ements introduced into our
system of education, the Greek and Latin grammars used at our public
schools are mainly founded on the first empirical analysis of language,
prepared by the philosophers of Athens, applied by the scholars of
Alexandria, and transferred to the practical purpose of teaching a foreign
tongue by the Greek professors at Rome.

LECTURE IV. THE CLASSIFICATORY STAGE.

We traced, in our last lecture, the origin and progress of the empirical
study of languages from the time of Plato and Aristotle to our own
school-boy days. We saw at what time, and under what circumstances, the
first grammatical analysis of language took place; how its component
parts, the parts of speech, were named, and how, with the aid of a
terminology, half philosophical and half empirical, a system of teaching
languages was established, which, whatever we may think of its intrinsic
value, has certainly answered that purpose for which it was chiefly
intended.

Considering the process by which this system of grammatical science was
elaborated, it could not be expected to give us an insight into the nature
of language. The division into nouns and verbs, articles and conjunctions,
the schemes of declension and conjugation, were a merely artificial
network thrown over the living body of language. We must not look in the
grammar of Dionysius Thrax for a correct and well-articulated skeleton of
human speech. It is curious, however, to observe the striking coincidences
between the grammatical terminology of the Greeks and the Hindus, which
would seem to prove that there must be some true and natural foundation
for the much-abused grammatical system of the schools. The Hindus are the
only nation that cultivated the science of grammar without having received
any impulse, directly or indirectly, from the Greeks. Yet we find in
Sanskrit too the same system of cases, called _vibhakti_, or inflections,
the active, passive, and middle voices, the tenses, moods, and persons,
divided not exactly, but very nearly, in the same manner as in Greek.(100)
In Sanskrit, grammar is called _vyakarana_, which means analysis or taking
to pieces. As Greek grammar owed its origin to the critical study of
Homer, Sanskrit grammar arose from the study of the Vedas, the most
ancient poetry of the Brahmans. The differences between the dialect of
these sacred hymns and the literary Sanskrit of later ages were noted and
preserved with a religious care. We