"Syntax" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... talk about the law, and school-masters talk about the latin tongue, in a way to make their hearers think they mean entities pre-existent to the decisions or to the words and syntax, determining them unequivocally and requiring them to obey. But the slightest exercise of reflexion makes us see that, instead of being principles of this kind, both law and latin are results. Distinctions between the lawful and the unlawful in conduct, or between the correct and incorrect in ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... Examples in Syntax, Accidence, and Style, for criticism and correction. New edition, ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... ye pale professors, who drilled me in syntax and scansion, ye would deem me ungrateful indeed were I to give utterance to the contempt and indignation which I then felt for ye—then, when I looked back upon ten years of wasted existence spent under your tutelage—then, when, after believing myself ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... The syntax of the thought is sufficiently lucid and orderly, but it is compressed into too few words. In the Fifth Book of Paradise ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... bridle (the truants of that busy day could have anticipated its application), walked down the Lawnmarket with Mr. Saddletree, each talking as he could get a word thrust in, the one on the laws of Scotland, the other on those of syntax, and neither listening to a word ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... i. e. got out of his bounds"—Warburton—Bravo! old Hurlo-thumbo! got out of his depth, Warburton, you mean. Extra-vagant certainly may be construed out of bounds; we need no ghost with a mouthful of Syntax to tell us that; but Shakspeare had too much taste to adopt such an absurd Latinism. I have no doubt that the late king was a man of expensive habits, and is here compared to a prisoner within the rules of the king's bench, who must return to quod at a given moment or compliment ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... exactly, and could perfectly read in these three languages." As he lived precisely five years, all he did was done at that little age, and it comprised this: "He got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius's 'Janua,' and had a ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... likely to be greatly advanced by any efforts of his to invest the money in her intellectual development. It would not be hard to persuade the rather indolent and altogether confiding Katy that she was now old enough to cease bothering herself with the rules of syntax, and to devote herself to the happiness and comfort of Smith Westcott, who seemed, poor fellow, entirely unable to exist out of sight of her eyes, which he often complimented by singing, as he cut ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... thee only to shave my head, but thou comest and pesterest me with this sorry prattle." "What more wouldst thou have?" replied he. "Allah hath bounteously bestowed on thee a Barber who is an astrologer, one learned in alchemy and white magic;[FN612] syntax, grammar, and lexicology; the arts of logic, rhetoric and elocution; mathematics, arithmetic and algebra; astronomy, astromancy and geometry; theology, the Traditions of the Apostle and the Commentaries on the Koran. Furthermore, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... B. translates: Who for a long time, ready at the coast, had looked out into the distance eagerly for the dear men. This changes the syntax of 'leofra manna.' ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... dilute. This adjuvant strain is found in the enthusiasm of Slang. Slowly its rhetorical power has won foothold in the language. It has won many a verb and substantive, it has conquered idiom and diction, and now it is strong enough to assault the very syntax of our ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... had an influence on the new age greater than yours, more largely prepared the way of the newest music. You are indeed the good friend of all who dream of a new musical language, a new musical syntax and balance and structure, and set out to explore the vast, vague regions, the terra incognita of tone. For you are their ancestor. If, in its general, homophonic nature, your work belongs primarily to the romantic period, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... probably have meant, not to turn from one language into another, but to explain the construction, or what is called by the Greek name syntax, much like what in regard to a single word is ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... gibberish, and stammering out such blundering distinctions, as the auditors perhaps may sometimes gape at, but seldom apprehend: and they take such a liberty in their speaking of Latin, that they scorn to stick at the exactness of syntax or concord; pretending it is below the majesty of a divine to talk like a pedagogue, and be tied to the slavish observance of the ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of English men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman. I always supposed "Dr. Syntax" was written to make fun of him. I have a whole set of his works, and am very proud of it, with its gray paper, and open type, and long ff, and orange-juice landscapes. The Pere Gilpin had the kind of science I like in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... nineteen lessons, and is concerned primarily with the study of syntax and of subjunctive and irregular verb forms. The last three of these lessons constitute a review of all the constructions presented in the book. There is abundant easy reading matter; and, in order to secure proper concentration of effort upon ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... barbarism of a language which one did not dare use in public documents, a pernicious custom for citizens whose lot was regulated in a language they did not understand. One was obliged then to cultivate French; but the language was neither noble nor regular. The syntax was left to caprice. The genius for conversation being turned to pleasantries, the language became very fertile in burlesque and naive expressions, and very sterile in noble and harmonious terms: from this it comes that in rhyming dictionaries one finds twenty terms suitable for comic poetry, for ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... in the face of this invasion, and the written character soon became as corrupt as the language; words foreign to the Egyptian vocabulary, incorrect expressions, and barbarous errors in syntax were multiplied without stint. The taste for art decayed, and technical ability began to deteriorate, the moral and intellectual standard declined, and the mass of the people showed signs of relapsing into barbarism: the leaders of the aristocracy and the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... gradually yielding to methodical and persevering study, the peculiar bent of the Chinese mind, with all its prejudices and superstitions, is quite as much an obstacle in the way of eliciting truth as any offered by the fantastic, but still amenable, varieties of Chinese syntax. We believe that native officials have the power, though it does not always harmonise with their interests to exercise it, of arriving at as just and equitable decisions in the majority of cases brought before them, as any English magistrate who knows "Taylor's Law of Evidence" ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... mistress: read but superstitious Coster and Gretser's Tract de Cruce, Laur. Arcturus Fanteus de Invoc. Sanct. Bellarmine, Delrio dis. mag. tom. 3. l. 6. quaest. 2. sect. 3. Greg. Tolosanus tom. 2. lib. 8. cap. 24. Syntax. Strozius Cicogna lib. 4. cap. 9. Tyreus, Hieronymus Mengus, and you shall find infinite examples of cures done in this kind, by holy waters, relics, crosses, exorcisms, amulets, images, consecrated beads, &c. Barradius the Jesuit boldly gives it out, that Christ's countenance, and the ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... vicissitudes attendant on pioneer life. The new country and poverty of his parents prevented his receiving a common English education, and it was not until after he was of age that he mastered Murray's syntax and Daboll's arithmetic. ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... by the inspectors whether he knew any thing of mathematics, answered that he didn't know Matthew, although he had seen a good deal of one Tom Mattocks, in Rhode Island; but he'd never hearn of his having any brother. So with Mrs. Wheelwright—Mr. Syntax was equally a stranger to her. But she had seen some coarse pieces of embroidery from the rustic pupils of country boarding schools, and knew that they were needlework, of some sort. She therefore set herself ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... with the rudiments, when I would fain have commented upon the various peculiarities of style in the ancient Greek and Latin authors; but now, all that has passed away. The eternal round of concord, prosody, and syntax has charms for me from habit: the rule of three is preferable to the problems of Euclid, and even the Latin grammar has its delights. In short, I have a hujus pleasure in hic, haec, hoc; [cluck cluck;] and even the flourishing of the twigs of that ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... called to "ratify" the declaration of war, and on the following day a courier started for Washington with a letter from Jackson tendering the services of twenty-five hundred Tennesseeans and assuring the President, with better patriotism than syntax, that wherever it might please him to find a place of duty for these men he could depend upon them to stay "till they or ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... other words, this one volume affords as complete a knowledge of Esperanto as several years' study of a grammar and various readers will accomplish for any national language. Inflection, word-formation and syntax are presented clearly and concisely, yet with a degree of completeness and in a systematic order that constitute a new feature. Other points worthy ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... pseudo-antique strophe such as Klopstock often used; the substance a rhetorical denunciation of military ambition. The most awful curses are imprecated upon the head of the ruthless 'conqueror', whose badness is portrayed in lurid images and wild syntax that fairly rack the German language.[9] No wonder that editor Haug cautioned the young poet against nonsense, obscurity ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... gave Hazlitt opportunity to say:[367] "We should think the writer could not possibly read the manuscript after he has once written it, or overlook the press."[368] His habit of carrying two trains of thought on together was also responsible for slips in diction and syntax. An amanuensis working for him noticed this peculiarity, and Scott said in his Journal: "There must be two currents of ideas going on in my mind at the same time.... I always laugh when I hear people say, Do one thing at once. I have done ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... misconstruction. Instead, therefore, of giving an exact transcript of the original poems, he set himself to soften down their harshness, to clear away their obscurity, to amplify, transpose, and mutilate according to his own ideas of syntax, taste, and rhetoric. On the Dantesque ruggedness of Michael Angelo he engrafted the prettiness of the seventeenth Petrarchisti; and where he thought the morality of the poems was questionable, especially in the case of those addressed to Cavalieri, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Milan to bring forth larks, gave his full consent that the good woman should tread down the heel of the hip-gut pangs, by virtue of a solemn protestation put in by the little testiculated or codsted fishes, which, to tell the truth, were at that time very necessary for understanding the syntax and construction of old boots. Therefore John Calf, her cousin gervais once removed with a log from the woodstack, very seriously advised her not to put herself into the hazard of quagswagging in the lee, to ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... development of the Latin language, which it is hoped will prove interesting and instructive to the more ambitious pupil. At the end of the book will be found an Index to the Sources of the Illustrative Examples cited in the Syntax. ...
— New Latin Grammar • Charles E. Bennett
... | lest we be accused of | on historical and such a subject. | dishonesty in | mythological allusions. | preparation. The rest | Every "pony" user is | of the time is spent on| soon caught, because | questions of syntax, | he is asked so many | references, footnotes, | questions on each | and the identification | sentence. There is a | of the of the real and | distinct relief when | mythological characters| the hour is over because | ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... travelers, perhaps, were ever more dependent upon the people than ourselves. The Chinese language, the most primitive in the world, is, for this very reason perhaps, the hardest to learn. Its poverty of words reduces its grammar almost to a question of syntax and intonation. Many a time our expressions, by a wrong inflection, would convey a meaning different from the one intended. Even when told the difference, our ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... like the Iliad, as a continuation of that series of cyclic poems, which have already been candidates for bestowing immortality upon, at the same time that they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of view I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition with a conjunction; the full stop which closes the poem continued by me being, like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey, a full stop of a very ...
— Peter Bell the Third • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... what a mean scrubby tail he has?" "What a fool you are, brother!" said Mr. Petulengro; "that very tail of his shows his breeding. No good bred horse ever yet carried a fine tail—'tis your scrubby-tailed horses that are your out-and-outers. Did you ever hear of Syntax, brother? That tail of his puts me in mind of Syntax. Well, I say nothing more, have your own way—all I wonder at is, that a horse like him was ever brought to such a fair of ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... abstemiousness in regard to the parts of speech. At the end of three weeks nobody in the city had fired even a blank syllable in my direction except the waiter in the grub emporium where I fed. And as his outpourings of syntax wasn't nothing but plagiarisms from the bill of fare, he never satisfied my yearnings, which was to have somebody hit. If I stood next to a man at a bar he'd edge off and give a Baldwin-Ziegler look as if he suspected me of having the North Pole ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... uttered by the flying footsteps. Even the inarticulate or brutal sounds of the globe must be all so many languages and ciphers that somewhere have their corresponding keys—have their own grammar and syntax; and thus the least things in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest. Palmistry has something of the same dark sublimity. All this, by rude efforts at explanation that mocked my feeble command of words, I communicated to my sister; ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Ware's book of poems, 'The Rhymes of Ironquill', and had declared his work to rank with the very greatest of American poetry—I think he called it the most truly American in flavor. I remember that at the luncheon he noted Ware's big, splendid physique and his Western liberties of syntax with a curious intentness. I believe he regarded him as being nearer his own type in mind and expression than any one ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... much the same may be said of the strictly miscellaneous part of the Miscellany. The greater part of the Uncertain Authors are less ambitious, but also less irregular than Wyatt, while they fall far short of Surrey in every respect. Sometimes, as in the famous "I loath that I did love," both syntax and prosody hardly show the reform at all; they recall the ruder snatches of an earlier time. But, on the whole, the characteristics of these poets, both in matter and form, are sufficiently uniform and sufficiently interesting. Metrically, they show, on the one side, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... are off, and he is snug in bed; not a wink can he sleep; that "fain" is domineering over him,—and he breaks out into what is as genuine passion and poetry, as anything from Sappho to Tennyson—abrupt, vivid, heedless of syntax. "Simmer's a pleasant time." Would any of our greatest geniuses, being limited to one word, have done better than take "pleasant?" and then the fine vagueness of "time!" "Flowers o' every color;" he gets a glimpse of "herself a fairer flower," and is off ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... mazes of Talmudic casuistry as soon as he could read; frequently he had not read the Bible or studied the rudiments of grammar. The Gaon insisted that every one should first master the twenty-four books of the Bible, their etymology, prosody, and syntax, then the six divisions of the Mishnah with the important commentaries and the suggested emendations, and finally the Talmud in general, without wasting much time on pilpul, which brings no practical result. "These few lines," says a writer, "contain a more thorough course ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... stated, the language or dialect of the German settlers in Brazil underwent an almost immediate change, not in its syntax, but in its vocabulary. Had the immigrants and their descendants only adopted such words as had no equivalent in their mother-tongue, our case would be much simpler. They went, however, much further, and, as a result even many of the commonest words dealing with the household ...
