Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

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  Webster’s lectures attracted an audience partly because questions of language use were on people’s minds during and after the Revolution. In the heady aftermath of declaring independence, Americans were faced with the dilemma of how much they should separate themselves culturally from the mother country. Among the issues troubling them was whether they should continue to accept British speech standards as the model for their own language use.

  In the two centuries or so between the first English settlements in North America and the Revolution, the American version of English had grown distinctly different from the British version. All languages evolve over time. From one generation to the next, small changes occur in people’s pronunciations and how they structure sentences. Word meanings shift, obsolete words disappear, and new words take their place. Although these changes happen slowly, eventually they add up. Because American and British English speakers were separated by an ocean, the two forms of the language had evolved in two different directions.

  Americans had invented dozens of words to describe their new environment—backwoods, rapids, muskrat—and adopted dozens more from the natives—squash, possum, hickory. New expressions arose and usages such as It is me became more common. Pronunciations had changed noticeably. Travelers from Great Britain often commented on the distinctive American accent, usually describing it as a drawl. They also remarked on the nasal quality of American speech.

  Americans were proud of the cultural and political differences that separated them from the old country. Nonetheless, most Americans still looked to England for linguistic guidance. Suggestions for establishing American grammatical standards typically assumed that the starting point should be the best version of British English.

  Most proposals took a top-down approach. One popular idea was to found an American Academy of Language that would determine principles of correct speech. Some were already imagining this possibility in the run-up to independence. Language was a serious enough issue to inspire commentary, even in the midst of planning for a war.

  In January 1774, the Royal American Magazine printed a letter patriotically signed “An American.” (Signing letters to the editor with a meaningful pseudonym was common at the time.) The writer argued that although British English had improved greatly over the past century, “its highest perfection, with every other branch of human knowledge, is perhaps reserved for this land of light and freedom.” He then proposed the formation of an American Society of Language, with members who will “publish some observations upon the language and from year to year, correct, enrich and refine it.”7

  Founding father John Adams also favored language reform from above. In a 1780 letter, he urged the president of Congress to consider instituting an academy “for correcting, improving, and fixing the English language,” which he believed “would strike all the world with admiration and Great Britain with envy.” (By “fixing” the English language, Adams meant deciding on a standard that could be permanently “fixed” in place.) Adams thought that American speech should grow out of British traditions. He explains in his letter, “We have not made war against the English language any more than against the old English character.”8 Adams and other backers of an academy weren’t interested in creating a new linguistic standard from scratch. They simply wanted to perfect the old one.

  Webster’s idea was more unusual. He envisioned starting from the bottom up. Two years before his Baltimore talks, in the introduction to his spelling book (A Grammatical Institute, Part I), he used an imaginative metaphor to state his position: “For America in her infancy to adopt the present maxims of the old world would be to stamp the wrinkle of decrepit age upon the bloom of youth.”9 As citizens of a new country, Americans had a unique opportunity to make their own rules. Webster wanted those rules to be based on current American speech.

  In this he was in the minority. Most Americans relied on British grammar books—the very grammars that Webster had attacked in his first lecture—to teach them the best version of their native language. One of the most popular and earliest to be imported was A New Guide to the English Tongue by English schoolmaster Thomas Dilworth. Dilworth’s Spelling Book, as it was popularly called, appeared in England in 1740. Benjamin Franklin first reprinted it in Philadelphia in 1747. It went through numerous editions and by 1785 a copy could be found in many homes and nearly all classrooms.10 Webster used it as a child. In the small farming hamlet of West Hartford, where he grew up, it was the only book the district school owned, apart from the Psalter (Book of Psalms) and the New Testament.

  An even more popular grammar book in 1785 was A Short Introduction to English Grammar by Anglican clergyman, later Bishop of Oxford, Robert Lowth. Bishop Lowth’s book appeared on the scene later than Dilworth’s—it was published in London in 1762 and in Philadelphia in 1775. It had a more lasting impact, however. Both Harvard and Yale used it as a textbook until the middle of the nineteenth century and later grammar writers borrowed from it freely.

  Several of the most familiar rules of “proper” grammar originated or were popularized in Lowth’s book. Lowth banned double negatives with the formula still universally accepted today—“Two negatives in English destroy one another, or are equivalent to an affirmative.”11 He argued that when two people or things were compared, the second should be treated as the subject of a missing verb—You are wiser than I (am), not You are wiser than me. Lowth also objected to the use of whose for inanimate objects, preferring of which, even though it can result in awkward constructions like This is the book the pages of which are badly stained. (One rule that he doesn’t mention is the “split” infinitive rule—the ban on inserting an adverb between to and the verb, as in to quietly depart. That issue wouldn’t begin appearing in grammar books until the middle of the nineteenth century.)

