A Modern English Grammar
Abridged (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from A Modern English Grammar: Abridged

1. Language. - Everybody has an instinctive desire to tell his thoughts and feelings to others; indeed, exchange of ideas is necessary in social life. One way of expressing thoughts is to make motions with the hands or other parts of the body, as children and deaf and dumb persons do. But the usual and very much better way is to make with the tongue and adjoining organs certain combinations of sounds which by common consent have certain meanings. These combinations of tongue-sounds, by which people express their thoughts and feelings, form Language (from Latin lingua, "tongue"). Combinations of sounds that stand for single ideas are called Words. These are in turn combined into thought-groups called Sentences.

2. Why Our Language is Called English. - Our language is called English because it is the language that has been spoken for more than fifteen hundred years in England, whence it has been carried to America and other parts of the world by English colonists.

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