— The German Element in Brazil - Colonies and Dialect • Benjamin Franklin Schappelle
... But, do you know what my trouble is now? Though I can't, for the life of me, understand your words, the music haunts me. Now, it's just the other way round with the Pundit. His words are clear enough, and they obey the rules of syntax quite correctly. But the tune!—No, it's no use telling ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... sciences; but we doubt whether in any department of physical science the manuals in use seventy-five years ago are so utterly inferior to those of the present day as are, for instance, the remarks of Viger, and his commentators before Hermann, on the syntax of the Greek verb, to the philosophical treatment of the same points by ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... believe it is not always rightfully imputed to the bent for poetry: that is only one effect of the common cause.—Jack, says his father, is indeed no scholar; nor could all the drubbings from his master ever bring him one step forward in his accidence or syntax: but I intend him for a merchant.—Allow the same indulgence to Tom.—Tom reads Virgil and Horace when he should be casting accounts; and but t'other day he pawned his great-coat for an edition of Shakespeare.—But Tom would have been as he is, though Virgil and Horace ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... this infraction of one of the most elementary rules of syntax, and several of those ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... more salient features of the Khasi language, its grammar, and syntax, it seems to be of importance to show how intimately connected Khasi is with some of the languages of Further India. In the middle of the last century Logan pointed out affinity between Khasi and these ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... feels bound to respect. He recognizes, as a general rule, for instance, that when the subject is in the singular it is desirable that the verb should be in the same number. For conventionalities of syntax of this kind Cooper was very apt to exhibit disregard, not to say disdain. He too often passed the bounds that divide liberty from license. It scarcely needs to be asserted that in most of these cases the violation of idiom arose from haste or ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... grew tired of chemistry altogether, and presently of physical science in general. His evenings were given to poetry and history; he took up the classical schoolbooks again, and found a charm in Latin syntax hitherto unperceived. It was plain to him now how he had been wronged by the necessity of leaving school when his education had ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... persons who imagine that I am ignorant of the three or four elementary rules of good writing, which everybody knows, while others believe that I am unacquainted with syntax. Senor Bonilla y San Martin has conducted a search through my books for deficiencies, and has discovered that in one place I write a sentence in such and such fashion, and that in another I write something else in another, while in a third I compound ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... Thy syntax conjures forth a morn Of spring, when blossoms rare Conspired the solemn earth to adorn, And spread themselves on bank and thorn, ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... stroke by declaring that there never had been, and never could be positive orthography. They concluded that syntax is a whim and ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... knowing any other Latin author, was able to read any part of the first book of the AEneid—to read it tolerably in measure, and to enjoy the poetry of it—and this not without a knowledge of the declensions and conjugations. As to the syntax, I made the sentences themselves teach him that. Now I know that, as an end, all this was of no great value; but as a beginning, it was invaluable, for it made and KEPT him hungry for more; whereas, in most modes ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... are submitted all matters relating to the spiritual part—has about eighteen or twenty pupils, counting seminarists and collegiates. In that institution are taught grammatical studies [minimos], syntax, philosophy, and moral theology, whose respective chairs are in charge of learned and industrious professors. The territory of the civil provinces which form this bishopric is divided into twenty-four ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... others. For such a one, being self-appreciative and fond of fame, "spends most of the day in that particular branch of study in which he chances to be proficient."[604] Thus he that is fond of reading will give his time to research; the grammarian his to syntax; and the traveller, who has wandered over many countries, his to geography. We must therefore be on our guard against our favourite topics, for they are an enticement to talkativeness, as its wonted haunts are to an animal. Admirable therefore was the behaviour ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Sympathetic simpatia. Sympathise simpatii. Sympathy simpatio. Symphony simfonio. Symptom simptomo. Synagogue sinagogo. Syncope sveno. Syndicate sindikato. Synod sinodo. Synonym sinonimo, egalsenco. Synonymous sinonima, egalsenca. Synopsis resumo, sinopsiso. Syntax sintakso. Synthesis sintezo. Syphilis sifiliso. Syringe ensxprucigi. Syrup siropo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... for the eye. Fr. Paulhan calls writers of this type rich in the predominance des sensations visuelles. Disconnected by his constant abuse of the dash—he must have studied Poe not too wisely—infinitesimal strokes of colour supplying the place of a large-moulded syntax, this prose has not unity, precision, speed, euphony. Its rhythms are choppy, the dabs of paint, the shadings within shadings, the return upon itself of the theme, the reticent, inverted sentences, the absence of architectonic and the fatal lack of variety, surprise, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... exaggerated, until to-day the grammar of the Babylonian-Assyrian language has been clearly set forth in all its essential particulars: the substantive and verb formation is as definitely known as that of any other Semitic language, the general principles of the syntax, as well as many detailed points, have been carefully investigated, and as for the reading of the cuneiform texts, thanks to the various helps at our disposal, and the further elucidation of the various principles that the Babylonians themselves adopted as a guide, the instance is a ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... of aristocratic idlers into a society of accomplished scholars, he exclaimed: "Hang it all, sir, we were sui generis." What the unreformed Fellows of All Souls' were among the common run of Oxford dons, that, it may truly (and with better syntax) be said, the late Lord Houghton was among his fellow-citizens. Of all the men I have ever known he was, I think, the most completely sui generis. His temperament and turn of mind were, as far as I know, quite unlike anything ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... literature which by general admission is now the richest and most liberal in the world