CORRECT ENGLISH

Hi all,
in this thread, I'm going to write about english grammar and many other things related to engliish that I've learned over the past 20 years, so that it helps many of us to build such a good english language.
I'll be updating this thread day by day.
P.S. my mother language is arabic, so if anyone comes across any mistake plz dont hesitate to correct me
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1) Parts Of Speech:
To write and speak correct english you have to get right back to fundamentals and understand why certain things are right and other things are wrong.
You may be surprised to find how much more there is about parts of speech than you realised in your schooldays and discover fascination of something that is usually taken for granted.

Nearly every word in the english language can be classified into its kind, the different kinds of words being known as "parts of speech"; the classifications having become crystallised through centuries of linguistic discipline.

The following are the parts of speech:

As will be seen later, the various parts of speech are not always firmly fixed and unfortunately the classifications are not perfect. Most words are easy to classify - that is, you know at a glance which part of speech a word belongs to - but some words can belong to two or more parts of speech. It frequently happens that a word cannot readily be classified at all; for example, it can form part of a phrase that, of little or no meaning in itself, has become understandable only through the common usage of years or centuries. Such use of word or phrase, constituting an idiom, is said to be idiomatic(اصطلاحي).

Of all eight parts of speech, the most tantalising are pronouns. Although there is no question about the principal pronouns, it must be admitted that this classification has somewhat hazy boundaries and there can be much vagueness about words which lie near the frontiers.

Before proceeding, however, let us, as an interesting exercise, consider a sentence and try to classify each of it words.

"It frequently happens that a word cannot readily be classified at all."

It: pronoun, but the use here is idiomatic

Frequently: adverb

Happens: verb

That: relative rponoun, but the use here is idiomatic

A: adjective; indefinite article

Word: noun

Cannot ... be classified: verb (combination of verbs, or "compound verb")

readily: adverb

At all: idiomatic

Nouns are just things, animate or inanimate, real or imaginary, visible or invisible. English has the advantage that inanimate things are of neuter gender: that is, they are not masculine or feminine as they are, for example, in French.

Proper nouns are names of people, places, oceans, ships, racehorses, streets and so forth. A proper noun (except in the case of a few peculiar surnames) always starts with a capital letter.

Most plurals in english consist of the singular form with the addition of s or es, with or without some modification. There are, however, several other ways of indicating plurality.

Of other plurals of nouns and names which themselves end with s, many people have hazy ideas. Such nouns are lenz, iris, and gas, and such proper nouns (names) are Jones, Francis, and Jenkins. To make such words plural, simply add ~es. "The Jenkinses went out to dinner." is perfectly correct.

Exceptions are means and news. We talk about "This means" and "These means", but news is always regarded as singular.

Ownership, or a "belonging to", is signified by a possessive, which usually, in the case of a single possessor, is denoted by the "apostrophe s".

The singular cases are those like "The horse's mouth", and "one week's time". If a proper noun ends in s the rule is still applied, for example, "Mark Jones's car".

Where onwership or the "belonging to" is shared by two or more nouns, the joint possession is usually indicated by "s apostrophe", as in "The girls' school.

Collective nouns are treated as singular, and the apostrophe comes before the s. Examples are: "The children's toys", and "The men's work".

There is an implied possession in "One week's time", the phrase meaning the length of time belonging to one week. Similarly we can have "Tomorrow's weather" and "In tow weeks' time" or "A hundred years' time". But remember that the apostrophe must not be used if you omit the word "time" and simply say something like "In two weeks I shall be twenty-one."

Mistakes are often made when people's homes are being written about. When you say, "I went to the Alromaithis'." you mean you went to the home not of Mr Alromaithi or Mrs Alromaithi but of both Alromaithis, so that "the Alromaithis' home". It is equally simple if your friends' name ends in s, in which case you write: "I went to the Joneses'." or "I went to the Inglises'."

In spite of the simplicity of this kind of possessive, mistakes appear in print almost every day, mistakes that are evidence of cloudy thinking.

An interseting use of the possessive is in references to the names of firms. If you want to write to tell someone where you bought your curtains you can say: "I bought my curtains at Smith's" or "... at Smiths'." meaning, of course, Smith's or Smiths' shop. If the firm is run by one man called Smith it is correct to write "Smith's", but if the firm is big enough to be controlled by a few of the Smith family then "Smiths' " is correct. If you do not know how many Smiths there are, or how big the firm is, you are on the safe side if yo write "Smith's".

Some firms and organizations call themselves by the possessive form, for example, "Sainsbury's" and others - "Lloyds bank Plc", for example - drop the apostrophe.