"Grammatical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... built on what is termed the principle of triliteralism; the skeleton, as it were, of each of them consisting of three consonants, while the vowels, which give flesh and life to the skeleton, vary according to the grammatical signification of the word. The relations of grammar are thus expressed for the most part by changes of vocalic sound, just as in English the plural of "man" is denoted by a change in the vowel. The verb is but imperfectly ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... 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 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 in aliorum scriptis vertant ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... had much contact with Europeans. He appears to have had a considerable acquaintance with the language, and has left some curious conversations 'en langage sauvage et Franc,ais', in which he gives some grammatical rules. The language of conversation is almost identical with that of Paraguay, though some words are used which are either peculiar to the Tupis or obsolete in Paraguay to-day. His account of their customs tallies with that of the various Spanish ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... scribes, especially those known as forming the series called ana ittisu, give as specimens certain laws. These were evidently given by the scribes as examples of connected prose in Sumerian, accompanied by a rendering into Semitic. Their object was primarily grammatical, or at any rate educational; but they are most valuable because they contain specimens of the Sumerian legislation. Owing to their limited scope they were at first regarded as family laws. But there can be little doubt that they really are extracts from something like ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... is in love with a certain country girl, whose name is Cowslip, to whom he makes a declaration of his passion in a strange mythological, grammatical style and manner, and to whom, among other fooleries, he sings, quite enraptured, the following air, and seems to work himself at least up to such a transport of passion as quite overpowers him. He begins, you ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... not too priggishly grammatical Lady Jane; "nowadays those sort of people dress like duchesses, and think themselves ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... appointed Professor of Humanity in Marischal College, Aberdeen—a post which he held for eleven years. To this new labour he gave himself with all his heart, and was eminently successful. The Aberdeen students were remarkable for their accurate knowledge of the grammatical forms and syntax of Latin, acquired under the careful training of Dr Melvin; but their reading, both classical and general, was restricted, and they were wanting in literary impulses. Professor Blackie strove to supply ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... here. Elster's note is of peculiar interest. He says: "Heine schloss sich am nAechsten an die Bearbeitung eines Stoffs an, die ein Graf LOeben 1821 verOeffentlichte." The expression "ein Graf LOeben" is grammatical evidence, though not proof, of one of two things: that Loeben was to Elster himself in 1890 a mere name, or that Elster knew Loeben would be this to the readers of his edition of Heine's works. Brandes says: "Die Nachahmung ist unzweifelhaft."[55] His proof is Strodtmann's statement, ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... that industrious bibliographer, Mr. O. Rich, now resident in London. Lastly, I must not omit to mention my obligations, in another way, to my friend Charles Folsom, Esq., the learned librarian of the Boston Athenaeum; whose minute acquaintance with the grammatical structure and the true idiom of our English tongue has enabled me to correct many inaccuracies into which I had fallen in the composition both of this and ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... who—for who the reward," said Philo Gubb, seeking a grammatical form that would sound right, "for information as to which five thousand dollars ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... credit, for the internal character of the paper is too vapid and heavy for the genius of Burke, whose ardent mind would assuredly have diffused vigor into the composition, and the correctness of whose judgment would as certainly have preserved it from the charge of inelegance and grammatical deficiency."—DR. WATKINS, Life of Sheridan. Such, in nine cases out of ten, are the periodical guides of public taste.] and by a more diligent inquiry, in which his kindness assisted me, it has been ascertained ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... completely subject is one in this regard to one's early environment, that it is not only difficult in later life to acquire a new pronunciation, but one finds it impossible to breathe freely, as it were, in the whole psychological atmosphere of a foreign language. Its grammatical categories, its spelling, its logic seem hopelessly irrational. It was perfectly natural of the Englishman in the story, when he was told that the French called it "pain," to insist, "Well, it's bread, anyhow." Many a reader of a foreign language which has become habitual ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... the martyrs portrayed before him in words that burned. The rude pictures that adorned many of the tombs carried with them a pathos that the finest works of the skillful artist could not produce. The rudely carved letters, the bad spelling and grammatical errors, that characterized many of them, gave a touching proof of the treasure of the Gospel to the poor and lowly. Not many wise, not many mighty are called; but to the poor ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... emotion pauses do not necessarily correspond to grammatical structure; but, as with all the modes of expression previously considered, their frequency and length—their only modifications—must harmonize with the feeling which they are to assist in interpreting. In length, for example, they should correspond with the movement of which they ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... it?" added the delicate Slim Goodwin, and, partly to hide his grammatical error, but mostly to express his enthusiasm, he gave Joe a one-hundred-and-seventy-pound whack on the back that sent him sliding out of the chair and half way under the ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... You will find that it intensifies and explains the forms which otherwise would have escaped notice, and that a perfectly gradated wash of neutral tint with an outline of this kind is all that is necessary for grammatical statement of forms. It is all that the great colorists need for their studies; they would think it wasted time to go farther; but, if you have no eye for color, you may go farther in another manner, ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... difficulty bridged. And finding herself awkward in the new role, Mrs. Anderson dropped it and resumed her old gait, remarking, as she closed the door, that she was glad to know that Julia was coming to her senses, and "had took the right road." For Mrs. Abigail was more vigorous than grammatical. ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... and rejection of this bill a fortunate incident. Every State will certainly concede the power; and this will be a national confirmation of the grounds of appeal to them, and will settle for ever the meaning of this phrase, which, by a mere grammatical quibble, has countenanced the General Government in a claim of universal power. For in the phrase, 'to lay taxes, to pay the debts and provide for the general welfare,' it is a mere question of syntax, whether the two last infinitives are governed by the first, or are distinct and co-ordinate ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... north of the Mafulu or Fuyuge people is that of the Ambo people, who are somewhat similar in appearance to the Mafulu, and whose language is also Papuan, and, though differing from the Mafulu language, is, I was told, somewhat similar to it in grammatical construction and as regards a few of its words. The area to the west is that of the Kuni people, whose language is Melanesian, but whose ordinary modes of life are, I was informed, more like those of the Mafulu than are those of the Papuan-speaking Ambo. The areas to the east and south cannot be ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... ferocious notes on the vanity of the triple Editory of the Edin. Annual Register [4]), my Hints, I say, stand still, and why?—I have not a friend in the world (but you and Drury) who can construe Horace's Latin or my English well enough to adjust them for the press, or to correct the proofs in a grammatical way. So that, unless you have bowels when you return to town (I am too far off to do it for myself), this ineffable work will be lost to the world for—I don't know how ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... which I am sure I have your approbation. The learned languages have certainly a great advantage of us, in not being tied to the slavery of any rhyme; and were less constrained in the quantity of every syllable, which they might vary with spondees or dactyls, besides so many other helps of grammatical figures, for the lengthening or abbreviation of them, than the modern are in the close of that one syllable, which often confines, and more often corrupts, the sense of all the rest. But in this necessity of our rhymes, I have always found ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... a grammatical double entendre whose application is palpable. Harf al-Jarra particle governing the noun in the genitive or a mode ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... while the latter has confined itself chiefly to an etymological analysis of mythological names in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, and other languages, such as had been sufficiently studied to admit of a scientific, grammatical, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... in this style for about half an hour, during which time the words came out in a constant stream without a moment's pause. Schrotter's expression became sad, while Paul banged the table with his mug and cried "Bravo" at every grammatical mistake, or every false analogy. Angry glances were cast at him from neighboring tables, as in his applause was recognized contempt for the speaker whom they admired so much. No one laughed or joked, all were silent to the end; at every violent ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... prosaic, but he becomes considerably less intelligible. There is a passage in "The Old Bachelor," too long to quote but worth referring to, which, though it may be easy enough to understand it with a little goodwill, I defy anybody to understand in its literal and grammatical meaning. Such welters of words are very common in Crabbe, and Johnson saved him from one of them in the very first lines of "The Village." Yet Johnson could never have written the passages which earned Crabbe his fame. The great ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... for her father, in spite of the fact that whatever her accent or grammatical mistakes, her mother's conduct was always right and her father, with his charming air, a little blurred by what he called misfortune, his clear speech to which Henrietta loved to listen, was fundamentally unsound. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... 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 ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... commonly neutral, but in conversation is often used actively, and why not in the works of a writer negligent beyond all others of grammatical niceties? ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... original letter; there are, however, no traces of sealing-wax or wax upon it, whence I infer that it was sent open, which, from its being written in a foreign language, would have been perfectly safe. I have purposely left the few grammatical errors it contains, as the smallest alteration of this gem would appear to me in the light of a treason against the character of this ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... that day indicates the unification very clearly. Besides being a tirade against schismatics of all classes, the discourse was often a discussion of grammatical principles, accompanied with a description of the spiritual condition of every hearer. After the singing of the hymn in the middle of its delivery, the people adjusted themselves to hear the application in which their cases were to be stated. There ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... and the doctors. It would have had its trivial and its quadrivial schools; its occupation would have been research, experiment, or investigation; in a word, its whole features would have been colored by a grammatical, a rhetorical, or a mathematical cast, accordingly as it should have been derived from a sect in which any one of these three characteristics was the ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... them, as because they afford me a starting-point for the consideration of the various phases of the act of believing, its blessings and its nature, and its relation to its objects, which are expressed in the New Testament by the various grammatical connections and constructions of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... this book to Elizabethan literature. It was not without reason that Ireland chose justified, when making a selection of passages from the work for modern readers, in altering his text to this extent—and this only: he has modernised the spelling, and in the case of entirely obsolete grammatical forms he has substituted modern ones (e.g. "its" for "his"). In the case of an utterly dead word he has followed the course of substituting a word from the same root, when one exists; and when none could be found, he has left it unchanged ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... looked up the etymology of grippe, but the word itself seems to tell its own story. It seems to mean restriction, subjection, slavery. It certainly spells lack of freedom. I have seen many boys and girls who seemed afflicted with arithmetical, grammatical, and geographical grippe, and I have sought to free them from its tyranny and lead them forth into the sunlight and pure air of freedom. If I only knew just how to do this effectively I think I'd be quite reconciled to the work ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... into two parts: one bears the name of "Kan Tsippor" ([Hebrew]), "The bird's nest," and treats of the Massorah of the Psalms, i.e., their divisions, accents, vowels, grammatical forms, and letters necessary for the preservation of the text; and the other, the name of "Gan Perakhim" ([Hebrew]), "The garden of flowers," containing poems, special prayers, family records, and descriptions of ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... 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 thousand ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... 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, ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... ejus, should be Englished thus by the letter, the Lord his adversaries shall dread, I English it thus by resolution, the adversaries of the Lord shall dread him; and so of other reasons that be like." In the later period of Biblical translation, when grammatical information was more accessible, such elementary comment was not likely to be committed to print, but echoes of similar technical difficulties are occasionally heard. Tyndale, speaking of the Hebraisms ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... which there had its origin and received its development,—this city, which gave to the world the master of this noble science, whose priority no one contests,—does not now possess a single preacher who pronounces the Sunday sermon according to grammatical rules! ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... this report on account of its grammatical and entomological mistakes. It is because of the evil effects it may, and probably will, have on amateur silk culturists, that I notice it; for most assuredly, failure will be the result of all attempts to produce silk cocoons by feeding the caterpillars of ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... necessarily general, and, as such, is not worth reporting. No general conversation, one finds, is of much value when set down in black and white. It is not even grammatical nowadays. To be more correct, let us note that the talk lay between Etta and M. de Chauxville, who had a famous supply of epigrams and bright nothings delivered in such a way that they really sounded like wisdom. Etta was equal to him, sometimes capping his sharp wit, sometimes ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... variation in the forms of the different parts of speech to show grammatical relation, is called INFLECTION. Though there is some inflection in English, grammatical relation is usually shown by ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... an historian, and his grammatical style, have been the subjects of contradictory opinions even among the ancients themselves—both his own contemporaries, and the men of succeeding ages. Some condemned his introductions, as having nothing to do with the works themselves; found fault with the minute details ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... and just began to read Arabic' This seems easy in the telling, but in reality it was a long, a monotonous, an exhausting process. Think of the expenditure of hours and eyesight over barbarous alphabets and horrid grammatical details. One must needs have had a mind of leather to endure such philological and linguistic wear and tear. Priestley's mind not only cheerfully endured it but actually toughened under it. The man was never afraid of work. Take as an illustration his experience ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... instances it is a perfect marvel of literary slipshod. Nor is there any ground for believing that the slovenliness was invariably intentional. Sterne's truly hideous French—French at which even Stratford-atte-Bowe would have stood aghast—is in itself sufficient evidence of a natural insensibility to grammatical accuracy. Here there can be no suspicion of designed defiance of rules; and more than one solecism of rather a serious kind in his use of English words and phrases affords confirmatory testimony to the same point. His punctuation is fearful and wonderful, even for an age in which the ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... "old-fashioned" and "precocious" by people who had one set of words for their own use, and another for children. My parents considered, and I think rightly, that the best and most correct forms of speech should be taught to mere infants, that it is as easy to train a child to be grammatical as to let it lapse into all sorts of slovenly inaccuracies that must be unlearned at school, and in society. So, when they talked of "circumstantial evidence" I had a fair inkling of what the phrase conveyed. Preciosa was upon trial for ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... are not easy reading; his German style, though grammatical and idiomatic, is generally very involved and obscure, often turgid. There is a want of self-discipline about the thought, and he is too hasty in committing ill-digested thoughts ill-arranged to print, while his style is full of tedious mannerisms, ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... accepted as axioms the social tenets held by his mother, or the business methods practised by his father. He believed that elderly men should speak precisely, and in grammatical, but colourless English. He believed also that people should, in society, conduct themselves according to the fashion-plate pattern designed by Mrs. de Laney. He believed these things, not because he was a fool, or shallow, or lacking in humour, or snobbish, ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Curtis. We perceive scarcely any of that peculiar stiffness of style which makes so many otherwise excellent translations painful to read,—the stiffness as of one walking in new boots,—the result of dressing the words of one language in the grammatical construction of another. Mr. Curtis gives us the sentiment and wit and fancy and humor and oddity of the German's stories, but in an English way. Indeed, his is manly and graceful English, such as we hope we are not now by any means seeing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... carefully read by the catalogue manager, all cuts examined and compared as to numbers, etc., to see that none are missing and that all appear in their proper places; anything not satisfactory must be explained, the grammatical construction should be carefully watched, and he is expected to satisfy himself fully that everything about the copy is positively O. K. before passing it. A complete record should be kept of the number of pages of copy handed in from each department, and the number of ...
— How Department Stores Are Carried On • W. B. Phillips
... 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, I ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... Aleria[22] to English Bentley. The criticks on ancient authors have, in the exercise of their sagacity, many assistances, which the editor of Shakespeare is condemned to want. They are employed upon grammatical and settled languages, whose construction contributes so much to perspicuity, that Homer has fewer passages unintelligible than Chaucer. The words have not only a known regimen, but invariable quantities, which direct and confine the choice. There are commonly more manuscripts than one; and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... Deventer in 1486, produced Virgil's Eclogues, Cicero's De Senectute and De Officiis, Boethius' De consolatione philosophiae and De disciplina scholarium, Aesop, a poem by Baptista Mantuanus, the 'Christian Virgil', Alan of Lille's Parabolae, Alexander, two grammatical treatises by Synthius and the Epistola mythologica of Bartholomew ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... great theological schools, in which he had a place of such honor and influence?... Dr. Shedd would have called to mind a statement in Guericke's Church History, as translated by himself, "It is noticeable that the exegetico-grammatical school of Antioch, as well as the allegorizing Alexandrian, adopted and maintained the doctrine of restoration, p. 349, note 1." Then it should be added that Origen was not the only one of the Alexandrian school, who taught this doctrine. Clemens, who preceded Origen, taught ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... rather of the blame than the praise which was lavished on me. My late school education, which was forced, and my impulse to become an author whilst I was yet a student, make it evident that my first work, the "Journey on Foot," was not without grammatical errors. Had I only paid some one to correct the press, which was a work I was unaccustomed to, then no charge of this kind could have been brought against me. Now, on the contrary, people laughed at these ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... only a shirt? Seeing me, Mosaide's eyes vomited fire. Out of his dirty yellow greatcoat he drew a neat little stiletto and shook it through the window with an arm in no way weighed down by age. He roared bilingual curses