  Most famously, Lowth ruled against stranding prepositions at the end of a question or relative clause, giving the example Horace is an author whom I am much delighted with. He admitted, “This is an idiom which our language is strongly inclined to,” but felt that “the placing of the preposition before the relative is more graceful … and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated style.” (Ending the first of these sentences with the preposition to instead of saying to which our language is strongly inclined might have been a mistake, but also could be a subtle way of demonstrating his point.)12

  The preposition-stranding rule offers a good example of how one grammarian’s style judgments can gradually harden into absolutes. Lowth meant his principle to apply mainly to “the solemn and elevated style.” He admitted that the sentence-final preposition “prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style.” In other words, it was fine for everyday speech. This nuanced statement was lost in later grammar and usage guides. Over the years, the ban on sentence-final prepositions expanded until it covered every situation, including prepositions that form part of complex verbs like sit down and stand up. Lowth never proposed such an extreme restriction.

  Not only sentence-final prepositions, but most of the structures Lowth rejected, had prevailed in “common conversation” for centuries. They had also appeared in the work of famous authors. Lowth often illustrated what he saw as incorrect usages by quoting examples from writers such as Pope, Swift, Shakespeare, and the authors of the King James Bible. His example of too many negatives comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost—“Nor did they not perceive the evil plight / In which they were, or the fierce pains not feel.”13

  The fact that great writers had made use of certain grammatical constructions did not persuade Lowth of their acceptability. On the contrary, he thought that it underlined the necessity of studying grammar as a separate subject. He writes, “Our best authors have committed gross mistakes, for want of a due knowledge of English grammar, or at least of a proper attention to the rules of it.”14 This point of view led to the teaching technique known as false syntax. Lowth describes it in his preface as teaching “what is right, by sh
owing what is wrong.” For nearly half a century after Lowth, grammar books would routinely include examples of false syntax, using the literary greats to show students what not to do.

  A Short Introduction to English Grammar permanently changed the landscape of standard English. Lowth presented his strictures more as style advice than a set of rigid rules—distinguishing, for instance, between elevated and casual speech—but future grammar book authors would treat his pronouncements as articles of faith. In spite of recurrent attempts to dislodge them, starting with Webster’s, Lowth’s guidelines would remain part of the grammatical orthodoxy until modern times. Although these rules no longer appear in up-to-date style guides, they are still what people think of first when they hear the word “grammar.”

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  Usage prescriptions were only a small part of any late-eighteenth-century grammar book, including Dilworth’s and Lowth’s. Many taught reading and spelling as well as sentence structure. Dilworth’s book was one of these. It’s divided into five sections, with the first two devoted to the alphabet and spelling and the final two to reading practice. Only the third section deals with grammar.

  Even grammar itself was not primarily about usage. Its main purpose, at least theoretically, was to describe current English in its most elegant form. At the beginning of A Short Introduction to Grammar, Lowth defines grammar as a set of “principles which are common to all languages” and explains that the purpose of English grammar (or the grammar of any particular language) is to apply those common principles “according to the established usage or custom” of the language.15 Later grammar books would typically adopt a similar definition. In practice, grammar book authors didn’t confine themselves to describing an accurate version of the best current English. They often followed their personal tastes or the pronouncements of earlier grammarians to rule out widespread, previously accepted usages.

  Some of the books’ content strikes modern readers as stilted and odd. For instance, thou and thee appear as second-person singular, as in thou hast and thou wilt. Ye as well as you is a possible second-person plural. Unfamiliar verb forms are listed, too—speak/spake, chide/chid, thrive/throve, work/wrought. The writing seems overelaborate, especially for books aimed at teaching children. Lowth’s explanation of natural gender in English begins with this convoluted sentence: “The English language, with singular propriety, following nature alone, applies the distinction of masculine and feminine, only to the names of animals.” Such vocabulary today would probably be considered too challenging even for older students.

  Grammar books also talk about issues that are unknown to modern English speakers. For example, they include detailed rules for the uses of shall and will. To express simple future tense, shall was used with first person—I shall arrive tomorrow—and will went with second and third person—they will arrive by noon. However, their use could be reversed to give a different spin to the meaning. Shall used with second or third person—you shall go—implied insistence or a threat. That is, the speaker plans to make you go. I will go, on the other hand, suggests determination—the speaker plans to go in spite of opposition. These uses were already becoming less common two hundred years ago. Today they are obsolete. Americans seldom use shall at all, and it’s usually in the form of a question—Shall we go?

  All these features, which make eighteenth-century grammar books sound arcane to modern readers, would have seemed unremarkable to grammar students of that day. They expected lesson books to be written in what Lowth calls the elevated style. That meant including thee and thou, which were no longer much used in speaking but were still fairly common in written language. It also meant an ornate style and a formal tone. And of course it meant exploring subtle usage details, as in the case of shall and will.

