Gloriously Wacky English–Part 4: Grammar 2: Parts of Speech

To continue our discussion of the peculiarities of English, I thought it might be good to look at our “Parts of Speech.”

Parts of Speech in World Languages

The rather odd term Part of Speech is the common name for a word class, a lexical class, or a lexical category. It divides our vocabulary up into groups of words that have the same function in syntax (Greek: σύνταξις “arrangement”). Syntax includes the rules, norms, etc., for the arrangement of words to form sentences in a language.

Virtually all human languages have nouns and verbs, but there are many variations after that. For example, Japanese has three classes of adjectives, which are thought of as separate parts of speech. Japanese, Korean and Chinese have Nominal Classifiers.

Noun Classifiers

Noun Classifiers are words that indicate what kind of thing is being referred to. Here are some examples from Wikipedia of Mandarin Chinese classifiers:

• 3-ge xuesheng (三個學生) lit. “3 human-classifier of student” — 3 students
• 3-ke shu (三棵樹) lit. “3 tree-classifier of tree” — 3 trees
• 3-zhi niao (三隻鳥) lit. “3 bird-classifier of bird” — 3 birds
• 3-tiao he (三條河) lit. “3 long-wavy-shape of river” — 3 rivers

Pien Wen-chi, Three Friends and A Hundred Birds (1413)

English does not have this part of speech, but there are a few nouns that fill this function in specialized cases:

• Ranchers say: “Three head of cattle”  (head = Cattle classifier)
• Florists say:  “Five stem of roses”  (stem = Rose classifier)
• We all say:  “Three pair(s) of pants/socks/gloves/shorts/glasses/ear-muffs.” (pair = apparel classifier for items that come in twos for our feet, legs, hands, arms, eyes, ears–everything we have two of). It is also used for other things that come in pairs: scissors, chopsticks, etc.

Six Head of Cattle

French is similar in this regard:

• Une tête de bétail (= a head of cattle)
• Une paire de lunettes/jumelles/gants/chaussures/baguettes (a pair of glasses/binoculars/gloves/shoes/chopsticks…things that come in pairs)
• Une botte de radis (= a boot) of radishes)
• Un pied de roses (a foot [for trees/berries] of roses)

Related to this is our rather lengthy (and sometimes humorous) list of Collective Nouns for all kinds of things. The most common are  “a brood of chickens,” “a flock of birds,” “a herd of sheep/cattle, etc.” These are actually rudimentary Noun Classes rather than Classifiers.

There are also many more colorful and fanciful ones which have various origins, sometimes alliterative. These originate in the Mediaeval English hunting tradition, called venery. We have:

• A Congregation of Alligators
• An Army of Ants
• A Troop of Apes
• A Cloud of Bats
• A Bench of Bishops — I didn’t know they hunted Bishops…well I guess the Romans before Constantine did, Henry VIII did, and the Communists did, tragically.
• A Hastiness of Cooks — Gordon Ramsey hunts cooks!
• A Murder of Crows
• A Gaggle of Geese
• An Exaltation of Larks
• A Pod of Pelicans
• A Nest of Vipers
• A Pack of Wolves
• And so forth…

Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Tree With Crows

The system has been expanded several times in history, notably:

• Dame Juliana Berners, The Book of Saint Albans (1486)
• Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801)
• Eric Partridge, Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English (1942)
• James Lipton, An Exaltation of Larks (1968)

Lists of Parts of Speech

The first mention of Parts of Speech that we know of comes from the work of the Sanskrit grammarian Yāska in the 5^th-6^th Centuries BCE. He defined four classes of words:

• Nouns
• Verbs
• Words Expressing the relationships between nouns and verbs
• Words qualifying nouns or verbs

Plato refers only to nouns and verbs in the Cratylus, and Aristotle adds Conjunctions, which included our conjunctions, pronouns and the article–Greek has only one. Dionysius Thrax’s work, Art of Grammar (Τέχνη Γραμματική) (2^nd Century BCE) introduces 8 categories:

• Noun
• Verb
• Participle (Verbal Nouns/Adjectives)
• Interjection
• Pronoun
• Preposition
• Adverb
• Conjunction

Surprisingly to us today, the Adjective was not recognized as a separate part of speech until Nicolas Beauzée did so in 1767 in his Grammaire générale, ou exposition raisonnée des éléments nécessaires du langage (General Grammar, or a Rational Explanation of the Necessary Elements of Language).

Grammar School, Milpitas CA

The traditional list of English parts of speech follows the European model, with the 8 parts of speech we all learned in school:

• Noun
• Pronoun
• Adjective (includes Articles)
• Verb
• Adverb
• Preposition
• Conjunction
• Interjection/Exclamation

How the Parts of Speech Are Effective…

We also teach Latin, Greek and many other languages using the same categories. They work well for Latin and Greek for example. In Latin, a noun is a noun is a noun. The same word is never a verb. The root of the word (its meaning) can be transformed by inflections into other parts of speech, but they are distinct. Let’s look at Lux “light.”