on me. Yes, Tournebroche, my grammatical knowledge authorises me to say that his curses were bilingual, that Spanish, or rather Portuguese, was mixed in them with Hebrew. I went into a rage at not being able to catch their exact sense, as I do not know these languages, ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... right. Before you can tell what a man means, you must have patience to find out what he says. So far from wishing our grammatical and philological education to be less severe than it is, I think it is not severe enough. In an age like this—an age of lectures, and of popular literature, and of self-culture, too often random and capricious, however earnest, we cannot be ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... share in the "invention, dissemination, conservation, and metamorphosis of language" has been very great, and she has been par excellence the teacher of language, as indeed she is to-day in our schools when expression and savoir faire in speech, rather than deep philological learning and dry grammatical analysis, have ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... is nothing either musical or natural in the ordinary construction of language. It is a thing altogether arbitrary and conventional. Neither in the sounds themselves, which are the voluntary signs of certain ideas, nor in their grammatical arrangements in common speech, is there any principle of natural imitation, or correspondence to the individual ideas, or to the tone of feeling with which they are conveyed to others. The jerks, the breaks, the inequalities, and harshnesses of prose, are fatal ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... is an ellipsis at the end of Silvia's remark, which, completed, would read: Il n'y aurait pas grande perte a cela. Dorante's reply, which is not strictly grammatical, even in the use of the time, would certainly nowadays be constructed differently, e.g., Non plus que si je m'en ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... the translator becomes doubly hazardous in case of translating a European language into Japanese, or vice versa. Between any of the European languages and Japanese there is no visible kinship in word-form, significance, grammatical system, rhetorical arrangements. It may be said that the inspiration of the two languages is totally different. A want of similarity of customs, habits, traditions, national sentiments and traits makes the work of translation ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri
... the manuscript with the 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 to this they ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... are bound to come back," was the not very cheering reply. "The deaths ain't wholesale like that. And maybe nothing won't happen to any of 'em," which was sufficiently clear and hopeful if not very grammatical. "But, even if they all come back, which is more than likely," went on the most recent foreman of Dot and Dash, "that ain't saying they'll find out ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... (p. 234.) recall to my mind a canon of criticism which I had intended to communicate at an earlier period as useful for the guidance of commentators in questions of this nature. It is as follows:—Master the grammatical construction of the passage in question (if from a drama, in its dramatic and I scenic application), deducing therefrom the general sense, before you attempt to amend or fix the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... be taken to avoid ambiguity in the use of pronouns. It is very easy to multiply and combine pronouns in such a way that while grammatical rules may not be broken the reader may be left hopelessly confused. Such ambiguous sentences should be cleared up, either by a rearrangement of the words or by substitution of nouns for some ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... the older Dorset folk is the ancient speech of Wessex. It is not an illiterate corruption but a true dialect with its own grammatical rules. But alas! fifty years of the council school and its immediate predecessor has done more to destroy this ancient form of English than ten centuries of intercourse ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... and severe moralist as he was, was not a strict Calvinist. Anyone who takes the trouble to read 'The Manual of Religious Belief in a Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by William Burness, Farmer, Mount Oliphant, and transcribed with Grammatical Corrections by John Murdoch, Teacher,' will see that the man was of too loving and kindly a nature to be strictly orthodox. What was rigid and unlovely to him in the Calvinism of the Scottish Church of that ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... to speak, all gloves. He must cover up her coarse speech, as he had covered up her coarse hands. He owed that to the gloves; it was the least he could do for them. So, whenever Mary Ann made a mistake, Lancelot corrected her. He found these grammatical dialogues not uninteresting, and a vent for his ill-humour against publishers to boot. Very often his verbal corrections sounded astonishingly like reprimands. Here, again, Mary Ann was forearmed by her feeling that she deserved them. She would have ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... common speech being so courteous as not to correct, but to adopt the mistakes, in the pronunciation or meaning of words that were made on the Vega. As a fruit of his studies Lieut. Nordquist has drawn up an extensive vocabulary of this little known language, and given a sketch of its grammatical structure.[255] The knowledge of the Chukch language, which the other members of the Expedition acquired, was confined to a larger or smaller number of words; the natives also learned a word or two of our language, so that ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... is one of the commonplaces of the day which is utterly false and hypocritical. Just as in the 18th century sympathy was with the simple hearted citizen, so today we talk about the workingman. The term workingman can never be anything but a grammatical common denominator. Among workingmen, as among the bourgeoisie, there are all sorts of people. It is perfectly true that there are certain characteristics, certain defects, which may be exaggerated in a given class, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... 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 ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... meaning of which has not yet been ascertained, but which probably corresponds with the idea "clearly speaking." The language is highly interesting and stands as yet absolutely isolated from the other tongues of Europe, though from the purely grammatical point of view it recalls the Magyar and Finnic languages. It is an agglutinative, incorporating and polysynthetic system of speech; in the general series of organized linguistic families it would take an intermediate place between the American on the one ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... suffixed, in a similar way. One of the tenses of the conjugation, and that the simplest and most archaic, is formed with identical affixes. Without insisting upon resemblances which are open to doubt, it may be almost affirmed that most of the grammatical processes used in Semitic languages are to be found in a rudimentary condition in Egyptian. One would say that the language of the people of Egypt and the languages of the Semitic races, having once belonged to the same ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... 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 all conscious of the genius with which she is endowed. Mrs. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... have such a specimen here! a man who discourses extemporaneously, positively without the power of constructing one grammatical sentence; but who is (ungrammatically) deep in Heaven's confidence on the abstrusest points, and discloses some of his private information with an ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Quincey's "Literary Remains" occurs this sentence; "Even by as philosophic a politician as Edmund Burke," in which the critical blunder of calling Burke a philosophic politician furnishes no excuse for the grammatical blunder. The rule (derived, like all good rules, from principle) which determines the use of this small particle is, I conceive, that the double as should only be employed when there is direct comparison. In the first part of the following sentence there is no direct comparative ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... respect rifacimento of 1623 has greater literary merits— the merits of mere smoothness, clearness, grammatical coherence, and intelligibility—than the autograph; and I can understand the preference of some students for the former, though I do not share it Michelangelo the younger added fluency and grace to his great-uncle's composition by the sacrifice of much that is most characteristic, and by the omission ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... of the ancients, have deserved, in some measure, the remembrance and gratitude of the moderns. The scholars of the present age may still enjoy the benefit of the philosophical commonplace book of Stobaeus, the grammatical and historical lexicon of Suidas, the Chiliads of Tzetzes, which comprise six hundred narratives in twelve thousand verses, and the commentaries on Homer of Eustathius, archbishop of Thessalonica, who, from his ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... something about this. But education cultivated a system of verbal etiquette so multiform that only the training of years could enable any one to master it. Among the [171] higher classes this etiquette developed almost inconceivable complexity. Grammatical modifications of language, which, by implication, exalted the person addressed or humbly depreciated the person addressing, must have come into general use at some very early period; but under subsequent Chinese influence these forms of propitiatory speech multiplied exceedingly. ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... 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 letter to ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... was always designed, by his father, for the ministry, and, with that view, instructed by him in grammatical learning, and the first elements of languages; in which he made such a proficiency, that he was, at the age of eleven years, not only master of the rules of grammar, but capable of translating with tolerable accuracy, and not ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... 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 their ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... removed. The educated Arab finds a book printed in characters modeled after the most approved specimens of Arab caligraphy. He soon perceives the style to be that of a man who is master of this wonderful language in all its grammatical and idiomatic niceties and rich resources. As a literary work it secures his respect, and thus invites a candid perusal. If he reads it, he finds the truths of Christianity clearly and correctly stated. Its beneficial influence ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... instructive at the university. Philological and linguistic details which were not suited for the senior pupils who were being fitted for other callings than those of the philologist were omitted. But he insisted upon grammatical correctness, and never lost sight of his maxim, "The school should teach its pupils to do thoroughly whatever they do ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... abridge the task. The best method is of course not to 'hammer in' the sentences, by mere reiteration, but to analyze them, and think. For example, if the pupil should have to learn this last sentence, let him first strip out its grammatical core, and learn, "The best method is not to hammer in, but to analyze," and then add the amplificative and restrictive clauses, bit by bit, thus: "The best method is of course not to hammer in the sentences, but to ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... because it is poetry.... I object to the tinkle. I object to the poetic license which performs a Germanic divorce between subject and verb, so that instead of a complete thought which can be mastered before another is set before the brain, there is a twist in the grammatical sequence that requires a conscious effort of will to keep the original thread. The world is too busy to do this; reading must be a relaxation, not a study.... When poetry conforms in its mental tone to the spirit of the times; when it reflects the life and ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... simple and well known by which a fact is affirmed to exist up to a certain time without any implication as to what happens after. And the meaning of the passage which is not at all necessitated by its grammatical construction is utterly intolerable in Catholic teaching. The constant teaching of the Church is the perpetual virginity of Mary—that she was a virgin "before and in and after her child-bearing." There was to ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... The grammatical variations, the syntax, and the genius of the language, must in this, as well as in several other modern European tongues, have been derived from the Celtic; it being well known, that the frequent use of articles, ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.
... dialect called Mongolian Hindustani, a 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 ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... resembled a soulless mosaic of words cemented together with international syntax. As to the disgracefully slipshod German with which Edward Devrient solemnised the death of Mendelssohn, I do not even wish to do more than refer to it. A grammatical error—and this is the most extraordinary feature of the case—does not therefore seem an offence in any sense to our Philistine, but a most delightful restorative in the barren wilderness of everyday German. He still, ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... important letters have been translated, to the best of my ability, verbatim. In the not infrequent instances where I have been unable to extract any intelligible meaning, on grammatical principles, from the words of my author, I have put in the text the nearest approximation that I could discover to his meaning, and placed the unintelligible words in a note, hoping that my readers may be more fortunate in their ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... Notwithstanding all her courage, her heart sank. She had expected "a difference," but she had not looked for her grandfather's greasy coat and wisp of neckcloth, or her grandmother's amazing cap, or the grammatical peculiarities in which both indulged. She had a good hot fit of crying, and for the moment felt so discouraged and depressed, that the only impulse in her mind was to run away. But her temperament did not ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... wealth to dispense, for her father was rich beyond counting, and she controlled his household, and helped to regulate his charities. She saw that he was not of the labouring classes, that he had known better days; his speech, if abrupt and cheerless, was grammatical. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... I feel an incomprehensible desire within me to write some horrible ghost story. As I said before, if it were not for those grammatical errors! ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... There is no grammatical gender. The words mwane male, geni female, are added when the noun does ...
