Higher Lessons in English A work on english grammar and composition by Kellogg, Brainerd, Reed, Alonzo, 1899-

Suppose, for instance, you have formed an idea of a day; could you express this by a tone, a look, or a gesture?

If you wish to tell me the fact that _yesterday was cloudy_, or that _the days are shorter in winter than in summer_, you find it wholly impossible to do this by means of Natural language.

To communicate, then, your thoughts, or even the mental pictures we have called ideas, you need a language more nearly perfect.

This language is made up of words.

These words you learn from your mothers, and so Word language is your mother-tongue. You learn them, also, from your friends and teachers, your playmates and companions, and you learn them by reading; for words, as you know, may be written as well as spoken.

This Word language we may, from its superiority, call +Language Proper+.

Natural language, as was said, precedes this Word language, but gives way as Word language comes in and takes its place; yet Natural language may be used, and always should be used, to assist and strengthen Word language. In earnest conversation we enforce what we say in words, by the tone in which we utter them, by the varying expression of the face, and by the movements of the different parts of the body.

The look or the gesture may even dart ahead of the word, or it may contradict it, and thus convict the speaker of ignorance or deception.

The happy union of the two kinds of language is the charm of all good reading and speaking. The teacher of elocution is ever trying to recall the pupil to the tones, the facial expression, and the action, so natural to him in childhood and in animated conversation.

+DEFINITION.--_Language Proper_ consists of the spoken and the written words used to communicate ideas and thoughts+.

+DEFINITION.--_English Grammar_ is the science which teaches the forms, uses, and relations of the words of the English language.+

* * * * *

LESSON 2.

A TALK ON THOUGHTS AND SENTENCES.

To express a thought we use more than a single word, and the words arranged to express a thought we call a sentence.

But there was a time when, through lack of words, we compressed our thought into a single word. The child says to his father, _up_, meaning, _Take me up into your lap_; or, _book_, meaning, _This thing in my hand is a book_.

These first words always deal with the things that can be learned by the senses; they express the child's ideas of these things.

We have spoken of thoughts and sentences; let us see now whether we can find out what a thought is, and what a sentence is.

A sentence is a group of words expressing a thought; it is a body of which a thought is the soul. It is something that can be seen or heard, while a thought cannot be. Let us see whether, in studying a sentence, we may not learn what a thought is.

In any such sentence as this, _Spiders spin_, something is said, or asserted, about something. Here it is said, or asserted, of the animals, spiders, that they spin.