Diacritic

“ Another source of error is described by some critics as proceeding ex ore dictantis, in consequence of the scribe writing from dictation, without having a copy before him. One is not, however, very willing to believe that manuscripts of the better class were executed on so slovenly and careless a plan. It seems more simple to account for the itacisms7 or confusion of certain vowels and diphthongs having nearly the same sound, which exist more or less in manuscripts of every age, by assuming that a vicious pronunciation gradually led to a loose mode of orthography adapted to it. ”

“ The books of the New Testament have had to share the fate of other ancient writings in being copied again and again during more than fourteen centuries down to the invention of printing and its application to Greek literature.
7. Every transcription of any kind of writing involves the chance of the introduction of some errors: and even if the transcript is revised by comparison with its exemplar or immediate original, there is no absolute security that all the errors will be corrected. ”

“ We know from our considerations in section I that a proposition cannot be given ‘ready made’; that meaning does not inhere in a sentence where it might be discovered, but that it must be bestowed upon it. And this is done by applying to the sentence the rules of the logical grammar of our language, as explained in section I. These rules are not facts of nature which could be ‘discovered’, but they are prescriptions stipulated by acts of definition. And these definitions have to be known to those who pronounce the sentence in question and to those who hear or read it. ”

“ The imperfections for which such reforms were designed in great part still perplex us. Our written language still remains to the utter confusion of the eye and the ear of the baffled foreigner, who often discovers that what is written is not spoken, and what is spoken is not written. The orthography of some words leads to their false pronunciation. Hence originated that peculiar invention of our own, that odd-looking monster in philology, “a pronouncing dictionary,” which offends our eyes by this unhappy attempt to write down sounds. ”

“ I wonder what a scholar would say to the man who should undertake to criticise a difficult passage in a Greek play, but who obviously had not acquainted himself with the rudiments of the Greek grammar. And, before giving a positive opinion about these high questions of biology, people not only don't seem to think it necessary to be acquainted with the grammar of the subject, but they have not even mastered the alphabet. ”

“ But tell me, what language has there ever been that men easily have learned to speak from grammatical rules? Is it not true that the very languages most thoroughly reduced to rules, like Greek and Latin, are learned rather by practice? What stupendous absurdity, therefore, it is to gather the sense of a sacred tongue, which is the repository of things theological and spiritual, from grammatical rules, and to pay no attention to the proper signification of things? ”

“ In distributing the various parts of language into their several classes, and imposing names on them, we ought always to be guided by the nature of that language, and to guard against adopting, with inconsiderate servility, the distributions and technical terms of another. This caution is the more necessary because, in our researches into the grammar of any particular tongue, we are apt to follow implicitly the order of the Latin grammar, on which we have been long accustomed to fix our attention, and which we are ever ready to erect into a model for the grammar of all languages. ”

“ The former is the principle of versification, the latter the indispensable condition of a correct pronunciation and the very soul of living discourse. Of the Parts of Speech. J. The words of the Latin language, arranged according to the signification, may be reduced to nine classes, usually called parts of speech, of which five are inflected, and four invariable. The declinable parts of speech are: Substantives or Nouns, Adjectives, Pronouns, Verbs, and Participles. The indeclinable are: Adverbs, Prepositions, Conjunctions, and Interjections. ”

“ Dictation consists in causing the pupil to convert the spoken into the written aspect of language, reading consists in causing him to do the reverse, most forms of translating consist in causing him to convert something from one language into another. We may also at times require our pupils to convert an affirmative sentence into a negative or an interrogative one, to convert a present tense into a past, a singular into a plural, passive into active, to convert a certain word-order into another. ”

“ Our grammarians are not all idiots. What possible principle could justify such a difference as “advertisement writer” and “proof-reader” (for “one who writes advertisements” and “one who reads proof”) ? If one of them is one word, the other also is one, the only difference being that some such familiar short words are written without a hyphen.
You in a recent edition, speaking of Roman type, used lower-case r. We write to ask what, if any, warrant you have among grammarians or lexicographers for the lower-case initial letter in an adjective of this class. ”

“ Roots, therefore, are merely the materials out of which speech can be made, the embodiments of isolated conceptions with which the lexicographer alone has to deal, whereas stems present us with words already combined in a sentence and embodying the relations of grammar. If we would rightly understand primitive Indo-European grammar, we must conceive it as having been expressed or implied in the suffixes of the stems, and in the order according to which the stems were arranged in a sentence. ”

“ From this state of grammatical numbness, languages recover by a secondary formation, which grows up slowly and imperceptibly at first in the speech of the people; till at last the reviving spirit rises upwards, and sweeps away, like the waters in spring, the frozen surface of an effete government, priesthood, literature, and grammar. ”

“ The true, though remote fountain-head of revision, and, more particularly, of the revision p. 8of the New Testament, must be regarded as the grammar written by a young academic teacher, George Benedict Winer, as far back as 1822, bearing the title of a Grammar of the Language of the New Testament. It was a vigorous protest against the arbitrary, and indeed monstrous licence of interpretation which prevailed in commentaries on Holy Scripture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ”

“ Joseph Wright, M.A., Ph.D., D.C.L., of the University of Oxford, compiled a work of many thousand words entitled “The English Dialect Dictionary, Being the Complete Vocabulary of all Dialect Words Still in use, or known to have been in use During the last Two Hundred Years.” The work is great, incomplete as it is. It is a kind of sacred book. It reveals the decrees of fate to the elect; that is to say, to those who think. To one wise enough to understand, it unfolds the Law; and therefore it discovers the wisdom of the prophets. It preserves for us “the tongue of those who sit in darkness.” ”