— Grammar and Vocabulary of the Lau Language • Walter G. Ivens
... from the press of Robert Coplande; and about 1527 Giles du Guez or du Wes (anglicized Dewes), French teacher to the Lady Mary, afterwards Queen Mary, published his 'Introductorie for to lerne to rede, to pronounce and to speke French trewly.' In addition to grammatical rules and dialogues, it contains a select vocabulary English and French. In 1514, Mary Tudor, younger sister of Henry VIII, became the unwilling bride of Louis XII of France. To initiate the princess in her husband's tongue, John Palsgrave, a ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... on her own part, so that we talked of ourselves, of our prospects, of the journey, of the weather, of each other,—of everything but our host and hostess. It must be confessed that Miggles's conversation was never elegant, rarely grammatical, and that at times she employed expletives the use of which had generally been yielded to our sex. But they were delivered with such a lighting up of teeth and eyes, and were usually followed by a laugh—a laugh peculiar to Miggles—so frank and ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... said that his son could write as well as any white man.—Most of the coloured people, when they speak of the education of one among us who can write a neat hand, and who perhaps knows nothing but to scribble and puff pretty fair on a small scrap of paper, immaterial whether his words are grammatical, or spelt correctly, or not; if it only looks beautiful, they say he has as good an education as any white man—he can write as well as any white man, etc. The poor, ignorant creature, hearing this, he is ashamed, forever after, to let any person see him humbling ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... Legislatures are apt to use very slip-shod English in drafting their bills. This should not be. How can they expect to Parse a bill unless it is couched in grammatical language? ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... 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 ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 1, March, 1898 • Various
... searching for the word as for a plank, he will jump in and rescue me. Under these circumstances, I am perfectly safe in talking French to him "Mais je ne vous attendais ce matin"—I've got an idea that this is something uncommonly grammatical—"a cause de votre lettre que je viens de recevoir"—this, I'll swear, is idiomatic—"ce matin. La voila!" I pride myself on "La," as representing my knowledge that "lettre," to which it refers, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 22, 1891 • Various
... 'er but her, borrer but borrow, actially but actually, Fanny," Mr. Huxter replied—not to a fault in her argument, but to grammatical errors in ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the tinkle; each has always its part in producing an impression which is produced always through language. Words are perhaps the hardest of all material of art: for they must be used to express both visual beauty and beauty of sound, as well as communicating a grammatical statement. It would be interesting to compare Pound's use of images with Mallarme's; I think it will be found that the former's, by the contrast, will appear always sharp in outline, even if arbitrary and not photographic. Such images as those quoted above ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... and grammatical forms unknown to the tongue of daily life occur. These may be archaic, or manufactured capriciously by ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... truths when they are really giving us the babble of Bedlam. If ladies and gentlemen who rant about freedom would try to emancipate themselves from the dominion of meaningless words, we should all fare better; but we find a large number of public personages using perfectly grammatical series of phrases without dreaming for a moment that their grave sentences are pure gibberish. A few simple questions addressed in the Socratic manner to certain lights of thought might do much good. For instance, we might say, "Do you ever speak of being free from good health, or free from a good ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... twenty, the orphan daughter of a bankrupt ship chandler. Miss Maria Manners was highly educated; that is, she could write short notes on perfumed billet paper, without making any orthographical or grammatical mistakes, had taken three quarters' lessons of a French barber, could work worsted lapdogs and embroider slippers, danced like a sylph, and played on the piano indifferently well. She had visited the Catskills on a matrimonial speculation, and ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... of speech there are openings for specious amendments, sometimes for real ones, especially in ironical expressions. But as in pronunciation we regard usage rather than etymology, so in sense the true meaning is not the literal or grammatical, but the conventional. Much indifferent humour is made of question and answer;—the reply being given falsely, as if the interrogation were put in a different sense from that intended, an occasion for the quibble being ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... confession that tools would still be of service to him, in particular "this same tripartite Grammar which Mr Brandram is hunting for, my ideas respecting Manchu construction being still very vague and wandering." {100b} There is also a request for "the original grammatical work of Amyot, printed ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... present century nothing was known of the works of Fronto, except a grammatical treatise; but in 1815 Cardinal Mai published a number of letters and some short essays of Fronto, which he had discovered in a palimpsest at Milan. Other parts of the same MS. he found later in the Vatican, the whole ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... commonplace and the rare; and the confusion which this picture created in the minds of Owen's friends was aggravated by the strange elliptical execution. Owen admitted the drawing to be not altogether grammatical; one eye was a little lower than the other, but the eyes were beautifully drawn—the right eye, for instance, and without the ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... which are spoken by the Indians of America, from the Pole to Cape Horn, are said to be all formed upon the same model, and subject to the same grammatical rules; whence it may fairly be concluded that all the Indian nations sprang from the same stock. Each tribe of the American continent speaks a different dialect; but the number of languages, properly so called, is very small, a fact which tends to prove that the nations of the New World ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... translation differs from Spiegel's, and this latter differs very slightly from what is here given. Yet in the present translation there has been made no addition to, or omission from, the original wording of the Zend text. The grammatical construction also has been preserved intact. The only difference, therefore, between the current translations and the one here given is that ours is in accordance with the modern corrections of philological research which make it more intelligible, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... surprise. [In—OEuvres de Frederic,—x. 276-303.] Surprise, first at Voltaire's official fidelity; his frankness, rigorous strictness in this small duty: then at the kind of correcting, instructing and lessoning, that had been demanded of him by his Royal Pupil. Mere grammatical stylistic skin-deep work: nothing (or, at least, in these Specimens