of living speech. English is a tongue less sonorous than Italian, less fine than French, less homely than German, but more expressive, more flexible, than these and all others. Its syntax imposes no burdens, its traditions are weighty only upon the vulgar and the bizarre. Without its literary history, American literature in general, and usually in particular, is not to be understood. That we have sprung from a Puritanical loin, and been nourished in the past from the breast of Victorianism, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... fraternity, to be not only Astrologers, but Conjurers too, if I do not produce a hundred instances in all their Almanacks, to convince any reasonable man that they do not so much as understand Grammar and Syntax; that they are not able to spell any word out of the usual road, nor even, in their Prefaces, to write ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... Anatolian peninsula, the Orthodox Greek population, submerged beneath the Turkish flood more than eight centuries ago, has retained little individuality except in its religion, and nothing of its native speech but a garbled vocabulary embedded in a Turkified syntax. Yet even this dwindling rear-guard has been overtaken just in time by the returning current of national life, bringing with it the Greek school, and with the school a community of outlook with Hellenism the world over. Whatever the fate of eastern Anatolia ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... is happening there as clearly with one's inner eyes as if it was all taking place before one, and viewed with one's outer ones?" This passage is not only wanting in coherence and correctness of syntax, but is exceedingly clumsy through redundancy of statement, and repetition of the word one. This word, though essential to colloquial diction, becomes very tiresome when used to excess; and should be ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... proof on many pages of the book, and at odd times set some type.... The penmanship of the copy furnished was good, but the grammar, spelling and punctuation were done by John H. Gilbert, who was chief compositor in the office. I have heard him swear many a time at the syntax and orthography of Cowdery, and declare that he would not set another line of the type. There were no paragraphs, no punctuation and no capitals. All that was done in the printing office, and what a time there used to be in straightening sentences ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... essential guts of the lines which you have so foully outraged in our presence. 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. You will, therefore, Vernon, write out and bring to me to-morrow a word-for-word English-Latin translation of the Ode, together ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... evolution of language is completed. There is, indeed, no tribe so undeveloped as to use the primitive forms of speech. The most savage of the races of mankind have made some progress in the art of combining words, gained some ideas of syntax and grammatical forms. Yet in certain instances the progress has been very slight, and in all we can see the living traces of the earlier method of speech from ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... to make a show of education; but I was disinclined to be overdone in syntax by a mere Indian, a member of a race to which we owe nothing except the land on which the United States ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... brickbats, and it is the effort of dodging these which perhaps distracts the mind from his message. (Is he a Marinettist, I wonder?) There are not enough words in the language for him, so he invents fresh ones at will; while as for grammar and syntax he passionately throttled them in Chapter I.; nor did they recover. I will own that notwithstanding all this the author has a way of making you read on to find out what it is all about. You don't find out; but ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... are agglutinative in their construction, the syntax being formed by adding prefixes principally and also suffixes to the root, but no infixes (that is to say, no mutable syllable incorporated into the middle of the root-word).[7] (2) The root excepting its ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... proof of your obligingness and of your sympathy—in French, as this language becomes more and more familiar and easy to me, whereas I am obliged to make an effort to patch up more or less unskillfully my very halting German syntax. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... Rowley used constantly the possessive pronominal form itts, instead of his; or the other fact that he used the termination en in the singular of the verb, was alone enough to stamp the poems as spurious. Tyrwhitt also showed that the syntax, diction, idioms, and stanza forms were modern; that if modern words were substituted throughout for the antique, and the spelling modernized, the verse would read like eighteenth-century work. "If anyone," says Scott, in his review of the Southey and Cottle edition, "resists the internal ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... manners, but not until the Northern tradition had exhausted itself, and the Icelandic polity began to break up. The literature of the maturity of Iceland just before the fall of the Commonwealth is a literature belonging wholly and purely to Iceland, in a style unmodified by Latin syntax and derived from the colloquial idiom. The matter is the same in kind as the common matter of heroic poetry. The history represents the lives of adventurers, the rivalries and private wars of men who are not ignorant of right and honour, but who acknowledge ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... political progress. Ingenious speculations about the possible organisation of the working classes and grandiose views of the future of humanity are so much more interesting and agreeable than the rules of Latin syntax and ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Thus cried the God with high imperial tone: In robe of stiffest state, that scoff'd at beauty, A pronoun-verb imperative he shone— Then substantive and plural-singular grown, He thus spake on:—'Behold in I alone (For Ethics boast a syntax of their own) Or if in ye, yet as I doth depute ye, In O! I, you, the vocative of duty! I of the world's whole Lexicon the root! Of the whole universe of touch, sound, sight, The genitive and ablative to boot: The accusative ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... some confusion of syntax, excusable in a person of his circumstances. Now, suppose they—or he—the man whose brains are out—goes about with his coffin under his arm, like my worthy uncle? and suppose he blandly, politely, relentlessly insists upon reading to you, out of that octavo ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... yet, but it is of course certain that the distinction of masculine and feminine existed in the spoken language, and it must exist somewhere in the glyphs. And it will have to be a prefix, not a postfix; for what I may call the syntax of glyph formation must follow that of the speech. At the bottom of Dres. 61 and 62 are seven identical Oc-glyphs with subfix, and with prefixes. Five of these prefixes