Circumlocution

“ As languages become modern they substitute prepositions and auxiliary verbs for cases and tenses. (3.) The amount of inflection is in the inverse proportion to the amount of prepositions and auxiliary verbs. (4.) In the course of time languages drop their inflection and substitute in its stead circumlocutions by means of prepositions, &c. The reverse never takes place. (5.) Given two modes of expression, the one inflectional (smiðum) , the other circumlocutional (to smiths) , we can state that the first belongs to an early, the second to a late, stage of language. ”

“ For in ordinary conversation what needful or reasonable occasion can intervene of violating this command? If there come under discourse a matter of reason, which is evidently true and certain, then what need can there be of an oath to affirm it, it sufficing to expose it to light, or to propose the evidences for it? If an obscure or doubtful point come to be debated, it will not bear an oath; it will be a strange madness to dare, a great folly to hope the persuading it thereby. What were more ridiculous than to swear the truth of a demonstrable theorem? ”

“ SIDE-LIGHTS
“You won’t condescend?” said a scornful voice.
“Since you have made up your mind, why should I?”
“It is only your word that I ask: your solemn word to me that you are innocent.”
“If you don’t believe in me, what’s the use of giving you my solemn word? I can’t prove it, and never could; the evidence was too strong.” ”

“ This union of inflections is called circumflex. No rule for inflections can be given which is not subject to numerous exceptions. The movement of the voice, whether upward or downward, is in all cases determined by the thought in the sentence. ”

“ In truth, we shall lose not only the authority, but even the name of judges, unless we judge from the facts which appear in the actual trials, and if we bring into court with us minds already made up on the subject at home. In the second place, I beg of you, if you have already adopted any opinion in your minds, that if reason shall eradicate it,—if my speech shall shake it,—if, in short, truth shall wrest it from you, you will not resist, but will dismiss it from your minds, if not willingly, at all events, impartially. ”

“ CIRCUMFLEX. (31) RULE XII.—The circumflex is used to express irony, sarcasm, hypothesis, or contrast.
NOTE.—For the reason that the circumflex always suggests a double or doubtful meaning, it is appropriate for the purposes expressed in the rule. It is, also, frequently used in sportive language; jokes and puns are commonly given with this inflection.
EXAMPLES. (31) 1. Man never is, but always to be, blest.
2. They follow an adventurer whom they fear; we serve a monarch whom we love. They boast, they come but to improve our state, enlarge our thoughts, and free us from the yoke of error. ”

“ Two or more nouns in the singular number, joined by copulative conjunctions, must have verbs, nouns, and pronouns agreeing with them in the plural.
"Wisdom or folly governs us."
Or is a conjunction, a word that is chiefly used to connect sentences: it sometimes connects words—disjunctive, it serves not only to connect and continue the sentence, but also to join on a member which expresses opposition of meaning—it connects the nouns "wisdom and folly."
Governs is a verb, a word that signifies, &c.—of the third person, singular number, agreeing with "wisdom or folly," according to RULE 9. ”

“ The enclitic circumflex is likewise divided into a number of sub-varieties, with different names: they are of too little consequence to be worth reporting.
86. The essential difference of the two kinds of circumflex is shown clearly enough by these facts: 1. the independent circumflex takes the place of the acute as the proper accent of a word, while the enclitic is the mere shadow following an acute, and following it in another word precisely as in the same word ”

“ The rising circumflex begins with the falling, and ends with the rising inflection; the falling circumflex begins with the rising, and ends with the falling inflection.
Positive assertions of irony, raillery, etc., have the falling circumflex, and all negative assertions of doubled meaning will have the rising. Doubt, pity, contrast, grief, supposition, comparison, irony, implication, sneering, raillery, scorn, reproach, and contempt, are all expressed by the use of the wave of the circumflex. ”

“ All such extraordinary alterations which a word has undergone in the course of long usage, and for which each linguistic text-book contains numerous examples, may, however, develop with comparative speed in each individual speaker, and if the development is not traced may lead, in the law-court, to very serious misunderstandings. ”

