Elementary Lessons in Historical English Grammar Containing Accidence and Word-Formation

The present treatise has been drawn up at the urgent request of numerous teachers, who asked for an easier and more elementary work than my “Historical Outlines of English Accidence”, published some two years ago. I have endeavoured to the best of my ability to produce a short historical grammar that might be advantageously used as an introduction to my larger book. I have not, however, made a new cutting down and compressing the old one. These “Elementary Lessons” constitute and entirely independent work, with many peculiarities of arrangement that at once distinguish it from “Accidence”. The illustrative examples scattered throughout the present work are for the most part new, very few of them having been quoted elsewhere (adopted from the preface of the first edition 1874). Contents: Chapter I Relations of English to the languages of Europe and Asia, relations of English to the Teutonic group. Chapter II: History of the English language, foreign elements in Engl