If you recall one of our previous discussions, Lux comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *lewk- “white, light, bright.” Lux is always a noun. The related verb is luceo “to shine.” The derived adjective is lūcidus, “clear, bright, shining.” In other words, the root is turned into different parts of speech by modifying its form. In Latin, only adjectives can be used as another part of speech, when they are employed as Substantives:  Boni:  “the good men,” “Bonae: “the good women,” Bona: “the good things” (nominative plural M/F/N). Latin can do this because of the grammatical categories of gender and number.

…And Not So Effective!

Not so in English! Let’s take the word “Baby.” We would usually think of this as a noun:  “Take care of the Baby.” But it can also exercise the function of an adjective, with no change in form:  “Baby Carriage.” It can also be a verb:  “Don’t Baby me!”  This could mean, “Don’t treat me like a Baby,” or “Don’t say ‘Baby…’ to me as if everything is OK!” The latter would be more clearly stated in writing as “Don’t ‘baby’ me!” In speech, the first meaning would be indicated by normal inflection of the voice for “Baby” in the verb function and position. The second would probably be indicated by a short pause before and after “Baby” and perhaps a slight raising of the voice.

Claus Ableiter, Historical Baby Carriage

English is remarkably flexible in this regard, making it even more difficult for non-native speakers to master, but also probably contributing to its popularity as a second language. We make verbs, adjectives, and sometimes other parts of speech out of many nouns. It’s not always considered “proper” English, but it works.

• We will grandfather him in.  (Here, “grandfather” is a bare infinitive.)
• Isn’t that a beautiful Grandfather Clock! (= Adjective)

We also inflect the noun with verb, adjective, or adverb endings, more like Latin:

• Grandfatherly = adverb
• Grandfatherish = adjective
• “We’ve Grandfathered in as many as we can.” = verb / participle

We can also get very playful in informal speech:

“‘Yikes! We’ve been Enron-ed!’ exclaimed the people of the West Coast when their lights went out.”

The adults in the room will recognize this as an analogy with the kind of language we don’t use in front of our Mothers…but this is a family-friendly blog and we won’t go into that.

The Real Scoop

They don’t teach all this in schools, unless you take university courses in Linguistics. This is the real structure of English (and other languages) in which words are categorized by function rather than by rigid Parts of Speech. Although there are disputes, the Wikipedia list of Function categories is fairly good. These include Open Word Classes, those which are susceptible to modification of function, either by position or by changes in form, and also can and are added to on a regular basis.

Open word classes:

• Adjectives (but not: articles, quantifiers, demonstrative adjectives, and possessive adjectives)
• Adverbs
• Nouns
• Verbs (except auxiliary verbs)
• Interjections

For example, we have recently brought new words into English. “Truthiness,” (Thank you Stephen Colbert!), the “Buffyverse” (the universe where Buffy and Angel take place). The Oxford English Dictionary regularly alerts us of new additions, including recently, dataveillance, geotagging, and the Australian boofy (describing big, strong but not very bright men–”Strong as an Ox, and as bright as one too!”).

David Shankbone, Stephen Colbert in NYC

Then there are the Closed Word Classes, ones that are not normally susceptible to modification or addition:

Closed word classes:

• Auxiliary verbs
• Clitics
• Coverbs–none in English
• Conjunctions
• Determiners (articles, quantifiers, demonstrative adjectives, and possessive adjectives)
• Particles
• Measure words
• Adpositions (prepositions, postpositions, and circumpositions)
• Preverbs–none in English
• Pronouns
• Contractions
• Cardinal numbers

These form the core of the language, and change only very slowly. So we don’t add new conjunctions, we stick with the ones we have (and, or, but, etc.). We do create portmanteau words like Juneteenth–which looks like an Ordinal Number, but it really isn’t: it’s the celebration of June 19, 1865, the Abolition of Slavery in the State of Texas after the Civil War, now celebrated in many areas. A portmanteau–pronounced as in French, approximately port-man-toe–word is one made up of two or more words or morphemes.

Whew! (An onomatopoeic Interjection) So that’s why when we learn the Parts of Speech in Grammar School, we aren’t really getting the full scoop. I can understand why, I’m not sure a first grader needs to understand Open and Closed Word Groups, etc. Unlike in Math, however, where we first learn Euclidian geometry, and then later learn that it can be transcended, or in Science where for all intents and purposes we learn classical Physics, and then graduate to Relativity and Quantum Physics, we don’t progress in the understanding of how our own language works or other languages work, for real. And that makes learning other languages harder.

More to come!

Steven A. Armstrong
Tutor, Editor, Consultant

Gloriously Wacky English–Part 2: Grammar 1: Inflection

Gloriously Wacky English: Part 2–Grammar 1: Inflection

A while back, we surveyed some of the reasons English has such a large and varied vocabulary, and why its spelling is nothing if not irregular.

Today, let’s take a quick look at some of the peculiarities of something sometimes not well studied in our “Grammar” Schools and High Schools: Grammar.

What is Grammar?

Grammar is one of the components of natural, human language. Others include spelling and punctuation, although punctuation can also be considered part of Grammar. Grammar itself is the set of structural rules that govern how words are arranged and formed into phrases, clauses, and sentences.

In English, we derive meaning using two primary structures: fusion (inflection) and analysis (position indicating the role of the word in its sentence. English is less fusional than most Indo-European languages (especially those like Latin, Greek, Russian, and German, among many others, who use prefixes, suffixes and infixes to convey the role of many types of words.

For example, the noun “human being” in Latin is listed in the dictionary as Homo. Depending on its role in the sentence, its form will change. These changes are called cases, and the list falls into five basic patterns, called declensions:

Singular, Plural

• Subject (Nominative): homo, homines the human(s)
• Possessive (Genitive): hominis, hominum of the human(s)
• Indirect Object (Dative): homini, hominibus to the human(s)
• Direct Object (Accusative): hominem, homines the human(s)
• Adverbial (Ablative): homine, hominibus by/from the human(s)
• Direct Address (Vocative): homo, homines O Human(s)

The Genitive, Dative, Accusative and Ablative Cases are also used as objects of prepositions, and some verbs take other direct objects than the Accusative.

Incidentally, the Proto-Indo-European root from which homo comes is *dʰǵʰm̥mō, a derivative of *dʰéǵʰōm, that is, “earth.” Homines are “Earthlings,” in the language of Science Fiction.

In Latin, Adjectives and Pronouns follow similar patterns of change, while Verbs are quite different, as would be expected.

A quick example from Greek will illustrate the role of prefixes, suffixes and infixes in the formation of verbs:

Λύω  “to loose” has the typical Classical Greek 6 principal parts:

• Present: λύω (luō)
• Future: λύσω  (lusō)
• Aorist: ἔλυσα (elusa)
• Perfect: λέλυκα (leluka)
• Perfect middle/passive: λέλυμαι  (lelumai)
• Aorist passive: ἐλύθην (eluthēn)

We can see all three types of change operative. From these six forms, all the rest of the verb forms can be built, over 200 for most verbs! Some reasons for so many forms is because Classical Greek has more moods than we do, and also a dual number (together with singular and plural).

Inflection in English

We don’t think about it much, but English does have some remaining inflections. That is why we are (partly) a fusional language. For example, in nouns we have some inflection:

Singular, Plural

• Subject/Object: human, humans
• Possessive: human’s, humans’

In Personal Pronouns, more cases have survived. The declension of “I” yields the following:

Singular, Plural

• Subject: I, we
• Object: me, us
• Reflexive*: myself, ourselves
• Possessive: mine, ours
• Possessive Determiner: my, our

*While the Reflexive is not precisely a grammatical case, it is an inflected form.

Verbs also have conjugations in English, and these show the Germanic ancestry of our language. We have two ways we vary verbs, called “strong” and “weak” by analogy with German.

The “weak” verbs in English are those that form the past and the past participle by adding “-ed” at the end of the verb:

Bare Infinitive, Past, Past Participle

• Look, looked, looked
• Like, liked, liked

“Strong” verbs have internal or other changes:

• See, saw, seen
• Do, did, done
• Take, took, taken

The bare infinitive is the infinitive without “to.” It is used in some situations: we say “I can see,”  but “I like to see.” Both are infinitives.

There are also suppletive verbs, which I like to call sandwich verbs. This is a linguistic phenomenon in which two or more verb roots are blended together to form a complete conjugation. English has two: “to be” and “to go.” As an example, “to go” has these three principal parts:

Go, went, gone

Clearly, “went” is not cognate with go, gone. Go (gone) is from the Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰēh₁-

• Old English: gān
• Middle English: gon, goon

For the past tense, Old English used another verb, ēode “he went.” By the 15^th century, another verb, wenden, had become synonymous with “go.” Its past tense “went” replaced ēode in the conjugation of “to go.” We also have wend and wended from wenden, perhaps not as common today as previously: I wended my way home. She wends her way home.

There is more, but that’s enough for today! Wacky English is a big subject!

— Steven A. Armstrong
Tutor, Editor, Consultant