t is commonly said, has no
grammar at all, that is to say, it has no inflections, no declension and
conjugation, in our sense of these words; it makes no formal distinction
of the various parts of speech, noun, verb, adjective, adverb, &c. Yet
there is no shade of thought that cannot be rendered in Chinese. The
Chinese have no more difficulty in distinguishing between "James beats
John," and "John beats James," than the Greeks and Romans or we ourselves.
They have no termination for the accusative, but they attain the same by
always placing the subject before, and the object after the verb, or by
employing words, before or after the noun, which clearly indicate that it
is to be taken as the object of the verb.(101) There are other languages
which have more terminations even than Greek and Latin. In Finnish there
are fifteen cases, expressive of every possible relation between the
subject and the object; but there is no accusative, no purely objective
case. In English and French the distinctive terminations of the nominative
and accusative have been worn off by phonetic corruption, and these
languages are obliged, like Chinese, to mark the subject and object by the
collocation of words. What we learn therefore at school in being taught
that _rex_ in the nominative becomes _regem_ in the accusative, is simply
a practical rule. We know when to say _rex_, and when to say _regem_. But
why the king as a subject should be called _rex_, and as an object
_regem_, remains entirely unexplained. In the same manner we learn that
_amo_ means I love, _amavi_ I loved; but why that tragical change from
_love_ to _no love_ should be represented by the simple change of _o_ to
_avi_, or, in English, by the addition of a mere _d_, is neither asked nor
answered.

Now if there is a science of language, these are the questions which it
will have to answer. If they cannot be answered, if we must be content
with paradigms and rules, if the terminations of nouns and verbs must be
looked upon either as conventional contrivances or as mysterious
excrescences, there is no such thing as a science of language, and we must
be satisfied with what has been called the art ({~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA~}) of language, or
grammar.

Before we either accept or decline the solution of any problem, it is
right to determine what means there are for sol