Founding Grammars

by Rosemarie Ostler

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  A Grammatical Institute, Part II was actually not as unconventional as Webster sometimes claimed. Because he wanted teachers to adopt it for the classroom, he followed a traditional format for the most part, borrowing elements from both Dilworth and Lowth. As his linguistic attitudes grew more radical, he would revise future editions of the grammar to reflect his changing ideas.

  Although Webster’s preface attacks Dilworth as being too dependent on Latin and “invariably wrong” when describing features that are specific to English, he nonetheless organizes his book along the same lines as Dilworth’s grammar section. Like Dilworth, he uses a question-and-response format. Similar in style to a Sunday school catechism, the question-and-response method was believed to be the easiest way for students to memorize and recite the material. Questions started with the general—What is grammar?—and moved to the particular—Where is the adjective to be placed?

  Webster’s answer to What is grammar?—“the art of speaking and writing our thoughts with propriety”—is almost identical to Dilworth’s—“the art of writing and speaking properly and syntactically.”31 In later editions, Webster would revise his definition to bring it more in line with his evolving views, saying that “the use of English grammar” was “to teach the true principles and idioms of the English language.” The more Webster thought and read about English, the more committed he became to idiomatic American English.

  Webster was not yet disillusioned with Lowth when he wrote Part II of the Institute. He praises Lowth in the book’s preface, saying Lowth is “well acquainted with the origin and genius of the language,” although he thinks Lowth’s “style and method are not suited to the capacities of youth.” He agrees with Lowth on various points that he will later attack. For instance, he advises using nominative case after be (It is I) rather than the more natural It is me. He also takes the same position as Lowth regarding stranded prepositions, writing that Whom did you give it to?, or even worse, Who did you give it to?, is “generally inelegant” and “in the grave and sublime styles is certainly inadmissible.”32

  Later, Who did you give it to? would be one of the constructions he strongly supported. In the 1800 edition of the Institute, he says, “It is the invariable practice to use who” rather than whom in such sentences, “except among people who are fettered by grammatical rules.” He continues, “In spite of rules, Who is she married to? is more agreeable than Whom is she married to?” In this same edition he changes his position on pronouns after be, coming down in favor of It is me and other objective-case pronouns (It is him or her) because they “have such a prevalence in English.”33

  Webster was moving gradually toward a defense of common American usages. He explains his new attitude in the preface to the 1800 edition, saying, “It is the business of grammar to inform the student, not how a language might have been originally constructed, but how it is constructed.… Anomalous phrases creep into a language in its infancy and become established idioms.… This is my reason for admitting some phrases as good English which the most respectable writers on this subject have condemned as ungrammatical.” His arguments would take on a more aggressive tone in later writings.

  Webster adopts Lowth’s idea of illustrating incorrect grammar with false syntax, but invents many of his own examples. These straightforward sentences are much simpler to follow than Lowth’s literary illustrations. When writing about double negatives, he replaces Lowth’s Milton quotation with the example I do not know nothing about it, a statement that would be familiar to students from their everyday speech.

  Webster also provides a parsing exercise, but one distinctly different from Lowth’s Bible passage. Instead he takes an excerpt from Henry Home’s 1774 Sketches of the History of Man. Because the book was only ten years old, the language would have sounded more modern than that of the Gospels. Still, it must have been daunting for young schoolchildren. The first sentence of the exercise reads, “A woman who has merit, improved by a virtuous and refined education, retains in her decline an influence over men more flattering than even that of beauty.” Webster suggests in a footnote that children use a pocket dictionary to help them understand the vocabulary.34

  The American flavor of the Institute comes through in some of Webster’s examples. He lists Mississippi and Philadelphia as examples of proper nouns and demonstrates the use of articles before names with the phrase, “a traitor is called an Arnold.” In 1784, with the Revolutionary War just over, he knew his readers would immediately catch his reference to Benedict Arnold and approve of the sentiment expressed.

  In his Baltimore lectures, given hardly more than a year after he wrote Part II, Webster would distance himself much more sharply from Lowth and other contemporary grammarians. Writing to his friend Timothy Pickering, Webster says that he “most pointedly” opposed Lowth in his talks and received no argument from the audience. He admits to Pickering, however, that although lecture audiences accepted his criticisms of popular grammar books in theory, they continued to buy them in preference to his own volume. He notes ruefully, “I convince the judgment, tho’ I may not reform the practice.”35 Webster’s Part II was the first American grammar to achieve widespread classroom adoption, but it never reached the popularity of the British imports.

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  Webster’s travel plans gained a new focus with the success of his Baltimore lecture series on the English language. Although he had already been on the road for six months, he decided to take the lectures to other cities. He still wanted to sell books, but now that wasn’t his only goal. He also wanted to convince Americans to abandon Latin-based grammars and embrace the natural structure of English. He wrote enthusiastically to his friend, “I shall make one General effort to deliver literature and my countrymen from the errors that fashion and ignorance are palming upon Englishmen.”

