Get the latest tech news
Diagraming sentences in the 19th century
A pre-history of the sentence diagrams that were once commonplace in the American classroom.
“The mind becomes a passenger; the body his chariot; ideas his baggage; the earth his inn; hope his food; and another world his destination.” It was in American Grammar that Brown debuted construing as a method for parsing sentences using a system of square and round brackets to isolate major and minor sections. Whereas Brown sought to reform an educational system plagued by “simplifiers”, “plagiarists”, and “new modellers”, Frederick A. P. Barnard’s Analytic Grammar; with Symbolic Illustration(1836) reported from the classroom on syntactic techniques “advantageously used in the instruction of the deaf and dumb”. “On this imperishable foundation — this rock of eternal endurance — I rear my superstructure, the edifice of scientific truth, the temple of Grammatical consistency.” Far less systematic than Barnard, Peirce arranged his sentences with a chain-link structure: assertives and relatives(verbs and prepositions) connect larger subject and object circles whose articles are attached to these nouns like keys on a ring.
Or read this on Hacker News