Founding Grammars (17 page)

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While running a school and contesting with the City Council, Fowle still found time to write textbooks. Within a few years he produced a French-American dictionary, an arithmetic book, a geography book, a reading and spelling guide, and an introduction to linear drawing. He wrote over forty textbooks altogether during his career.
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In 1827, he finally produced the grammar book that he'd been planning since his own school days.
The True English Grammar
was intended to make grammar study meaningful by explaining the true structure and history of the language. The detailed subtitle—
An Attempt to form a Grammar of the English Language, not modelled upon those of the Latin and Greek and other Foreign Languages
—makes Fowle's purpose clear.

Fowle's years of training teachers should have translated into a highly functional grammar textbook. Unluckily for the success of his project, he was diverted by John Horne Tooke. By the time Fowle began writing, Horne Tooke's two-volume work on the origins of English,
Winged Words, or the Diversions of Purley,
was more than two decades old. The second volume had appeared in 1805 and Horne Tooke himself had been dead since 1812. His influence was still strong, however, in the United States.

The Diversions of Purley
(as it's usually called) strikes a bizarre note with modern readers. The “Purley” in the title refers to the country house of Horne Tooke's patron, where the book is set. Horne Tooke and his fellow guests at Purley—all scholarly men—“divert” themselves with a series of conversations about the origins of English words. These are really closer to monologues. They usually open with one of Horne Tooke's companions questioning some aspect of his theory that all parts of speech are ultimately traceable to ancient nouns or verbs. Horne Tooke then launches into a detailed defense of his ideas, pummeling his listeners with an overwhelming battery of facts and arguments in support of his claims. By the time he's finished, they are more than ready to admit that he's right.

Horne Tooke's arguments would not be so readily accepted today. His approach to word histories was slapdash at best. Modern etymologists uncover a word's history and development by carefully tracking its appearances in historical documents over time. Horne Tooke favored a more intuitive approach. Often he connected words based on little more than a spelling resemblance, twisting meanings in far-fetched ways to make the words in question fit in with his theory. As a result, many of his word histories are wrong, as later discoveries in etymology would show.

In one typical scenario, a member of the party questions how a preposition like
from
can really be a disguised noun or verb. It seems to him that
from
encompasses several complex meanings—indicating a source in
These figs come from Turkey,
a point in space in
That lamp hangs from the ceiling,
and a starting point in
That lamp is falling from the ceiling.
Surely all these meanings can't have come from a single term.

Horne Tooke replies that
from
has “as clear, as precise, and at all times as uniform and unequivocal a meaning as any word in the language.
From
means merely
beginning
and nothing else. It is simply the Anglo-Saxon and Gothic Noun Frum,…
Beginning, Origin, source, fountain, author.
” He then demonstrates that the word
beginning
can substitute for
from
in all these instances without changing the meaning—“Figs came BEGINNING Turkey … Turkey the
Place
of BEGINNING to come.”
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(According to the
Oxford English Dictionary, from
derives from the Old English adjective
fram,
with the general meaning of “forward.” Later the meaning shifted to “onward” or “away.” By the ninth century, it was being used as a preposition. Gothic
frum,
meaning “to forward, promote, or supply,” is indirectly related to
fram,
but its modern English descendant is the verb
furnish.
)

Challenged with sentences using
from
in different ways (
The alarm rang from morning till night
), Horne Tooke shows how each one really means
beginning
(“The alarm rang BEGINNING morning, i.e., Morning being the
time
of its BEGINNING to ring”).
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He bolsters his arguments with extended footnotes that feature such wide-ranging evidence as quotations from Chaucer, lines from early English poetry, the opinions of earlier linguistic philosophers, and related words in Dutch and German. He also uses the footnotes to take jabs at mainstream grammarians like Lowth and Murray.

It seems astonishing today that educated nineteenth-century readers could have taken this mixture of bombast and quasi-scholarship seriously. One explanation is that the scientific tone, no matter how spurious, strongly appealed to Americans of the Jacksonian era. They were enthusiastic about all types of scientific progress. Several institutions for the promotion of science were founded around this time. Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences dates from 1812 and the Franklin Institute from 1824. New York's Lyceum of Natural History, later the New York Academy of Sciences, opened in 1817. In 1835, during Jackson's second term, the United States received the bequest under James Smithson's will that led to the Smithsonian Institution. The lyceum movement—named after the garden where Aristotle taught philosophy—also took hold during the 1820s, with lyceums springing up around the country. Americans eager to hear about the latest scientific discoveries and inventions could attend lectures sponsored by their local lyceum.

During these years, scholars were keenly interested in scientifically organizing and classifying the natural world, a trend that spilled over into grammar study. Grammarians began treating their subject more like a science. Lindley Murray and other eighteenth-century grammarians defined grammar as the art of speaking properly, but grammar writers in the 1820s talked about the science of language. Fowle was part of this new approach. He believed that by applying Horne Tooke's theories to the parts of speech, he was giving the structure of English a more rational and scientific basis.

As linguists a decade or two later started to construct a more genuinely scientific history of English,
The Diversions of Purley
would gradually fall out of favor. Horne Tooke's early detractors accused him of having a poor command of Anglo-Saxon English and other ancient languages. This criticism would appear even more obvious to the next generation of readers. By the time a new edition of
Diversions
appeared in 1840, the world had changed so much that a
Blackwood's
reviewer would scornfully describe the book as “one of the most consummate compounds of ignorance and presumption that ever practiced with success upon human credulity.”
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In the 1820s, however, the field of etymology was still in its infancy. Horne Tooke's incisive writing style made his word histories sound convincing and few were equipped to challenge them.