are faces with the woman's curl, ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... down every syllable With those clever clerkly fingers, All I've forgotten as well as what lingers In this old brain of mine that's but ill able To give you even this poor version Of the speech I spoil, as it were, with stammering! —More fault of those who had the hammering Or prosody into me and syntax, {700} And did it, not with hobnails but tintacks! But to return from this excursion,— Just, do you mark, when the song was sweetest, The peace most deep and the charm completest, There came, shall I say, a snap— And the charm vanished! And my sense returned, so ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Secondly, the worthy pedagogues of that day found no readier way of leading the most studious of boys to a love of science than corporal punishment. "At the expense of many tears and some blood I purchased the knowledge of the Latin syntax." Whether all love of study would have been flogged out of him if he had remained at school, it is difficult to say, but it is not an improbable supposition that this would have happened. The risk was removed by his complete failure ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... race, to have adopted non-resistance principles—a promise to abstain from fighting, provocative of many cuffs till it was well broken by a hinterschlag, applied to some blustering bully. Nor had he refuge in the sympathy of his teachers, "hide-bound pedants, who knew Syntax enough, and of the human soul thus much: that it had a faculty called Memory, which could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch rods." At Annan, however, he acquired a fair knowledge of Latin and French, the rudiments of algebra, the ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... occupied the shore and began to build his batteries. As soon as the British had made themselves secure Vaudreuil thought it time to turn them out. But he sent only 1,500 men; and so many of these were boys and youths at school and college that the French troops dubbed them 'The Royal Syntax.' These precious 1,500 went up the north shore, crossed over after dark, and started to march, in two separate columns, down the south shore towards Levis. Presently the first column heard a noise in the woods and ran back to ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... a breach, the brave Subaltern dreads Awkward breaches of syntax a hundred times more; And tho' often condemned to see breaking of heads, He had ne'er seen ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... (shown particularly in bold attempts to excise interpolations from the Gospels), but as devoid of the higher critical wisdom as was Bentley, whom he congenially criticised. To a reader of to-day, his arguments from Shakspere's diction and syntax ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... such a line, as "To expedite your flame," or of the pedantic school-boyism of calling a housekeeper "nymph." In fact, it is by the merest accident that I am now enabled to give them in their genuine shape. An old school-fellow, whom I have not seen since the days of syntax, and whose name I had utterly forgotten, enclosed ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... should insist that the letters of Patrick Henry are witnesses to the fact and quality of real intellectual cultivation: these are not the manuscripts of an uneducated person. In penmanship, punctuation, spelling, syntax, they are, upon the whole, rather better than the letters of most of the great actors in our Revolution. But, aside from the mere mechanics of written speech, there is in the diction of Patrick Henry's letters ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... so to say, a grammar of their own, whose rules and syntax are more general than our own; if you attend carefully you will be surprised to find how exactly they follow certain analogies, very much mistaken if you like, but very regular; these forms are only ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... is different but the syntax and phonemes are nearly identical. I'll speak it perfectly in a week. It's just a question of memorizing two or three thousand new words. Incidentally, Joe wants to know why you're digging up his bottom land. He was all ...
— Blessed Are the Meek • G.C. Edmondson
... gained the admiration of Criticism and the praise of Fashion, until a more absurd novelty pushed them from their preferments and caused them to be as suddenly forgotten! The vulgar, tasteless jargon of "Dr. Syntax," with all the above-mentioned excellencies to excite public notice from the butterflies of fashion, soon found what it sought, though some of the plates or illustrations possess the disadvantageous ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... [Unix techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name derives from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing. See also {Perl}. 2. n. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal {regexp} facilities (for example, one containing a {newline}). 3. /vt./ To ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... all its attendant servilities, was driven from the presence of the lordly need. That once satisfied in spite of pandies and imprisonments, he returned with fresh zest, and, indeed, with some ephemeral ardour, to the rules of syntax or prosody, though the latter, in the mode in which it was then and there taught, was almost as useless as the task set himself by a worthy lay-preacher in the neighbourhood—of learning the first nine chapters of the first ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... lingered there with some tenderness for Alpine piety. While he was near the high-altar some people came in at the west door; but he did not notice them, and was presently engaged in deciphering a curious old German epitaph on one of the mural tablets. At last he turned away, wondering whether its syntax or its theology was the more uncomfortable, and, to this infinite surprise, found himself confronted with the ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... Books relatively pure "in grammatical forms, in syntax, and in vocabulary," could be kept thus clean without the aid of written texts, I am unable to imagine. If left merely to human memory and at the mercy of reciters and new poets, they would have become stained with "the defining article"—and, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... for which in your day school-boys used to be whipped. You were not. It's important, because when lawyers get on to the interpretation of the law, loose syntax gives them their opportunity; they make fortunes out of the grammatical errors of Parliament. And, of course, it was a lawyer who drew up ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... grammar. Particular stress is laid upon the study of verbs. A short story or description forms the basis of each lesson, illustrating a grammatical principle and affording an easy and pleasant subject for conversation. The more difficult aspects of French grammar and syntax are treated in the Third Year, and unusual attention is given to all points likely to prove especially confusing. The progressive reading lessons are such as will prepare the student to read the masterpieces of French literature. ...
