THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN A NUTSHELL All the words in the English language are divided into nine great classes.
These classes are called the Parts of Speech. They are Article, Noun, Adjective, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjunction and Interjection. Of these, the Noun is the most important, as all the others are more or less dependent upon it. A Noun signifies the name of any person, place or thing, in fact, anything of which we can have either thought or idea. There are two kinds of Nouns, Proper and Common. Common Nouns are names which belong in common to a race or class, as _man_, _city_. Proper Nouns distinguish individual members of a race or class as _John_, _Philadelphia_. In the former case _man_ is a name which belongs in common to the whole race of mankind, and _city_ is also a name which is common to all large centres of population, but _John_ signifies a particular individual of the race, while _Philadelphia_
denotes a particular one from among the cities of the world. Nouns are varied by Person, Number, Gender, and Case. Person is that relation existing between the speaker, those addressed and the subject under consideration, whether by discourse or correspondence. The Persons are _First_, _Second_ and _Third_ and they represent respectively the speaker, the person addressed and the person or thing mentioned or under consideration. _Number_ is the distinction of one from more than one. There are two numbers, singular and plural; the singular denotes one, the plural two or more. The plural is generally formed from the singular by the addition of _s_ or _es_. _Gender_ has the same relation to nouns that sex has to individuals, but while there are only two sexes, there are four genders, viz., masculine, feminine, neuter and common. The masculine gender denotes all those of the male kind, the feminine gender all those of the female kind, the neuter gender denotes inanimate things or whatever is without life, and common gender is applied to animate beings, the sex of which for the time being is indeterminable, such as fish, mouse, bird, etc. Sometimes things which are without life as we conceive it and which, properly
speaking, belong to the neuter gender, are, by a figure of speech called Personification, changed into either the masculine or feminine gender, as, for instance, we say of the sun, _He_ is rising; of the moon, _She_ is setting. _Case_ is the relation one noun bears to another or to a verb or to a preposition. There are three cases, the _Nominative_, the _Possessive_ and the _Objective_. The nominative is the subject of which we are speaking or the agent which directs the action of the verb; the possessive case denotes possession, while the objective indicates the person or thing which is affected by the action of the verb. An _Article_ is a word placed before a noun to show whether the latter is used in a particular or general sense. There are but two articles, _a_ or _an_ and _the_. An _Adjective_ is a word which qualifies a noun, that is, which shows some distinguishing mark or characteristic belonging to the noun. -------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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