Review of George J. Smith's LONGMANS ENGLISH GRAMMAR

Review of George J. Smith’s LONGMANS’ ENGLISH GRAMMAR [1901]

Smith, George J. LONGMANS’ ENGLISH GRAMMAR. New York: Longmans, Green & CO, 1901.
George Smith’s LONGMANS’ ENGLISH GRAMMAR is a simplified version of David Solmon’s LONGMANNS SCHOOL GRAMMAR. Smith describes his grammar as an “elementary grammar,” designed for students in grades 6 through 8. Smith approach to teaching in 1901 is quite different from the teaching philosophy embraced today by many in New England High Schools. Central to Smith’s teaching philosophy is the act of parasing. Parasing is an often-lost technique of teaching grammar that “means the telling of facts about the form and class of a word, and its relation to the other words in the sentence” (Smith 80). Parasing is a technique of teaching that today is seen in the teaching of inflexive languages such as Latin or German, where cases are identified such as the nominative, dative, and accusative cases.

Smith is very aware that his elementary grammar text is a technical approach to teaching English, and sees his approach as an alterative to failed untechnical approaches. Smith writes that “The reign of the notion that Grammar should be set aside for loose and untechnical ‘language lessons’ has been short lived (Smith vii). Smith’s text is valuable for the student of English language, and is refreshing when compared to the de-emphasis on technical grammar that seemed prevalent in high schools during the end of the 1990s. Smith sums up his argument for the technical approach well with a quote from John Stuart Mill.

John Stuart Mill says that the things we study in Grammar, ‘the distinctions
between various parts of speech, between the cases of nouns, the moods and
tenses of verbs, the functions of participles, are distinctions in though, not
merely in words’ (Mill as qtd. by Smith vii).

–Samuel Gordon Paley.