— Contes et lgendes - 1re Partie • H. A. Guerber
... begun, How to join them two in one; Till you got (these first steps past) To your fine text-hand at last. So though I at first commence With the humble accidence, And my study's course affords Little else as yet but words, I shall venture in a while At construction, grammar, style, Learn my syntax, and proceed Classic authors next to read, Such as wiser, better, make us, Sallust, Phaedrus, Ovid, Flaccus: All the poets (with their wit), All the grave historians writ, Who the lives and actions show Of men famous long ago; Ev'n their very sayings giving In the tongue they us'd ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... I believe the wisest of us must be beguiled in this way sometimes, and must think both better and worse of people than they deserve. Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning. Long dark eyelashes, now—what can be more exquisite? I find it impossible not to expect some depth of soul behind a deep grey eye with a long dark eyelash, in spite of an experience which ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... passions and interests; more often individual in its applicability, and less drawn from the depths of human nature as exhibited by types and classes. And often they would cap each other with a mutual relationship similar to that between a rule of syntax and its example, sometimes the one coming first ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... gymnasium or secondary school.] all at the same time. Finally, in this jumble of ideas, professional instinct got the upper hand. He sat down at the table, put the three heavy volumes of Gazis's Dictionary, the Syntax of Asopios, and his other handbooks of study in their usual order, then set out his ink and paper, and found in his "Iliad" the page marked for the next day. He began his work by noting the etymology of each ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... well for you to say 'shut up,' but why the syntax didn't you save some of the stuff for our watch: that's what I want to know?" said the injured mariner, with an intoxicated air of Christian virtue. Jimmy's friend, anticipating trouble, came to the rescue by judiciously calling his attention from his grievance ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... was a drunkard; he never beat the schoolchildren, but for some reason he always had hanging on his wall a bunch of birch-twigs, and below it an utterly meaningless inscription in Latin: "Betula kinderbalsamica secuta." He had a shaggy black dog whom he called Syntax. ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... face when the fit of inspiration was on him, without having cause to regret her indiscretion. But though delicacy might have dictated that this fact should be only barely hinted at, surely grammar need not have miscarried in the statement. The syntax of the passage will puzzle future commentators as much as some of his own corrupt choruses. "Euripides" promises well; but the expression, "Right in the classes," throws our intellect completely on its beam-ends; and as we cannot right it ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Lush. We know that there are persons who will forego their own obvious interest rather than do anything so disagreeable as to write letters; and it is not probable that these imperfect utilitarians would rush into manuscript and syntax on a difficult subject in order to save another's feelings. To Grandcourt it did not even occur that he should, would, or could write to Gwendolen the information in question; and the only medium of communication he could use was Lush, who, to his mind, was as much of an implement as ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... may not at every step verify the connection or incoherence of the parts.[3221]—The procedure used in arranging a simple sentence also governs that of the period, the paragraph and the series of paragraphs; it forms the style as it forms the syntax. Each small edifice occupies a distinct position, and but one, in the great total edifice. As the discourse advances, each section must in turn file in, never before, never after, no parasitic member being ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... double emphasis, the echoing words, and the monotones. But, to borrow from Meg Dods, "Oh, what a style of language!" The elocutionist, evidently an untaught and grossly ignorant man, had not an idea of composition. Syntax, grammar, and good sense, were set at nought in every sentence; but then, on the other hand, the inflections were carefully maintained, and went rising and falling over the nonsense beneath, like the wave of some shallow bay over a bottom of mud and comminuted sea-weed. After ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... fact had not arrived at the clear splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written into her work, but in changes ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... works; Goethe's works; and Niebuhr's History, both in the original, and in the translation. My way of learning a language is always to begin with the Bible, which I can read without a dictionary. After a few days passed in this way, I am master of all the common particles, the common rules of syntax, and a pretty large vocabulary. Then I fall on some good classical work. It was in this way that I learned both Spanish and Portuguese, and I shall try the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Trewthen's betrothed conveyed little more matter than details of their future housekeeping, and his preparations for the same, with innumerable 'my dears' sprinkled in disconnectedly, to show the depth of his affection without the inconveniences of syntax. ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... slogs boy; Off like bird, avi similis—(you observed The dative? Pretty i' the Mantuan!)—Anglice Off in three flea skips. Hactenus, so far, So good, tam bene. Bene, satis, male -, Where was I with my trope 'bout one in a quag? I did once hitch the syntax into verse: Verbum personale, a verb personal, Concordat—ay, "agrees," old Fatchaps—cum Nominativo, with its nominative, Genere, i' point o' gender, numero, O' number, et persona, and person. Ut, Instance: Sol ruit, down flops sun, ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... assigning a single measure to each motive. But both here, and in Ex. 10, the student is advised to adhere to the two-measure standard; he will avoid much needless confusion by so doing,—at least until he shall have so developed and sharpened his sense of melodic syntax that he can apprehend the finer shades of distinction in the "motion and repose" of a melody. Adopting the lower line of brackets, we discover successive members of unequal length, the first one containing two, the next ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... from being a representative or skilful interpreter. Horace Greeley said that when the rules of the English language got in his way, they did not stand a chance. We may be sure that if by violating the rules of syntax Horace Greeley sometimes added forcefulness to his editorials, he violated them deliberately and not in ignorance. Luminosity is not stumbled into. The richly savored and deliciously unlettered ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... and a more than common accuracy of discrimination; and Mrs. Piozzi brought to the task, a jargon long since become proverbial for its vulgarity, an utter incapacity of defining a single term in the language, and just as much Latin from a child's syntax as sufficed to expose the ignorance she so anxiously labours to conceal." ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... who distinguish desert; who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that a writer will ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... it and of the masculine he being his. This gave rise to confusion when the old gender system decayed, and the form its gradually came into use, until, by the end of the seventeenth century, it was in general use. Milton, however, scarcely recognised it, its place in his involved syntax being taken by the relative pronouns and other connectives, or by his, ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... provinces did not differ materially from that spoken in Italy. It was the language of the Roman soldier, colonist, and trader, with common characteristics in the way of diction, form, phraseology, and syntax, dropping into some slight local peculiarities, but kept essentially a unit by the desire which each community felt to imitate its officials and its ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... superior at Bessie's sentiment and Bessie's syntax. "There is the railway, and Oxford is on the road. I intend always ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... lessons. 