You have already done this art without naming it. You knew that Him go store yesterday was aimed at a trip to the store, and you also knew that it was not yet English. You have written a sentence that was perfectly formed and still nonsense. You have heard a child put a question in the shape of a statement, and you answered the question, not the shape. Grammar begins in those recognitions: a saying can be joined, or fail to be joined, as speech.
School grammar is often sold as a list of errors to avoid. That is a fragment of the art, and a useful fragment, but it is not the art. Grammar, as this course uses the word, is the care of significant speech: of the parts of a saying and of their order, so that what is meant can actually be said. A cough is a vocal sound and not a word. A cry signifies, but not by agreement as a name does. A name is not yet a statement. A statement is not yet an argument. The art is the joining of speech so that it can mean.
That joining is not the same as being true, and not the same as persuading. A sentence can be well formed and false. The moon is made of green cheese is English, and it is not so. A string can fail as English and still be aimed at a truth. Grammar asks whether the utterance is joined as speech. Truth is a later question. Persuasion is later still. Holding those three questions apart is the first discipline of the trivium.
Walshe, explaining how logic is distinguished from grammar, gives the same split in a pair of school sentences.
For example, when asked to evaluate the following two statements: “man is stone” and “man are animal,” the grammarian says that the first one is correct, while the second statement is incorrect. While the logician says the first statement is false, while the second statement, while expressed badly, is true.
The grammarian is asked whether the saying is composed as the language composes sayings. The logician is asked whether what is said is so. You need both questions. You must not let either swallow the other. Kearns’s two examinations of words — whether they adequately express what we are thinking, and whether they are adequate to the things we are thinking about — belong here as the reason grammar is first and not last. The first examination is the grammarian’s daily work. The second is why names matter at all.
The grammarian’s restriction is worth stating exactly, because it is a restriction and not a poverty. Grammar takes the word as a conventional instrumental sign and asks how such signs are composed in this language. It does not ask whether the concept behind the word is adequate to the thing; that question was placed in the order of signification and belongs to the logician. Walshe’s way of putting it: the grammarian cares how we signify according to the customs of a given language, while the logician cares about words insofar as they signify things through thoughts.
The categories, in the sense Walshe is teaching, are the highest kinds under which names are said of things: substance, quantity, quality, and the rest. They are names, said of things through thoughts — the order you have just been given — not a second list of parts of speech. Grammar still has to compose the saying in which those names appear. Logic will later care how they are said truly. This page will not list the ten and drill them. It needs only this contact: the categories are a map of what can be said of a thing, and they are not the same map as noun, verb, and the rest.
A different grammatical form does not by itself mean a different category. Walshe’s wording is the one to keep: non-univocity “need not mean a different grammatical form (though often enough a different mode of predicating corresponds to a different grammatical form).”
Similarly, “humanity”, though expressing human nature abstractly, is ultimately defined in terms of substance. So in spite of the different grammatical form, this too would fall under the same mode of predicating found in the Category of substance.
It is worth knowing what the difference between man and humanity actually is, since the grammatical ending is the part that does not matter. Maritain’s account: a concrete concept such as man presents a form in the subject it determines, and an abstract concept such as humanity presents the same form without that subject. A man is one who has humanity. The two words present one determination, once with a bearer and once on its own. The ending marks the difference in how it is conceived, not a difference in category.
Conversely, his other pair on the same page as “man is stone”: the grammarian treats blue triangle and equilateral triangle as the same case — adjective and noun, twice — while the logician does not, because the first is an accident with its subject and the second a species-making difference with its genus. The parts of a saying and the kinds of what is said can come apart. That is why this course will not invent a system in which every grammatical ending is secretly a category, or every category secretly a part of speech.
Walshe also notes that this distinction of categories is not a peculiarity of Greek. Experiences obvious to the senses and common to human life tend to be reflected in language; English is no exception. That is as far as this lesson takes the point. It is not a proof that every tongue must have the same ten, and it is not a finished science of “modes of signifying.” If the practice application asks why the parts of speech are these parts and not others, follow the application. Do not take this page as that science.
This course does not import a system of modi significandi. Walshe’s “mode of predicating” belongs to the Categories — how names are said of a subject — which is not the same question as how a sentence is composed.
If you cannot yet tell a statement from a question or a command, you may look at the opening of logic sooner than the default order. Logic works on statements, which can be true or false. A question, a command, and a wish are speech, but they are not yet that. The case is rare. For everyone else, grammar is first because a statement is made of words, and the words have to be joined before anything can follow from them. Remember why the joining is what matters: white signifies and is neither true nor false until something is said of something. Grammar composes; only what is composed can be true.
Continue to Into Ars Grammatica.