nothing) of attempt upon the interior structure, or the interior harmony even of utterance: solely the Parisian niceties, graces, laws of poetic language, the FAS and the NEFAS in regard to all that: this is what his Majesty ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... believed in him, and had introduced him to Mr. Howells, who recommended him to the Bacheller Syndicate. "The Red Badge of Courage" had been published in the State Journal that winter along with a lot of other syndicate matter, and the grammatical construction of the story was so faulty that the managing editor had several times called on me to edit the copy. In this way I had read it very carefully, and through the careless sentence-structure I saw the wonder of that remarkable performance. But the ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... the obscurity of the text. A translator is required to be, above all things, comprehensible, and, therefore, he must interpret, he must paraphrase. He is not at liberty to retain the equivocal suggestiveness of the original. The language of a translation must be chastened, or, at least, grammatical, and Michael Angelo's verse is very often neither the one ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... and delicacy, but these were not beyond the powers of other writers then living. The circumstance which inclines us to reject the external evidence in favour of this play being Shakespeare's is, that the grammatical construction is constantly false and mixed up with vulgar abbreviations, a fault that never occurs in any of his genuine plays. A similar defect, and the halting measure of the verse are the chief objections to PERICLES OF TYRE, ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... the sunshine of public patronage, he feels that his heart is rendered invulnerable to your poisoned shafts. Read, and you shall find I have not been parsimonious of the means to grant you food and pleasure: errors there are, no doubt, and plenty of them, grammatical and typographical, all of which I might have corrected by an errata at the end of my volume; but I disdain the wish to rob you of your office, and have therefore left them just where I made them, without a single note to mark ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... our prelates and their chaplains with the goodly echo they made; and besotted us to the gay imitation of a lordly Imprimatur, one from Lambeth House, another from the west end of Paul's; so apishly Romanizing, that the word of command still was set down in Latin; as if the learned grammatical pen that wrote it would cast no ink without Latin; or perhaps, as they thought, because no vulgar tongue was worthy to express the pure conceit of an Imprimatur, but rather, as I hope, for that our English, ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... really make any difference who you modeled yourself on," said the Terror, desirous rather of being frank than grammatical. ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... Fortune, and have done for good and all with the Life of a Roving Bachelor? By this time (although by no means forgetting my own dear native Tongue) I spoke French with Ease and Fluency, if not with Grammatical correctness; and had likewise an indifferently copious acquaintance with the Hollands Dialect. Why should not I be a Magistrate, a Burgomaster? Madam Vanderkipperhaerin was Rich, and had a beautiful Summer Villa all glistening with Bee's-waxed ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... and abominable roads; the 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 ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the past at a common man's disposal, that scarcely a field of endeavour remained in which modern work had not long since passed beyond the ancient achievement. He disclaimed any utility. But there was, he said, a peculiar magic in these grammatical exercises no other subjects of instruction possessed. Nothing else provided the same strengthening and orderly ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... that 2 is the halting place for a very long time; that up to this point the fingers may or may not have been used—probably not; and that when the next start is made, and 3, 4, 5, and so on are counted, the fingers first come into requisition. If the grammatical structure of the earlier languages of the world's history is examined, the student is struck with the prevalence of the dual number in them—something which tends to disappear as language undergoes ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... social welfare of mankind. There is many a man, moving in good society, who would rather be guilty of, and even detected in, an act of unkindness or mendacity, than be seen in an unfashionable dress or commit a grammatical solecism or a broach of social etiquette. Vulgarity to such men is a worse reproach than hardness of heart or indifferent morality. In these cases, as we shall see hereafter, the social sanction requires to be corrected by the moral and religious sanctions, and ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... which, strictly translated, means "Can't go thing have done." Who has done? you? or he? or I? This can only be inferred, for it is not stated. If a speaker wishes to make his personal allusion blind, he can always do so with the greatest ease and without the slightest degree of grammatical incorrectness. "Caught cold," "better ask," "honorably sorry," "feel hungry," and all the common sentences of daily life are entirely free from that personal definiteness which an Occidental language necessitates. We shall see later that the absence of the personal element from the wording of ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... indeed, are not otherwise valuable than as 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 ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... say you——? [extraneous close quote at end] Footnote 83... She speaks of "liberae," "free women," [in Harper edn. only, second open quote missing] Footnote 90... to tie criminals hands and feet together [no apostrophe after "criminals"; grammatical intent is ambiguous] ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... had been made. The truth then came out. Mrs Nickleby had, that morning, had a yesterday's newspaper of the very first respectability from the public-house where the porter came from; and in this yesterday's newspaper was an advertisement, couched in the purest and most grammatical English, announcing that a married lady was in want of a genteel young person as companion, and that the married lady's name and address were to be known, on application at a certain library at the west end ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... me a very pretty grammatical quibble about 'son' and 'prophet' (apropos of Christ) on a verse in the Gospel, depending on the reduplicative sign [Arabic sign for sheddeh] (sheddeh) over one letter; he was just as put out when I reminded ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... of my respects in that language: and be so good to answer me in the same. Not that I am apprehensive of your forgetting to speak French: since it is probable that two-thirds of our daily prattle is in that language; and because, if you leave off writing French, you may perhaps neglect that grammatical purity, and accurate orthography, which, in other languages, you excel in; and really, even in French, it is better to write well than ill. However, as this is a language very proper for sprightly, gay subjects, I shall conform to that, and reserve those which are serious for English. I shall ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... arising from this lack