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? It may be highly satisfactory to schoolteachers to succeed in making their class read aloud passages from Shakespeare and Milton without dropping more than fifty per cent. of the aspirates, or mispronouncing more than half a dozen multi-syllabic words. But, unfortunately, there is no demand for ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... which a youth of an inaccurate mind delights. He rejoices to profess all the classics, and to learn none of them. On the other hand, by "Grammar" is now more commonly meant, as Johnson defines it, "the art of using words properly," and it "comprises four parts—Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody." Grammar, in this sense, is the scientific analysis of language, and to be conversant with it, as regards a particular language, is to be able to understand the meaning and force of that language when ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... time were proud to place him with Homer and with Virgil on the roll of the poets. Ronsard's peculiarity in style was the free use of words and constructions not properly French. Boileau indicated whence he enriched his vocabulary and his syntax, by satirically saying that Ronsard spoke Greek and Latin in French. At his death, Ronsard was almost literally buried under praises. Sainte-Beuve strikingly says that he seemed to go forward into posterity as into ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... expression so that it irresistibly compels attention and interest. There are four kinds of figures, viz.: (1) Figures of Orthography which change the spelling of a word; (2) Figures of Etymology which change the form of words; (3) Figures of Syntax which change the construction of sentences; (4) Figures of Rhetoric or the art of speaking and writing effectively which change ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... The syntax of the classic languages, which had been my weak point as a school-boy, now aroused the deepest interest, and I was grateful to Lepsius for having so earnestly insisted upon my pursuing philology. I soon felt the warmest appreciation of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and Rossetti, who painted poems and made poetry that is pictorial. Sculpture was the only art that had resisted this universal disintegration, this imbroglio of the arts. No sculptor before Rodin had dared to break the line, dared to shiver the syntax of stone. For sculpture is a static, not a dynamic art—is it not? Let us observe the rules, though we preserve the chill spirit of the cemetery. What Mallarme attempted to do with French poetry Rodin accomplished in clay. His marbles ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... All Parts of French Syntax, methodically arranged after Poitevin's "Syntaxe Francaise"; to which are added Ten Appendices. Designed for the Use of Academies, Colleges, and Private Learners. By Frederick T. Winkelmann, A.M., Ph.D., Professor ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... in York, of whom it is possible to speak with certainty, was Ursyn Milner, who printed a Festum visitationis Beate Marie Virginis, without date, and a Latin syntax by Robert Whitinton, entitled Editio de concinnitate grammatices et constructione noviter impressa, with the date December 20th, 1516, and a woodcut that had ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... command, That you your birch do take in hand, Read concord and syntax on; The bays, your own, are only mine, Do you then still your nouns decline, Since you've declined ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... style; but it is certain he never did. He never had time, or rather he never took time, preferring invariably quantity to quality. What work of his has survived till to-day is read, not for its style, but in spite of its style. His syntax is loose and unscholarly; his vocabulary is copious, but often inaccurate; many of his sentences ramble on interminably, lacking unity, precision, and balance. Figures of speech he seldom abuses because he seldom uses; his imagination, as noticed ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... and so have spared himself the ignominy of sinking to the ungrammatical level of the Common Herd. But the fact is, his proud spirit was chafed and fretted at the spectacle of sordid self-seeking that everywhere met his gaze, and excess of sentiment made him forgetful of syntax. "Mark me, my friend, I am not to be bought," he continued in unconscious blank verse. "I shall take my pick, sir, and you will take this check." And he handed the amazed publisher a check for five hundred ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... Latin is a troublesome speech on account of its complicated inflections and grammatical rules, which can be mastered only after a great deal of study. The people of the Roman provinces and the incoming barbarians naturally paid very little attention to the niceties of syntax and found easy ways of saying what they wished.[160] Yet several centuries elapsed after the German invasions before there was anything written in the language of conversation. So long as the uneducated ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... old; as "body" in pencil, and "bodie" in ink. We wonder that such a fact was noticed by a man of Mr. Hamilton's knowledge; for it can be easily set aside; or rather, it need not be regarded, because there is nothing suspicious about it. For the spelling of the seventeenth century, like its syntax and its pronunciation, was irregular; and the fatal error of those who attempt to imitate it is that they always use double consonants, superfluous final e-s, and ie for y. And even supposing that these pencilled words and the words in ink were written by the same person, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... dates. Most forgers have betrayed themselves by ignorance of facts of this kind; they let slip modern words or phrases. It has been possible to establish the fact that certain Phoenician inscriptions, found in South America, were earlier than a certain German dissertation on a point of Phoenician syntax. In the case of official instruments we examine the formulae. If a document which purports to be a Merovingian charter does not exhibit the ordinary formulae of genuine Merovingian charters it must be spurious. Lastly, we note ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... contrast between the styles of these prayers impressed Zulma very strongly. The former were such as she herself knew, complete, appropriate and pathetic in their very phraseology. The latter were fragmentary, rude, and sometimes incongruous in syntax, but they spoke the poetry of the heart, and their yearning fervour and indubiety made Zulma understand, as she listened to them through her tears, how it is that wayside statues of stone, and wooden ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... double prosody, quantitative and alliterative, which secured it from the slightest chance of poetic poverty or hide-boundness; relieved from the cumbrousness of synthetic accidence to all but the smallest extent, and in case to elaborate a syntax equally suitable for verse and prose, for exposition and narrative, for oratory and for argument. Moreover it was, as I have at least endeavoured to show, probably England which provided the groundwork and first literary treatment, it was ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... extraordinary change has taken place in the language of these islands during the latter half of the eighteenth century; insomuch that the language of the Indian inhabitants consists entirely of Spanish words, but all the inflexions, the syntax, and the idiomatic manner of expression are Chilese, that is to say exactly corresponding to the Moluchese ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... at which different traits of character may be observed and recognized." This was a very scientific and well drawn scheme; and it was, on the whole, most faithfully and even brilliantly carried out. But with infinite art Boz emancipated himself from the formal hide-bound trammels of Syntax tours and the like, when it was reckoned that the hero and his friends would be exhibited like "Bob Logic" and "Tom and Jerry" in a regular series of public places. "Mr. Pickwick has an Adventure at Vauxhall," "Mr. Pickwick Goes to Margate," ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... very good example: I choose him because he is probably better known to readers than any other writer who affects similar methods. In his later publications Mr. Joyce does deliberately go to work to break up the traditional sentence, throwing overboard sequence, syntax, and, indeed, most of those conventions which men habitually employ for the exchange of precise ideas. Effectually, and with a will, he rags the literary instrument: unluckily, this will has at its service talents which though genuine are moderate only. A writer of greater ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... are to find him out to be a low man, or what marks can remain of the ordinary language of conversation in the inferior orders of society. If there be any phrases that are not used in good society, they will appear as blemishes in the composition, no less palpably, than errors in syntax or quality; and, if there be no such phrases, the style cannot be characteristic of that condition of life, the language of which it professes to have adopted. All approximation to that language, in the same manner, implies a deviation ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... praise of Stevenson's style cannot be exhausted in a description of his use of individual words or his memory of individual phrases. His mastery of syntax, the orderly and emphatic arrangement of words in sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater. And here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... together, were very pleasant matters to David. Even the Latin Grammar, over whose tedious pages so many boys have yawned and trifled from generation to generation, even declensions and conjugations, and rules of Syntax, and other matters which, as a general thing, are such hopeless mysteries to boys of nine or ten, were made matters of interest to David when his father took ...
