GRAMMAR, in its usual sense, and as applied to a particular language, investigates and systematizes the facts of that language, as exhibited in the most improved writers and speakers; the main divisions or heads being: (1) the way in which the sounds or spoken words are represented by letters (orthography); (2) the division of words into classes or " parts of speech," the changes or inflections they undergo, their derivation and compo sition (etymology): and (3) the way in which they are joined together to form sentences (syntax). A book embodying the results of such investigations, with a view to enable learners to understand a language, and to use it properly, is a grammar of that language.
Languages were not originally constructed according to rules of grammar previously laid down; but grammar rules were deduced fropi languages already in existence. In the days of Plato, perhaps the greatest master of language that ever wrote, the division of words into classes or parts of speech had not yet been made. Plato himself, accord ing to Max Muller, took the first step in formal grammar by making the distinction of noun and verb, or rather of subject and predicate; for it was a distinction in the ideas or elements of a proposition he was making, rather than in the words themselves. Aris• totle and the Stoic philosophers made further advances in the analysis of language, but ' they attended little to the forms of words, their object being logical rather than gram matical (see GENITIVE). It was the Alexandrian scholars, engaged in preparing critical editions of Homer and the other Greek classics, who first analyzed, classified, and mulled the phenomena of language as language; and it was one Dionysius Thrax, who had been trained in the Alexandrian school, and became a teacher of Greek (grammaticus, from Gr.'gramma, a letter; as those who taught boys their Roman letters were called litera
(ores) at Roane, that published the first practical systematic Greek grammar for the use of his Roman pupils (about 80 B.c.). This work, which still exists, though much inter polated, became the basis of all subsequent grammars, both Greek and Latin; and when grammars of the modern European tongues came to be written, they naturally followed the classical models. The chief matters treated of in grammar are considered under such heads as ADJECTIVE, CONJUNCTION, DECLENSION, etc.
In quite recent times, the study of language has advanced beyond this empirical stage, in which its object was confined to the explaining and teaching individual lan gt tags: and under the name of " comparative grammar," has brought to light the resem blances and differences of the various languages of the world, so as to classify them, after the manner of natural history, into families and minor groups, according to their greater or less affinities. Still higher questions, entering into the origin and growth of speech, and seeking to give a scientific account of its phenomena, now occupy the more advanced students of this subject. See LANHUAGE, INFLECTION.