ABSTRACT
The authors have traced back changes in the proportions of the parts of speech throughout the history of the English language. This is their only evidential means of pursuing into the past the examination that we have made into the developing English vocabulary. Many of the peoples have survived into modern times, but most have left behind only a brief glossary collected by a traveler, and there is insufficient evidence to attempt an examination of the proportions of the parts of speech in a group of representative vocabularies. But different languages and families of languages like or dislike a particular part of speech and tend to use another in its place. The Arab grammarians, indeed, did not recognize the adjective as a separate part of speech: to them there were only nouns, verbs and particles. There is hardly a sufficient demand as yet to create the adverb as a separate part of speech.
