Part 1 covered “picturing” and “declaring” in the head, and how a sentence is built from three pieces. Part 2 takes up this book’s two most famous discoveries — what a verb really is, and the several sentences hiding inside one sentence.
1. The true nature of a verb is not “time” but “declaring”
“Health” is a noun. “Is healthy” is a verb. What’s the difference?
The usual answer is that a verb signals time. Aristotle himself defined it that way, ages ago. This book pushes back. The verb’s most important job, it says, is not marking time but declaring.
le verbe, un mot dont le principal usage est de signifier l’affirmation, c’est-à-dire, de marquer que le discours où ce mot est employé, est le discours d’un homme qui ne conçoit pas seulement les choses, mais qui en juge et qui les affirme.
the verb — a word whose principal use is to signify affirmation, that is, to mark that the discourse in which the word is used is the discourse of someone who does not merely conceive things, but judges and affirms them. (French quotations throughout; Japanese and English are ToL working translations.)
Saying “Peter lives” is exactly the same as saying “Peter is living.” Inside the single word “lives,” the act of declaring (“is”) and the content (“living”) are both packed in. A verb that does the pure declaring job and nothing else is really just one word — “is.” Every other verb bundles in the content (the attribute), whose story it is (the person ending), and when it happened (tense).
So the core of a verb is not time. What a verb really is, is the very act of a speaker stepping forward and saying “this is true” about the world. Aristotle’s De Interpretatione defined the verb as “a word signifying with time” — and this book says, flatly, that’s a mistake. Time is only an ornament that happens to attach itself to the verb.
2. One sentence can hide several sentences inside it
Now for the most quoted passage in the whole book. Read the next sentence slowly.
Dieu invisible a créé le monde visible.
God invisible created the world visible.
Only one sentence comes out of the mouth. But the authors say: saying it, three judgments are moving in your mind at once.
il se passe trois jugemens dans mon esprit … Dieu est invisible. 2. Qu’il a créé le monde. 3. Que le monde est visible.
Three judgments take place in my mind … 1. God is invisible. 2. That he created the world. 3. That the world is visible.
The “invisible” in “God invisible” is really the folded-up sentence “God is invisible.” So is the “visible” in “the world visible.” So “God invisible created the world visible” is, precisely, three sentences — “God is invisible. That God created the world. That world is visible.” — compressed into one.
The tool that pulls this back out into the open is the relative pronoun (French qui, English who/which/that). Rewrite it as “God, who is invisible, created the world” and the folded-up sentence steps back into view. And the authors add something important: these hidden sentences are “often in our mind without being expressed in words.” We routinely juggle several judgments in our heads at once and say only part of them out loud.
3. Sounds, letters, and a new trick for reading
The front half of the book (Part I) deals with something more basic still — sound and letters. A vowel is a sound made just by opening the mouth (a, e, i, o, u). A consonant cannot become a sound on its own; it only becomes audible once paired with a vowel.
The authors also make a practical proposal here. Where spelling and pronunciation drift apart, they argue, teaching from the letter’s actual sound — rather than its name (“bee,” “cee”) — lets anyone learn to read faster. “A new way of learning to read easily in all sorts of languages” — a proposal close to what we’d now call phonics, made more than 350 years ago.
In sum — putting both halves together
| Heading | Content |
|---|---|
| What grammar is | The art of speaking — a direct copy of “picturing” and “declaring” in the head |
| The skeleton of a sentence | subject + is + attribute. “Is” alone does the declaring |
| The great divide among words | Words for objects (nouns, etc.) vs. words for feeling and motion (verbs, conjunctions) |
| The true nature of the verb | Not “time” but “declaring.” Everything else is added on |
| The hidden sentence | Several judgments can be folded into one sentence; the relative pronoun brings them out |
What the General and Rational Grammar was really saying comes down to this: the shape of language is a shadow cast directly by the workings of the mind. Learning grammar, on this view, is less about memorising rules than about looking inside your own head.
Articles digging deeper into each topic follow from here. For the whole picture and the sources, see “Reading the General and Rational Grammar.”