Lindley Murray

Lindley Murray (* June 7, 1745 at Harper Tavern, Pennsylvania, United States; † January 16, 1826 in Holgate in York, United Kingdom) was an American lawyer and businessman but became famous as a grammarian. His English Grammar was after the Spelling Book by Noah Webster the best-selling English-language book in the first half of the 19th century. Until the 1960s into it English school grammars based on this work.

Life

Lindley Murray was the son of Quaker and businessman Robert Murray and his wife Mary. Their home was on a hill in Manhattan, where nowadays cross Park Avenue and 36th Street. The area is, until today Murray Hill. Lindley Murray worked as a lawyer and businessman. To 1784, he retired to Holgate near York in England back. According to some sources was the reason that he was a Loyalist, other sources mention his poor health. Over the last 16 years of his life Murray suffered from depression and did not leave the house more.

The grammar

Before Lindley Murray dealt with the issue, came the most important grammar of the Oxford poetry professor and later London Bishop Robert Lowth. His published anonymously Short Introduction to English Grammar appeared 1762nd Lowth as later Murray represented a prescriptive approach would therefore contact their grammars standards. The first sentence of his grammar was: " English Grammar is the art of speaking with propriety the English language and to write. " Murray took much of its material in Lowth.

In his retirement, Murray was asked to write teaching materials for a girls' school. This resulted in the English Grammar, angepasst to the different classes of learners: With an Appendix, Containing Rules and Observations for Promoting Perspicuity in Speaking and Writing, published in 1795. The plant experienced a phenomenal success with 200 runs alone by 1850 and 20 million copies sold. It was in the United States even more popular than in the UK and has been translated into numerous other languages. With the success contributing factor was that there was no more time to Murray's copyright, which would have protected the rights of an author. In the early 19th century were "grammar" and Murray in the English language synonyms, its popularity is also shown by the fact that writers like Charles Dickens or satire magazines such as Punch to make fun of him. In articles about grammar Murray's English Grammar always made the scale, if he has now rejected or defended.

Murray was a close observer of the English language, and a large part of his grammar could do with some change in terminology still appear in a modern descriptive grammar. He represented approximately the correct view that there are only two case in English, the nominative and the Possesiv. So it is pointless to distinguish according to the model of the Latin additional case as vocative (O mother ) or ablative ( by mother ). Consequently, one would otherwise be assigned its own case each combination of a preposition with an article and a noun.

In the brief rules that would be mostly uncontroversial today, followed by long, small print comments that have occasionally challenged mockery to Murray's lifetime. So Murray argued about, you should not use the pronoun who for child, because children still were not rational beings. Murray rejected the double negative, although they can be detected already in Old English, was used by Shakespeare and his time in the colloquial language for emphasis was common. Murray was so convinced of the value of its grammatical posited norms that he even the use of wills and sentenced Shall in the King James Bible. This led ultimately to the fact that the language as it was used by the majority of English speakers, as was " incorrect " branded. Many other rules that Murray had originally intended only as a style recommendation, were in the classroom to rules from which the students were not allowed to vary. So Murray had recommended not to end a sentence with an adverb or a preposition. Students was the then chalked than grammatical errors. If Murray justified his standards, he argued with either aesthetic criteria - a design is elegant and harmonious than the other - with clarity or precision of a structure. A closer look at the warped version of it does but the same often.

Murray's grammar had the greatest influence of all the books that the English language split into a standard language and Nichtstandardvarietäten while they had previously formed a continuum.

In addition to his grammar he wrote more school books, of which the English reader was the most popular.