of knowledge is now removed, and with it all uncertainty disappears. The similarity of the two tongues, apparent enough in many of their words, is most strikingly shown, as might be expected, in their grammatical structure, and especially in the affixed pronouns, which in both languages play so important ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... the man that even in the heyday of youth he cared little for modern literature and speculations and all that makes for exact knowledge, and that he fled from his Latin teacher, the celebrated Puoti, on account of his somewhat exclusive love of grammatical rules. None the less, though con-genitally averse to the materialistic and subversive theories that were then seething in Naples, he became entangled in the anti-Bourbon movements of the late thirties, and narrowly avoided the ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... a wistful note in her voice which seemed singular when speaking of a town never visited; second, with all her precise use of language, once in a while this woman of the highest aristocracy made an odd slip in a grammatical way. She was a somewhat ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... however, did not confirm this sentiment. Henry always went with alacrity to his Latin and his Greek. His judicious teacher did not disgust his mind with long and laborious rules, but introduced him at once to words and phrases, while gradually he developed the grammatical structure of the language. The vigorous mind of Henry, grasping eagerly at intellectual culture, made rapid progress, and he was soon able to read and write both Latin and Greek with fluency, and ever retained the power of quoting, with great facility and ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... was ten years amongst the Maoris. He was an ignorant sailor. He could not write, and the account of his adventures, it is explained, was dictated to a friend while he was on the voyage back to England. Craik says that if allowance is made for some grammatical solecisms, the story, as it appeared in the manuscript, was told with great clearness, and sometimes with considerable spirit. Knight evidently knew him, as it is stated in "The New Zealanders" that "the publisher ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... of paryaya-naya, which represent grammatical and linguistic points of view, are s'abda-naya, samabhiru@dha-naya, and evambhula-naya. See Vis'e@savas'yaka bha@sya, ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... those which are frequently required by the voice in reading and speaking, although the construction of the passage admits of no grammatical point. ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... answer. Jack seemed to have acquired new dignity since coming aboard; and it was noticeable, a little later, that he took more pains with his talk, being more grammatical, and pronouncing his words better, ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... plundered the abbey of its treasures, which were first removed to Ely, and then carried off by the Danish fleet and sunk, lost, or squandered. The English in the later portions of this Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more modern, and falls away more and more from the strict grammatical standards of the classical Anglo-Saxon. It is a most valuable historical monument, and some passages of it are written with great vividness, notably the sketch of William the Conqueror put down in the year of his death (1086) by one who had "looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his court." ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... I inquired. "Why, sir, and maybe 'twas young Brady that didn't sack him clane before the priest and all, and went nigh to bog the priest himself in Greek. His Reverence was only two words beyant him; but he sacked the masther any how, and showed him in the Grammatical and Dixonary where ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... There is no abstract language 'in rerum natura,' any more than there is an abstract tree, but only languages in various stages of growth, maturity, and decay. Nor do other logical distinctions or even grammatical exactly correspond to the facts of language; for they too are attempts to give unity and regularity to a subject which is ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... biographer, had led a somewhat curious life. In a pamphlet published in Paris, in 1646, addressed 'to all men that loves Truth,'—singularly rich, thanks to the French printers, in blunders, orthographic and grammatical,—Sir Balthazar gives some account of his family and himself. He was born about 1591, at Middelburg in Zeeland, the son of Anthoine Gerbier, a baron of Normandy, and Radegonde, daughter-in-law to the Lord of Blavet in Picardy. 'It pleaseth God,' writes Sir Balthazar, ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... you mean by 'real difference'?" he demanded. "I have told you, haven't I, that 'I wrote' is the perfect tense, while 'I have written' is the imperfect tense." This was in accordance with the grammatical ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Janice became convinced that the powers of darkness no longer had singled her out as their particular prey, and in the peaceful isolation of the winter her woes, when she thought of them, underwent a change of grammatical tense which suggested that they had become things ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... centuries monastic libraries contained books which were deemed necessary for grammatical study in the claustral schools, and other books, chiefly the Fathers, as we have seen, which were regarded as proper literature for the monk. The books used in the cathedral schools were similar. Such schools and such libraries were for the glory of God and the increase ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... momentary space in the interval between two eternities; and earns the blessings or the curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil, even as they also are earning their payment for their work? On the whole, then, I am in favor of reading the Bible, with such grammatical, geographical, and historical explanations by a lay teacher as may be needful, with rigid exclusion of any further theological teaching than that contained in the Bible itself." Mr. Huxley is an Englishman, ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... centuries they prefer to call themselves Anglo-Saxons rather than British. (Nomen a potiori fit.) *"Philologically, English, considered with reference to its original form, Anglo-Saxon, and to the grammatical features which it retains of Anglo-Saxon origin, is the most conspicuous member of the Low German group of the Teutonic family, the other Low German languages being Old Saxon, Old Friesic, Old Low German, and other extinct forms, and the modern Dutch, Flemish, Friesic, and Low ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner
... thinking very intently for a few seconds about Ralph. She did her best to verify all the qualities in him which gave rise to emotions in her; and persuaded herself that she accounted reasonably for them all. Then she looked back again at her manuscript, and decided that to write grammatical English prose is the hardest thing in the world. But she thought about herself a great deal more than she thought about grammatical English prose or about Ralph Denham, and it may therefore be disputed whether she was in love, or, if so, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... 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. Mr. Charles Pearson, in his remarkable ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison |
