Excerpt from The English Language: Its Grammar, History and Literature It is hoped that the book will prove useful in high schools, academies, and seminaries, as well as to candidates for teachers' examinations and civil service examinations. The various topics have been prepared upon the assumption that the stu dent has already studied a part of the work in an elementary form. The most salient features of the language have been de scribed, and minor details have been left for the teacher to fill in as needed. The utmost clearness and simplicity have been the aim of the writer, and he has been obliged to sacrifice many interesting details to this aim. The study of English grammar is necessarily becoming more and more historical. There are scores of inflections and constructions and idioms which cannot be truly or adequately explained without a reference to the past states of the language, to the time when it was a synthetic or inflected language, like German or Latin. The subject of syntax has been set forth in the form of rules. This is thought to be better for young students who require firm and clear dogmatic statements of fact, but the skilful teacher will work up to these rules by the interesting process of induction, and, when possible, will induce his pupils to draw the general conclusions from the data given. Another convenience that will be found by both teacher and student in this form of rules is that they can be compared with the rules of foreign languages, such as Latin, French, and German. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.