— The Inglises - How the Way Opened • Margaret Murray Robertson
... Mishnah a transition between the two. Often, for the purpose of explaining a word in the Bible, he has recourse to Talmudic Hebrew or to the Aramaic. He pays careful attention to the precise meaning of words and to distinctions among synonyms, and he had perception for delicate shading in syntax and vocabulary. Owing to this thorough knowledge of Hebrew he readily obtained insight into the true sense of the text. By subjecting the thought of the Holy Scriptures to a simple and entirely rational examination, he not seldom succeeds in determining it. Thus, as it were by divination, ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... had bartered their souls away in order to become senior wranglers. Intellect lured them on into wordy unseemliness; their skill in forensics became a passion, and to embarrass and defeat the antagonist became the thing desired, not the pursuit of truth. They fell victims to their facility in syntax and prosody—semi- Solomons in Scriptural explanations, waxing wise in defining the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... Class of Text-books.—In one class are those that aim chiefly to present a course of technical grammar in the order of Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody. These books give large space to grammatical Etymology, and demand much memorizing of definitions, rules, declensions, and conjugations, and much formal word parsing,—work of which a considerable portion ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... of the finest in our language, and more in Milton's style than has been reached by any other poet, is occasionally obscure from imitation of the condensed Latin syntax. The meaning of st. 5 is "rivalry or hostility are the same to a lofty spirit, and limitation more hateful than opposition." The allusion in st. 11 is to the old physical doctrines of the non-existence of a vacuum and the impenetrability ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... next morning with a black, extravasated eye, which he bathed at intervals with a rag, he was regarded by most of us as absolute scum. The German master, a tall, good-looking man, was treated as utterly incompetent because, when he asked a question in grammar or syntax, he walked up and down with the book in front of him, and quite plainly compared the answer with the book. We boys thought that anyone could be a master, with a book in his hand. History and Geography were taught by an old man, ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... studies to a late period. This is exemplified in the abandonment of that intensely stupid custom, the teaching of grammar to children. As M. Marcel says:—"It may without hesitation be affirmed that grammar is not the stepping-stone, but the finishing instrument." As Mr. Wyse argues:—"Grammar and Syntax are a collection of laws and rules. Rules are gathered from practice; they are the results of induction to which we come by long observation and comparison of facts. It is, in fine, the science, the philosophy of language. In following ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... a greater equality of culture than there was in the last generation," said Kenelm. "People of all ranks utter the same commonplace ideas in very much the same arrangements of syntax. And in proportion as the democracy of intelligence extends—a friend of mine, who is a doctor, tells me that complaints formerly reserved to what is called aristocracy (though what that word means in plain English I don't know) are equally shared by the commonalty—tic-douloureux ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the sphere of syntax one may point to certain French and Latin influences, but it is doubtful if they ever reached deeper than the written language. Much of this type of influence belongs rather to literary style than to ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... teacher by the process rather than by the product, and we introduce a number of extraneous criteria to hide the absence of a real criterion. We watch the way in which he conducts a recitation, how many slips he makes in his diction and syntax, inspect his personal appearance, ask of what school he is a graduate and how many degrees he possesses, inquire into his moral character, determine his church membership, and judge him to be a good or a poor teacher according to our findings. All ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... Anderson employs in telling these stories may seem at first glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... mankind affixes to the epithet adopted by Doctor Cooper the idea of dishonour. It has been publicly applied to me under the sanction of your name. The question is not whether he has understood the meaning of the word, or has used it according to syntax and with grammatical accuracy, but whether you have authorized this application, either directly or by uttering expressions or opinions derogatory to my honour. The time "when" is in your own knowledge, but no way material to me, as the calumny ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... the working-man; others appealed to a gay experience of the high seas; but vastly the greater part to memories and associations of an Irish origin; some still uttered the poetry of plantation life in the artless accents of the end—man. Where they trusted themselves, with syntax that yielded promptly to any exigency of rhythmic art, to the ordinary American speech, it was to strike directly for the affections, to celebrate the domestic ties, and, above all, to embalm the memories of angel and martyr mothers whose dissipated sons ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... love it. I like wheels and beams and valves so much better than I like syntax and subjunctives," he urged. "I'd be willing to work for it, papa; it's interesting and it really counts for something, when you get ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... fifth is concerning the syntax and disposition of studies; that men may know in what ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... post which he held for eleven years. To this new labour he gave himself with all his heart, and was eminently successful. The Aberdeen students were remarkable for their accurate knowledge of the grammatical forms and syntax of Latin, acquired under the careful training of Dr Melvin; but their reading, both classical and general, was restricted, and they were wanting in literary impulses. Professor Blackie strove to supply both deficiencies. He took his students over a great deal of ground, opening ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various |
