced fresh terms to be defined and old classifications to be remodelled. This introduced extraneous elements of criticism and points of discussion which in a more advanced stage of English philology would have been superfluous. It also introduced elements which had a tendency to displace the account of some of the more special and proper details of the language. There was not room for the exposition of general principles for the introduction of the necessary amount of preliminary considerations and for the minutiæ of an extreme analysis. Nor is there room for all this at present. A work that should at one and the same time prove its principles instead of assuming them sup¬ply the full and necessary preliminaries in the way of logic phonetics and ethnology and besides this give a history of every variety in the form of every word although perhaps a work that one man might write would be a full and perfect Thesaurus of the English Lan¬guage and would probably extend to many volumes. For in the English language there are many first principles to be established and much historical knowledge to be applied. Besides which the particular points both of etymology and syntax are far more numerous than is imagined. Scanty as is the amount of declension and conjugation in current use there are to be found in every department of our grammars numerous isolated words which exhibit the fragments of a fuller inflection and of a more highly developed etymol¬ogy. This is well-known to every scholar who has not only viewed our language as a deriva¬tive of the Anglo-Saxon and observed that there are similar relations between many other languages (e. g. the Italian and Latin the German and Moeso-Gothic &c.) but who has also generalized the phenomena of such forms of relationship and derivation and enabled himself to see in the most uninflected languages of the nineteenth century the fragments of a fuller and more systematic inflection altered by time but altered in a uniform and a general manner.