“ Imagine yourself trying to read a philosophical treatise, a technical or abstruse discussion, a scholarly or scientific essay, a thrilling romance, or a legal document, in which there were no distinctions of paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or even individual words—no capitalization and no punctuation-marks of any kind to assist in determining a writer's thoughts or the exact meaning of his composition—and you must recognize the obstacles which confront the researchers of ancient literary documents. ”

“ The only way to obtain ‘copy’ (in this Latin sense) or abundance of any document, would be by taking ‘copies’ (in our present sense) of it. Then, too, it often meant the exemplar, and is so used in the quotations from Shakespeare and Jeremy Taylor.
We cannot follow a better pattern for elocution than God Himself. Therefore He using divers words in his Holy Writ, and indifferently for one thing in nature, we may use the same liberty in our English versions out of Hebrew or Greek, for that copy or store that He hath given us.—The Translators [of the Bible, 1611] to the Reader. ”

“ These are admirable professions for a critical author to publish; especially, as every rule or principle of General Grammar, condemning as it must whoever violates it, cannot but "be in perfect harmony with" every thing that is true. In this model for all grammars, Latin, Greek, &c., the doctrines of punctuation, of abbreviations, and of capital letters, and also sections on the rhetorical divisions of a discourse, the different kinds of composition, the different kinds of prose composition, and the different kinds of poetry, are made parts of the Syntax ”

“ We shall thus have a comparative grammar and an historical grammar, the latter being devoted to tracing the history of grammatical forms and usages in the same language. Of course, an historical grammar is only possible where a succession of written records exists; where a language possesses no older literature we must be content with a comparative grammar only, and look to cognate idioms to throw light upon its grammatical peculiarities. ”

“ The complexity introduced into the transmission of ancient texts by mixture needs no comment. Where the mixture has been accompanied or preceded by such licence in transcription as we find in the New Testament, the complexity can evidently only increase the precariousness of printed texts formed without taking account of the variations of text which preceded mixture. ”

“ For every cultivated language has its particular grammar, in which whatsoever is universal, is necessarily included; but of which, universal or general principles form only a part, and that comparatively small. We find therefore in grammar no "two species" of the same genus; nor is the science or art, as commonly defined and understood, susceptible of division into any proper and distinct sorts, except with reference to different languages—as when we speak of Greek, Latin, French, or English grammar. ”

“ But two Latin alphabets (of steel) and one Hebrew alphabet (of iron) would not suffice for composing and printing more than two or three words on any one page at a time, so that a person with such a small quantity of letters at his command would, in several respects, be worse off than a scribe. Hence the documents which only refer to the art of writing, mean nothing more serious than an art of taking impressions of certain letters (perhaps initials or capitals) in a more regular and steady fashion than even trained scribes could produce them by hand. ”

“ Nor are they always principles or parts of words: we sometimes write what is not a word; as when, by letters, we denote pronunciation alone, or imitate brute voices. If words were formed of articulate sounds only, they could not exist in books, or be in any wise known to the deaf and dumb. These two primary definitions, then, are both false; and, taken together, they involve the absurdity of dividing things acknowledged to be indivisible. In utterance, we cannot divide consonants from their vowels; on paper, we can. Hence letters are the least parts of written language only ”

“ But, whatever may be said to the contrary, there are weighty, and, we think, irrefutable arguments for continuing the use of Latin and Greek terms in medical writings,—even in recipes. Since it should be so, and certainly is so, we insist here, as elsewhere, that all technical terms, proper names, or any words on which the context can throw but little, if any, light, should be written not with ordinary, but with cardinary care,—which new word we hazard, that our meaning may make a deeper impression. ”

“ We become more familiar every day with the secret ways of language, and there is no reason to doubt that in the end grammatical analysis will be as successful as chemical analysis. Grammar, though sometimes very bewildering to us in its later stages, is originally a much less formidable undertaking than is commonly supposed. What is grammar after all but declension and conjugation? Originally declension could not have been anything but the composition of a noun with some other word expressive of number and case. ”

“ Next, if it would please the wisdom of foolish custom (in whose errors of this kind (though in nothing else) all Religions meet) being long enough advis’d in time, to think fit to amend in the Copy, or at least in the Margin, where 12 words are far otherwise spell’d, than they are pronounc’d (which the Hebrews call Kery and Kethiu; the Copy as written, but Kery the Margin as read, mark’d with Asterisk, one to the other) B I believe our Printers could as easily Cambril our English Vowels, as Circumflex the Latin, which would be a sure guide for reading. ”

“ The treatises of the old Roman sophists and rhetoricians, the dialectics of Aristotle and the schoolmen, and the commentaries on ecclesiastical law of the fathers of the church, were the works which engrossed the attention of men of letters for many centuries before the invention of typography. ”

“ OBS. 7.—In no part of grammar is usage more unsettled and variable than in that which relates to the figure of words. It is a point of which modern writers have taken but very little notice. Lily, and other ancient Latin grammarians, reckoned both species and figure among the grammatical accidents of nearly all the different parts of speech; and accordingly noticed them, in their Etymology, as things worthy to be thus made distinct topics, like numbers, genders, cases, moods, tenses, &c. But the manner of compounding words in Latin, and also in Greek, is always by consolidation. ”

“ Proper names, technical expressions, quotations from foreign languages, and frequent change of subject, are all likely to cause difficulty to a scribe and error in his work.
Careful and continuous regard to the various kinds of errors and defaults that are found in transcription will enable us to judge whether a reading which it is suggested stood in the archetype of our text is likely to have been corrupted to the reading, or readings, which stand in the extant manuscripts or editions. ”