Last time we took in the whole shape of the General and Rational Grammar (1660). Now let’s walk through the text itself, slowly. The first half: the book’s project, and what is going on inside your head.
1. A grammar book that opens by talking about your head
Grammar books usually open with conjugation tables and lists of exceptions. Not this one. It opens by declaring:
La Grammaire est l’art de parler. Parler, est expliquer ses pensées par des signes que les hommes ont inventés à ce dessein.
Grammar is the art of speaking. To speak is to explain one’s thoughts by signs that men invented for this purpose. (French quotations throughout; Japanese and English are ToL working translations.)
So speaking has two sides. The sound or letters themselves (the outside), and the thought they carry (the inside).
The “general” in the title means it is not a book about French alone — it holds French up against Latin and Greek, hunting for the shared machinery underneath every language. “Rational” means it explains not just what is said but why. It never stops at “this is correct usage”; it goes looking for the reason inside the speaker’s head. So this is less a French textbook than an investigation of what’s happening in the head of anyone who talks.
2. Merely picturing something is not the same as flatly declaring it
The authors first split what happens in the head into two.
- Picturing something. You see a sky and think “clouds.” You see an animal and think “dog.” On its own, this asserts nothing.
- Declaring something about what you pictured. “That cloud is grey.” “That dog is big.”
The first they call conceiving (concevoir), the second judging (juger).
Juger, c’est affirmer qu’une chose que nous concevons est telle, ou n’est pas telle.
To judge is to affirm that a thing we conceive is thus, or is not thus.
“Reasoning” — drawing a third judgment out of two others (“every virtue is praiseworthy, patience is a virtue, so patience is praiseworthy”) — is also a mental act, but it is only judging stacked twice. So for this book’s purposes, two mental operations are enough. We rarely just think “clouds” to ourselves; we go on to declare “it’s overcast” and tell someone. Words, on this view, are used almost entirely to carry judgments.
3. Why “the earth is round” always comes in three pieces
With that two-step picture in hand, you can see how a sentence like “the earth is round” gets built. First you picture “the earth,” then you picture “round” — both are the work of ② (conceiving). Then you declare, of “the earth,” that it is “round” — that’s the work of ③ (judging). A judgment put into a sentence is what this book calls a proposition.
toute proposition enferme nécessairement deux termes ; l’un appelé sujet, qui est ce dont on affirme, comme terre ; et l’autre appelé attribut, qui est ce qu’on affirme, comme ronde : et de plus la liaison entre ces deux termes, est.
Every proposition necessarily contains two terms — one called the subject, that of which one affirms, as “earth”; the other called the attribute, that which one affirms, as “round” — and, moreover, the link between these two terms: “is”.
So every sentence has the same skeleton: “subject + is + attribute.” Subject and attribute are things you’ve pictured; “is” alone is the act of declaring, in the flesh.
4. Every word is either “team object” or “team feeling-and-motion”
If the head splits into “picturing” and “declaring,” the words that carry it should split the same way, the authors reason.
il faut aussi que la plus générale distinction des mots soit que les uns signifient les objets des pensées, et les autres la forme et la manière de nos pensées.
The most general distinction of words must likewise be that some signify the objects of thought, and others the form and manner of our thought.
Team object — nouns, articles, pronouns, prepositions, adverbs. Team feeling-and-motion — verbs, conjunctions, interjections. The clearest case is the word “not (non).”
il n’y a point d’objet dans le monde hors de notre esprit, qui réponde à la particule non.
There is no object in the world outside our mind that answers to the particle “non”.
“Cat” points to a real cat out there in the world. “Not” points to nothing at all. “Not” only marks a movement in the head — “this is not that.” “But” and “and” work the same way: not a thing out in the world, but a way of linking that is happening inside the speaker’s head.
The second half takes up this book’s two most famous claims — that the true nature of a verb is not “time” but “declaring”, and that a single sentence can hide several sentences inside it. For the whole picture, see “Reading the General and Rational Grammar.”