It is an old
barbaric engine, which in its highest development is altered, patched,
and tinkered into capability. It is originally and naturally a product
of low culture, developed by ages of conscious and unconscious
improvement to answer more or less perfectly the requirements of
modern civilization."
It is plain, therefore, that no grammar, and least of all that derived
from the prim, meager Latin contingent of it, is adequate to legislate
for the free spirit of our magnificent tongue. Again, if this is ever
done and English ever has a grammar that is to it what Latin grammar
is to that language, it will only be when the psychology of speech
represented, e.g., in Wundt's Psychologie der Sprache,[5] which is now
compiling and organizing the best elements from all grammars, is
complete. The reason why English speakers find such difficulty in
learning other languages is because ours has so far outgrown them by
throwing off not only inflections but many old rules of syntax, that
we have had to go backward to an earlier and more obsolescent stage of
human development. In 1414, at the Council of Constance, when Emperor
Sigismund was rebuked for a wrong gender, he replied, "I am King of
the Romans and above grammar.
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