“ The counsel for the defendants in error, throughout his points, brief, and argument, seeks to confound and confuse words and phrases which have distinct and well understood differences of meaning. Thus, on one page only of his printed argument, he uses the phrases 'certain peril,' 'inevitable danger,' 'peril inevitable,' and 'loss inevitable,' as though these were equivalent and convertible terms. A peril may be inevitable, and yet no loss accrue; but to say that loss is inevitable, and yet may not happen, is to do violence to language. ”

“ But if you, O judges, are bound to obey the laws, and if you are unable to do so unless you follow what is written in the law; what can hinder your deciding that he has acted contrary to the laws?"
But if we pass over the proof of the assumption, again, the argumentation will be arranged under four heads, in this manner:—"When men have repeatedly deceived us, having pledged their faith to us, we ought not to give credit to any thing that they say. For if we receive any injury in consequence of their perfidy, there will be no one except ourselves whom we shall have any right to accuse. ”

“ We know what conjecture is, and what opinion, and what assent is, can we point out any specific state or habit of thought, of which the distinguishing mark is unchangeableness? On the contrary, any conviction, false as well as true, may last; and any conviction, true as well as false, may be lost. A conviction in favour of a proposition may be exchanged for a conviction of its contradictory; and each of them may be attended, while they last, by that sense of security and repose, which a true object alone can legitimately impart. ”

“ The doctrine of the permissibility of a secret reserve, reservatio mentalis, and the use of ambiguous language, by means of which, if one, upon giving a solemn affirmation or denial upon oath, has so arranged his words, that besides the meaning naturally to be taken from them that is contrary to the truth or the intention, they admit of another that is in accordance with fact, he is not to be regarded as guilty of giving false witness, of breach of faith, deceit, or perjury. ”

“ At times, the atmosphere in which an opinion is written may become so surcharged that unnecessarily broad statements are made. In such a case, it is our duty to look beyond the broad sweep of the language and determine for ourselves precisely the ground on which the judgment rests. ”

“ Any argument which deceives us, by seeming to prove what it does not really prove, may be called a ‘Fallacy’ (derived from the Latin verb fallo “I deceive”) : but the particular kind, to be now discussed, consists of a Pair of Propositions, which are proposed as the Premisses of a Syllogism, but yield no Conclusion. ”

“ But why must the verb agree with its nominative? Why must we say, thou talkest, the man talks, men talk? Because the genius of our language, and the common consent of those who speak it, require such a construction: and this requisition amounts to a law or rule. This rule, then, is founded in the nature of things, and sanctioned by good usage.
RULE 12. A noun or pronoun in the possessive case, is governed by the noun which it possesses.
It is correct to say, The man eats, he eats; but we cannot say, the man dog eats, he dog eats. ”

“ Customs have been handed down by ages of repetition, but the punishment for ignoring a custom is a matter for individual treatment by a jury of the culprit's peers, and I may say that justice seldom misses fire, but seems rather to rule in inverse ratio to the ascendency of law. ”

“ Few would quarrel, we think, with the proposition that in no field of human endeavor has the tool of language proved so inadequate in the communication of ideas as it has in dealing with the fundamental questions of man's predicament in life, in death or in final judgment and retribution. ”

“ For praise, or blame, or the statement of an opinion, or accusation, or denial, ought all to effect different ends. In judicial investigations the object of inquiry is, what is just; in demonstrative discussion the question is, what is honourable; in deliberations, in our opinion, what we inquire is, what is honourable and at the same time expedient. For the other writers on this subject have thought it right to limit the consideration of expediency to speeches directed to persuasion or dissuasion. ”

“ Not that we are saying now that the same statement of the case is not admissible in all of them, but some kinds of speech arise from the object and kind of the discussion; if it refers to the demonstration of some kind of life, or to the delivery of some opinion. Wherefore now, in explaining controversies, we shall have to deal with causes and precepts of a judicial kind; from which many precepts also which concern similar disputes, will be transferred to other kinds of causes without much difficulty. But hereafter we will speak separately of each kind. ”

