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Portrait engraving of Antoine Arnauld by Pierre Drevet, after Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne

Antoine Arnauld

The General and Rational Grammar (1660), written at Port-Royal by the theologian Arnauld and the grammarian Lancelot. It derives the one rational grammar behind all languages from the three operations of the mind — the parts of speech, the verb as affirmation, and the analysis of the "hidden sentence." Read from the French.

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Reading Arnauld & Lancelot's General and Rational Grammar (1660) — the Wager That the Shape of Language Copies the Shape of the Mind

At the convent of Port-Royal outside Paris, the theologian Arnauld and the grammar teacher Lancelot wrote a small book. Instead of listing the usages of a single language, they tried to derive the one rational grammar behind all languages from the operations of the mind. The parts of speech, the essence of the verb, the hidden sentences — all of it is a copy of the mind's acts of conceiving and judging. The whole picture, from the French, with plain diagrams.
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