  Webster’s decision meant another round of travel, no light undertaking in the late eighteenth century. Travel in colonial America was slow, uncomfortable, and often hazardous. Most roads were poorly maintained. So-called “corduroy” roads, made out of unfinished logs laid in rows, were treacherous for horses and wagons. In the South, where most people lived on remote plantations rather than in towns, roads were scarce. Unless travelers were headed for a courthouse, church, or other public gathering place, they had to forge their own path across fields and through forests.

  Webster traveled on horseback most of the time, carrying his personal belongings in two heavy saddlebags and sending his books down the coast by sloop. Occasionally, he traveled by sloop himself or took the stagecoach. Both methods were uncertain. A sailing trip from Norfolk to Charleston, which should have taken only a few days, stretched out to nearly three weeks as squalls were followed by lack of wind. On one ill-fated stagecoach trip from Baltimore to Alexandria, the vehicle overturned on a corduroy road, leaving Webster to “curse all stage wagons” and return to town, where he hired a horse.

  Webster would spend the next seven months speaking in cities all along the Eastern Seaboard, including Philadelphia, Dover, Trenton, and Albany. At the end of May 1786, thirteen months after setting out, he finally returned to his home in Hartford. He didn’t stay long, however. By mid-June he was lecturing again, first in Hartford and New Haven, then farther afield—Boston, Providence, Salem, Newport.

  Besides lecturing on grammar, Webster kept up a steady stream of essays on topics that interested him. He wrote an essay on manners and one on government. He wrote frequently to the newspapers, putting forth his opinions about language and politics and often drawing heated responses. News of Webster’s contentious ways traveled to his father in West Hartford, who wrote advising him to “have courage but temper the same with prudence.”36

  On a return trip to Philadelphia he was offered a teaching post at the Episcopal Academy, where he stayed for several months. The chance to teach was a lucky opportunity for Webster to earn some extra money. Financial gain had not been the only reason for Webster’s lecture tour, but
he had hoped to earn more than he did. Webster’s typical audiences, at around thirty or forty, had been disappointingly small, although he occasionally drew a crowd as large as three hundred. Sales of A Grammatical Institute, Part II also continued to lag well behind sales of the speller.

  In June 1787 the twenty-eight-year-old Webster gained another reason for wanting a steady income. He became engaged to a young Bostonian woman named Rebecca Greenleaf and needed money to marry on. Webster stayed in Philadelphia just long enough to shepherd a revised edition of his spelling book through the press and to write an essay explaining the principles of the new federal Constitution, signed “a citizen of America.” Then he moved to New York City to found a monthly journal titled The American Magazine. He hoped journalism would prove more profitable than grammar.

  Webster’s journal published an ambitious mix of political, scientific, and literary writing, including poems by Webster’s friend Joel Barlow and others. The title page displayed the magazine’s forward-looking motto, “Science the guide, and truth the eternal goal.” He also found time to start a Philological Society, dedicated to the study of American English. (Philology was the usual eighteenth-century term for language study, from the Greek for “love of language.”) Webster occasionally read essays before the Society and was able to persuade them to recommend his speller, although they balked at approving the more unorthodox grammar.

  Unfortunately, The American Magazine never caught on with the general public. Webster lost money on it and was forced to suspend publication after less than a year. At the end of 1788, Webster left New York. He continued his usual round of business travel for several more months, while Rebecca waited at her family home in Boston. Eventually he settled once again in Hartford for another try at the law. Gradually he started to build a practice.

  On the strength of a generous $1,000 gift from his future brother-in-law James Greenleaf, a prosperous merchant, Webster felt financially stable enough to marry Rebecca. They wed on October 26, 1789, shortly after his thirty-first birthday. He wrote in his diary, “I am united to an amiable woman, and if I am not happy, shall be much disappointed.” Although Webster would continue to face obstacles in his career, from now on his family life would be a source of comfort and consolation.

  A few months before Webster married, he brought out his lecture series in the form of a book titled Dissertations on the English Language, which he had printed in Boston. Webster’s challenge to Latin-based grammars is more forcefully stated here than in the Institute. In the book’s preface, he writes dismissively, “Our modern grammars have done much more hurt than good. The authors have labored to prove, what is obviously absurd, viz. that our language is not made right; and in pursuance of this idea, have tried to make it over again, and persuade the English to speak by Latin rules, or by arbitrary rules of their own.” He goes on to attack Lowth by name, saying, “Very few of the alterations recommended by Lowth and his followers can be vindicated on any better principle than some Latin rule or his own private opinion.”37

  Between the first edition of A Grammatical Institute and the publication of Dissertations, Webster’s anti-Latin bias received strong reinforcement from a 1786 book by an English radical politician and language scholar named John Horne Tooke. Horne Tooke’s book, ponderously titled Winged Words, or The Diversions of Purley, is a forcefully argued attempt to prove that all English words derive from a small set of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) nouns and verbs. Later linguistic discoveries would show that Horne Tooke’s analysis of English was mostly wrong, but when his work first appeared, it captured the imagination of Webster and many others. Horne Tooke was well known in America for his vocal defense of the American Revolution, which might have further influenced Webster in his favor.