“ So that I think we may conclude, that, in propositions, where though the proofs in view are of most moment, yet there are sufficient grounds to suspect that there is either fallacy in words, or certain proofs as considerable to be produced on the contrary side ; there assent, suspense, or dissent, are often voluntary actions. ”

“ Justice reacted upon logic, sentiment upon reason, by guiding the choice to be made between one logic and another. Reason in its turn reacted upon sentiment by purging it of what is arbitrary, by checking it when it might otherwise Have been extravagant, by relating it to method and order and coherence and tradition. [43] In this conception of the method of logic or philosophy as one organon among several, I find nothing hostile to the teachings of continental jurists who would dethrone it from its place and power in systems of jurisprudence other than our own. ”

“ The first distinction which we must remark in the use of the accusative is that between the free accusative, or accusative which is independent of the nature of the verb which it follows,—as, to buy a hat,—and the attached accusative, which is connected with a few verbs only by a close tie, and in each case with a restricted signification,—as, to blow a gale, to row a race. The free accusative is more freely used in English than in French or German; many of the relations which in those languages are expressed by the genitive and dative are in English expressed by the case under consideration. ”

“ When we consider what a tremendous amount of work classical philologists, etc., have to put into the determination of the proper form of some misspelled word, we can guess how needful it is to have the textual form of a protocol absolutely correct. The innocence or guilt of a human being may depend upon a misspelled syllable. ”

“ The first I told him presented itself in the form of a question, as to the spirit in which I had doubted; and a little serious self examination “landed” me in the mortifying, but salutary assurance, that in the strength of reason I had taken so much for granted, and assumed so many arbitrary positions on which to ground my scepticism, that, when brought back to first principles, I was obliged to confess the folly of my own inconsistency, and admit that the dogmas [88] which I laid down required proof quite as much as those which they attempted to controvert. ”

“ The ELENCHUS then is the exact contradictory of the opponent's assertion under the terms of the law of contradiction. To establish by a syllogism, or series of syllogisms, any other proposition, however slightly different, is to commit this fallacy. Even if the substance of the contradiction be established, it is not enough unless the identical words of the opponent are employed in the contradictory. ”

“ Or when there is no natural division at all in a cause, and when it is a simple question that is under discussion, though that is a thing which cannot be of frequent occurrence, still we must use careful arrangement. And these other precepts also, with respect to the division of subjects which have no such great connexion with the practice of orators, precepts which come into use in treatises in philosophy, from which we have transferred, hither those which appeared to be suitable to our purpose, of which we found nothing in the other arts. ”

“ But, since we are entirely ignorant, in case of its depending on a collocation, what the collocation is, we are not safe in extending the law beyond the limits of time and place in which we have actual experience of its truth. ”

“ Nay, even an ambiguous emphasis falling to the right-hand word, or the left-hand word, shall confound a system.” It is a fact well known to lawyers, [440] that, the omission or misplacement of a monosyllable in a legal document has rendered many a man bankrupt. Fifteen years ago an expensive lawsuit arose in England, on the meaning of two phrases in the will of a deceased nobleman. ”

“ A gloss is attempted to be put upon it-which we think is unjustified and inaccurate unless, indeed, it can be asserted that the writer of the opinion did not know the meaning of the words he used, and, that the members of the court who concurred with him were equally deficient in understanding. ”

“ In a circumflex the voice is made to bend so that it falls and rises, or rises and falls, during the utterance of a single sound. Circumflex inflection is used in expression of bitter irony or reproach. ”

“ B. The wages of sin is death. Query? would the wages of sin are death be correct? This is an example of a disputed point of concord in respect to the number of the verb.
§ 476. In respect to the concord of person the following rules will carry us through a portion of the difficulties.
Rule.—In sentences where there is but one proposition, when a noun and a pronoun of different persons are in apposition, the verb agrees with the first of them,—I, your master, command you (not commands) : your master, I, commands you (not command) . ”