Part of Speech - History

History

The classification of words into lexical categories is found from the earliest moments in the history of linguistics. In the Nirukta, written in the 5th or 6th century BCE, the Sanskrit grammarian Yāska defined four main categories of words:

1. nāma – nouns or substantives
2. ākhyāta – verbs
3. upasarga – pre-verbs or prefixes
4. nipāta – particles, invariant words (perhaps prepositions)

These four were grouped into two large classes: inflected (nouns and verbs) and uninflected (pre-verbs and particles).

The ancient work on the grammar of the Tamil language, Tolkappiyam, dated variously between 1st and 10th centuries CE, classifies words in Tamil as

1. peyar (noun),
2. vinai (verb),
3. idai (part of speech which modifies the relationships between verbs and nouns) and
4. uri (word that further qualifies a noun or verb)

A century or two after the work of Nirukta, the Greek scholar Plato wrote in the Cratylus dialog that "... sentences are, I conceive, a combination of verbs and nouns ". Another class, "conjunctions" (covering conjunctions, pronouns, and the article), was later added by Aristotle.

By the end of the 2nd century BCE, the classification scheme had been expanded into eight categories, seen in the Art of Grammar (Τέχνη Γραμματική) :

1. Noun: a part of speech inflected for case, signifying a concrete or abstract entity
2. Verb: a part of speech without case inflection, but inflected for tense, person and number, signifying an activity or process performed or undergone
3. Participle: a part of speech sharing the features of the verb and the noun
4. Interjection: a part of speech expressing emotion alone
5. Pronoun: a part of speech substitutable for a noun and marked for a person
6. Preposition: a part of speech placed before other words in composition and in syntax
7. Adverb: a part of speech without inflection, in modification of or in addition to a verb, adjective, clause, sentence, or other adverb
8. Conjunction: a part of speech binding together the discourse and filling gaps in its interpretation

The Latin grammarian Priscian (fl. 500 CE) modified the above eightfold system, substituting "article" for "interjection". It was not until 1767 that the adjective was taken as a separate class.

Traditional English grammar is patterned after the European tradition above, and is still taught in schools and used in dictionaries. It names eight parts of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and interjection (sometimes called an exclamation).