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That is, an examination in order to ascertain whether he knows Etymology and Syntax, the two principal departments of the science of language,—whether he understands how the separate portions of a sentence hang together, how they form a whole, how each has its own place in the government of it, what are the peculiarities of construction or the idiomatic expressions in it proper to the language in which it is written, what is the precise meaning of its terms, and what the history of their formation.
The mosques are my refuge; I haunt them indeed: My heart from their shelter shall never take flight. To the Lord of all creatures, to God be the praise, Whilst yet in the body abideth the spright! Then I examined him in the Koran and in syntax and poetry and lexicography, and found him perfect in all that was required of him and said to him, "God strengthen thy purpose!
We've had more Syntax than Caesar to-day. Never mind, it's a point worth remarking, and sure to be useful as you get on in Latin. The class is dismissed." Little he knew the joy his words carried to two small hearts in his audience. "Jolly good luck that!" said Parson, as he strolled out into the passage arm-in-arm with his friend.
In this respect education is like food: what is one man's meat is another man's poison. We do not wish to teach book-keeping to a washerwoman, or fancy ironing to a private secretary. Then, why stuff artisans, domestic servants, and farm labourers with common denominators and the rules of syntax?
The wonderful German syntax seems at its most enigmatical in this sort of literature, and sometimes they lost themselves in its labyrinths completely, and only made their way perilously out with the help of cumulative declensions, past articles and adjectives blindly seeking their nouns, to long-procrastinated verbs dancing like swamp-fires in the distance.
The difference is immense. Far be it from me to deny the value of the patient and laborious researches of the Germans in the grammar and syntax of the ancient languages and in archaeology. They are painstaking to a painful degree. They gather facts as bees gather pollen, indefatigably. But when it comes to making honey they go dry. They cannot interpret, they can only instruct.
But the note changed, 'so far as in me lies, I will strive to bring home to you, Vernon, the fact that there exist in Latin a few pitiful rules of grammar, of syntax, nay, even of declension, which were not created for your incult sport your Boeotian diversion.
They seem, at first, to have a grammar adapted to their own age, although its rules of syntax are more general than ours. And if we were to pay close attention to them, we should be astonished at the exactness with which they follow certain analogies, very faulty if you will, but very regular, that are displeasing only because harsh, or because usage does not recognize them.
"If you can tell me that you have not done wrong, I shall be sorry to have reproved you so sharply." "I shall tell you no such lie!" she answered almost indignantly. "You asked what would be said." I was fairly at a loss. The figure which Martial grammarians call "the suppressed alternative" is a great favourite, and derives peculiar force from the varied emphasis their syntax allows.
'Distinction' was defined to be 'a diction which avoided homeliness. Over against these there were two comprehensive vices, barbarism and solecism, the one being an offence against accidence, the other against syntax. The famous comparison of the infant mind to a blank sheet of paper, which we connect so closely with the name of Locke, really comes from the Stoics.
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