We have seen what English is, of what stuff it is made, how it came by its present compositeness of substance; how it became strong, and full, and flexible, and fervent; let us now look a little into its structure, _i. e._, the way in which it is put together, in doing which we shall see by comparison how it differs from other languages. This matter of structure, the formation of the sentence, is the distinctive trait of a language. Mere words are not the essential difference between languages. Many words are common (with slight phonetic variation) to all the languages of the Aryan or Indo-European stock, as we have already seen. Multitudes of words have been adopted into all the modern tongues from other languages ancient and modern, dead and living, as most of the readers of THE CHAUTAUQUAN know. The bulk of English dictionaries like Webster’s and Worcester’s is composed of words which are of Latin, Greek, French or Italian origin, and which indeed are essentially the same words in all these languages; their unlikeness being merely a phonetic variation, mostly caused by difference in pronunciation, or change in termination. For example, _flower_ is in Latin _flos_ (genitive _floris_), in Italian _fiore_, in French _fleur_, in Spanish _flor_; each language having somewhat changed the sound of the word, according to rules or habits which are loosely called laws; but the word is in all essentially the same. A sentence—many sentences—might be written in English, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and German, in which all the words of subject-matter (all but verbs like _have_ and _be_, and prepositions and conjunctions) should be essentially the same, and so like that an intelligent person with some faculty for language, and who understood any one of these languages, could apprehend the meaning of any one of the supposed sentences with little difficulty. And yet the sentences would be respectively English, Latin, French, and so forth. Why and how? It is to the reason of this, that is the why and the how of it, that we shall now give a little time and attention. The most important and significant distinction between languages is in their grammar; that is, in the structure of the sentence. In the languages mentioned above the greatest unlikeness in this respect is manifested in English, Latin and German, or to name them in their order of grammatical importance, Latin, German and English. The term “grammar” has two senses; one large and vague, and called by some “philosophical” or “scientific” (phrases commonly used with a deplorable union of pretension and looseness), which includes all that relates to the history, the substance and the structure of a language; the other much narrower and simpler; the sense implied when the phrases “good grammar” and “bad grammar” are used. To this sense I shall here confine myself, and shall here repeat a definition of grammar which I have given before.[A]