  Webster uses Horne Tooke’s theories to buttress his arguments against basing English grammar on Latin. For instance, he argues that typical verb classifications, such as those in Bishop Lowth’s grammar book, are inaccurate because they are influenced by Latin. Lowth (and most grammarians) assumed a future tense for English. Webster points out that, while Latin verbs are marked for future tense with a special ending, English verbs have no such form. They simply combine present-tense verbs with shall or will for a “future” meaning. After providing several examples of this sort, he concludes, “It is astonishing to see how long and how stupidly English grammarians have followed the Latin grammars.”38

  Dissertations argues for the same constructions that Webster had been promoting to his lecture audiences, but now he fleshes out his arguments with etymological evidence. He writes, “Who did you speak to? Who did he marry? are challenged as bad English, but whom did you speak to was never used in speaking … who in the Gothic or Teutonic has always answered to the Latin nominative qui, the dative cui,… and the ablative quo … So that who did he speak to? who did you go with? were probably as good English in ancient times as cui dixit?” It’s more than probable, in Webster’s opinion, that “who was once wholly used in asking questions, even in the objective case … until some Latin student began to suspect it [of being] bad English because not agreeable to the Latin rules.”39

  Webster was not always consistent in his views. In spite of his belief that the most common usage should determine what was standard, he did have pet peeves. He complained, for instance, that speakers didn’t understand how to use shall properly and were increasingly replacing it with will. He also thought upper-class New England pronunciations sounded more educated than those of other regions. He urged Americans in other parts of the country to abandon their own local dialects and adopt New England speech in the interests of a uniform national language.

  Webster wrote in his preface that he hoped Dissertations would be useful to “all classes of readers,” but the book was too esoteric to have wide appeal. Besides the original material of his lectures, Webster included essays on topics that had recently caught his interest. These included a proposal for spelling reform and a section demonstrating Horne Tooke’s method of deriving prepositions, conjunctions, and other parts of speech from ancient Saxon verbs. Such abstruse topics made the book heavy going for readers who were simply hoping to improve their grammar skills. Although Dissertations added to Webster’s stature as an expert on language, it was not successful as a practical grammar guide.

  Webster lost $400 on the publication of Dissertations, a hefty sum at that time. Many workingmen earned less than half that in a year. In 1791 he wrote wryly to Timothy Pickering, “My dissertations, which cost me a large sum of money, lie on hand and must, I believe, be sold for wrapping paper.”40 Earlier, Webster’s brother-in-law Nathaniel Appleton had tried to reassure him by writing, “The work has, undoubtedly, merit, and the next generation will acknowledge it.”41 But Webster was far more than one generation ahead of his time. Several decades would pass before a group of grammarians made another attempt to inject more natural usage standards into American grammar books, and nearly a century would pass before linguists began challenging the very notion of prescriptive grammars.

  Dissertations on the English Language would be Webster’s last linguistic publication for the next seventeen years. Meanwhile, his writings in support of the Constitution and a strong federal government led to a new opportunity. In 1793 a group of Federalists, including Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, approached Webster about starting a Federalist journal in New York City. They wanted to counteract anti-Federalist newspapers such as the Philadelphia Aurora, which was publishing vitriolic attacks on President Washington. To get the project started, each man in the group gave Webster a no-interest loan of $150 on the condition of being repaid in five years.

  The new project would give Webster a powerful platform for his political views. It would also give his income a much-needed boost, allowing him to pay off his debts. In October Webster moved his family, which now included two small daughters, from Hartford to New York. On December 9 he published the first issue of his journal, The American Minerva. Beneath the title was the motto
“Patroness of Peace, Commerce and the Liberal Arts.” The Minerva would prove to be a success. Webster now committed himself to public affairs. For the first few years, until he could afford an assistant, he worked long, arduous hours producing all the paper’s editorial content himself. This heavy schedule left little time for other writing.

  Although the speller remained popular, Webster’s grammar books soon sank into obscurity. His famous dictionary was decades in the future. In the meantime, a rival grammarian was about to publish the book that would sweep all others off the market.

  2.

  Grammar for Different Classes of Learners

  While Noah Webster was in New York laboring in the Federalist cause, an expatriate named Lindley Murray who lived several thousand miles away in old York, England, was beginning work on his own version of an English grammar book. In many ways Murray was the antithesis of Webster. He didn’t write the book to express his own theories of language use—his views were entirely orthodox. Nor was he especially interested in making money. Growing up in a family of prosperous Quaker merchants, he had always been well off and had earned enough income as a lawyer and businessman to retire at the age of thirty-nine. Unlike Webster’s Institute or Dissertations, Murray’s grammar book was not written with the American public in mind. Yet during most of the nineteenth century, Americans would invoke the name Murray as a synonym for proper grammar. Today, although his name is virtually unknown, his ideas about usage live on in America’s favorite style guides.