Fowle organized
The True English Grammar
like a typical textbook, but the conventional format is misleading. Although the book opens with a standard definition of grammar (“rules for writing or speaking the English language”) and a conventional description of nouns, it quickly plunges into Horne Tooke territory. Fowle spends most of the book presenting detailed arguments for reclassifying almost every part of speech. Horne Tooke's influence is especially apparent in a long section titled “Contractions, Anomalies, Etc.,” which is simply a shortened version of
The Diversions of Purley.
Here Fowle presents a list of several dozen words normally identified as prepositions or conjunctions, from
as
(“means the same as
it
or
that
”) to
unless
(“the Anglo-Saxon verb
dismiss
”), and claims that they are really verbs or nouns.

Throughout the book Fowle notes his disagreements with other grammarians in asides such as “in consequence of a misperception … Mr. Murray has constructed his Passive voice” or “what is called the imperative mood by Dr. Lowth and his followers.” He also criticizes Murray more directly in an appendix titled “Strictures on Murray's Grammar.” Fowle admits that anyone correcting the great man faces an uphill climb. “In the United States,” he writes, “Murray's Grammar, under one form or another, is universally used; and so satisfied is the publick mind of its perfection that any attempt to check its progress will be viewed as a desperate adventure.”
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Even so, he feels that Murray's word classifications should be revised.

In Fowle's view, the only reason why Murray and his followers have sorted English words into articles, prepositions, pronouns, and the like is to bring them into line with Latin word categories. They've adopted case distinctions like nominative and accusative for the same reason. He doesn't see any value in organizing English this way. Concluding that “we are surely as competent to improve our grammar as to simplify and improve our machinery,” Fowle proposes that Americans abandon all Latin-based linguistic complications in favor of his more logical system.
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Fowle considered his book a practical guide to English, but he provided almost no usage guidance. Typically, grammar book writers of the time included a “Syntax” section where they pronounced on issues such as the importance of making pronouns agree with their antecedents. Fowle omits this discussion. Nor does he mention the nonstandard usages that Webster argued for so insistently, such as
Who did she speak to?
and
It is me
. Although he praises the common man's linguistic instincts, he stops short of actively encouraging nonstandard speech.

The book does offer some sensible suggestions for making grammar easier to learn. Fowle labels nouns according to their use in the sentence—“agent” or “object”—rather than with the case names “nominative” and “accusative.” He also provides easily intelligible definitions for the few parts of speech that he accepts, saying that nouns are “names of things” and verbs are “words which express what nouns do.” He instructs teachers to explain the material so their students understand it rather than merely forcing them to memorize it. This approach, a clear improvement over the usual practice, was highly unorthodox at the time. Unhappily, these useful hints are nearly hidden among dense discussions about word origins.

Like Webster, Fowle had a sharp grasp of the realities of nineteenth-century American English. He saw the weaknesses of contemporary grammar teaching and his ideas for reform were enlightened and sensible. If they had been incorporated into a conventional grammar book, they might have taken root. Fowle spoiled his book's chance of classroom adoption—and his chance to influence the way Americans thought about English—by turning a grammar text into a treatise on etymology. As with Webster's
Philosophical and Practical Grammar,
his reasonable suggestions were swamped in a sea of linguistic proselytizing. Arguments for dropping Latin case names or accepting
It is me
lose much of their punch when they're accompanied by extended arguments that
from
is really a noun.

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Other alternative grammar books appeared during the 1820s. Their authors all share the same general point of view as Fowle. They all criticize mainstream grammar books for purveying Latin-based nonsense. They also emphasize that standard English should be defined by the normal way that most people talk. They all make reasonable arguments for teaching grammar in a new way—one that starts from an appreciation of how English is really constructed and how Americans actually use it. Unfortunately, none of the authors can resist embellishing their main topic with speculative theories about word origins. Predictably, these eccentric books made no more headway with teachers or the general public than Fowle's had.

One book that received some attention was William Cardell's
Elements of English Grammar, Deduced from Science and Practice, Adapted to the Capacity of Learners.
Published in 1826,
Elements of English Grammar
focuses on the supposedly scientific aspects of Horne Tooke's theories. Cardell taught French and English in New York and also wrote boys' adventure stories. Several years earlier, he had been active in trying unsuccessfully to found an American Academy of Language. As he wrote in a letter to the elderly Thomas Jefferson, the academy hoped to “form and maintain … an English standard of writing and speaking, correct, fixed, and uniform, throughout our extensive territory.”
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(The former president approved of the idea, but declined to participate.)

Cardell wrote
Elements of English Grammar
in the hope of providing a more rational description of the language. He deplored the sloppiness of standard grammar texts. He asks, “Who, in teaching arithmetic, would say ‘nine times nine makes a hundred;' and then offer as a reason for this misstatement that a hundred is a round number and easier to remember than the real product.”
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In his opinion, the broad generalizations that most grammar books make about parts of speech and word relationships are no less misleading.

Cardell attributes the misinformation that infects other grammar textbooks to their authors' lack of scientific training. He says, “Those who … devoted their lives to this study were in too great a degree mere linguists, and not persons of accurate scientific pursuits.” He also argues that to get at the essence of English, grammarians need to return to the roots of language—“the strong, crude models of early expression.” They must ignore artificially imposed rules and classifications and try to discover what English was like in its more primitive state.
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