  Grammar books were typically organized to present information in memorizable chunks, taking students from the smaller pieces of language—the alphabet in some cases—to larger chunks, such as sentences, poems, and short essays. Students eventually memorized and recited all the book’s lessons, the idea being that when they had thoroughly absorbed all the material, they could apply it to their own speech with ease.

  Grammar study usually encompassed orthography (spelling), prosody (pronunciation), and etymology (parts of speech), as well as syntax (sentence grammar). The parts of speech were the same ones found in modern grammar books—nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, articles. Authors defined each part of speech and then discussed how it worked. Definitions didn’t change much from book to book. In fact, later grammar book authors frequently lifted definitions word for word from older volumes. Dilworth defines a noun, or “substantive,” as “the name of any being or thing, perceivable either by the senses or the understanding.” Lowth describes it in a more convoluted but essentially similar way as “the name of a thing; of whatever we conceive in any way to subsist, or of which we have any notion.”16 (The now-common formula “person, place, or thing” wasn’t used until the early nineteenth century.)

  After defining a part of speech, grammarians demonstrated its features. Here is where Latin comes into play. Latin was a high-status language in the eighteenth century, normally studied only by the educated upper classes. Considered excellent mental training, it formed a major part of the curriculum at private boys’ schools and was a requirement for college admission. For these reasons, many grammar book writers adopted Latin as a template for English. Not only was it thought to be a superior organizing tool for English, using it as a model was meant to prepare students for the eventual study of Latin itself.

  In fact Latin is not that helpful for studying English—the structures of the two languages are very different. In Latin, a word’s exact form varies according to its relationship to other words in the sentence. Nouns, for example, feature various endings, depending on their “case,” or what part they play in the sentence. Subjects are in nominative case, direct objects in objective case (also called accusative), possessives in genitive case, and objects of prepositions in a variety of cases, depending on the preposition. Students learned the language by memorizing lists of the different forms. This practice was called noun declension. The declension of liber, the Latin word for “book,” is nominative liber, genitive libri, dative libro, accusative librum, vocative liber, ablative libro.

  Dilworth and most other grammar book writers used the same system for English, even though English nouns don’t change their form no matter what role they play in a sentence. Whether a book is the subject of the sentence or the object, it’s still a book. That meant students spent their time “declining” pointless lists of identical nouns—nominative a book, genitive of a book, dative to a book, accusative a book, vocative O book, ablative from a book.

  Verbs were typically organized according to mood and tense. Classifications differed, but were again based on Latin. Most authors included indicative mood (statements), imperative mood (commands), subjunctive mood (conditional or contrary to fact), and potential mood (combining with may, can, might, ought, could, and similar words). Tenses included past, present, and future, as well as occasional subcategories, such as pluperfect (had loved). As with nouns, students memorized mostly unchanging lists of verb forms—I love, thou lovest, he loves, we love, ye love, they love—an exercise known as verb conjugation.

  When Webster attacked grammarians who “lay down certain rules … drawn from the principles of other languages,” he was thinking of these lists. In the preface to A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, Part II—the grammar volume—he makes his view even clearer, calling Dilworth’s book “a mere Latin grammar, very indifferently translated.”17

  Lowth’s grammar is unusual in not providing lists of Latin-based noun declensions. Instead he notes that English has only two noun forms—the noun itself, which he labels nominative, and possessive, which uses ’s. He adds an objective case for pronouns that follow a verb or preposition. Lowth does, however, provide the usual lists of verb moods and tenses fo
r students to memorize.

  Lowth also invented a form of mental exercise called “grammatical resolution,” or sentence parsing. In sentence parsing, a sentence is broken down word by word and each word defined by its place in the sentence. For his parsing exercise, Lowth chose a passage from the Gospel of Luke that begins, “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar.”

  First Lowth sets out the passage. Then he analyzes each word—“In is a preposition; the the definite article; fifteenth an adjective; year a substantive, or noun in the objective case; of a preposition; the reign a noun, objective case; of Tiberius Caesar, both substantives, proper names”; and so on through the entire passage.18 This laborious method of teaching sentence structure remained a feature of most grammar textbooks until the end of the nineteenth century. (Sentence diagramming, a way of representing the parts of the sentence visually, came into vogue around that time, as shown in chapter 6.)

  Lowth’s parsing exercise illustrates another feature of grammar books in early America. Reading and grammar exercises were nearly always religious or morally improving. Dilworth’s first practice sentence, for words of one syllable, is “No man may put off the law of God.” His practice verses bear such sobering titles as “Life is short and miserable” and “The duty of man.” Books often included fables that taught a lesson—“He that will not help himself shall have help from nobody”—or prayers thought to be suitable for schoolchildren. Dilworth’s suggested prayer for wisdom and knowledge begins, “O Almighty Lord and merciful Father, Maker of Heaven and Earth, who of thy free Liberality givest Wisdom abundantly to all who with Faith and full Assurance ask it of Thee: Beautify by the Light of thy Heavenly Grace the Towardness of my Wit.”19