No good reason. The Greeks had eight; so did the Romans but their list did not include articles (Latin doesn't have them) so, apparently for consistency's sake, they added interjections. Can it be that the Greeks had no such type word? Eureka!, I think I've remembered one.
So unscientific is the notion of parts of speech that these days they are called word classes, or lexical categories. Yet author Ben Yagoda defends the subject in his book When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse because you cannot write clearly without taking them into account:
As the anonymous author of a 1733 book called The English Accidence put it, the parts of speech are "the foundation upon which the beautiful fabrick of the language stands." (p. 10)
You know you are in for more whimsy than logic when the subject's chapters are arranged alphabetically. That system forces the despised adjectives to the top of the heap and the mighty verb to the back where only the Jesuits among the readership can be expected to make the trek. As you see, the book put me in a good mood. I joke about it because, even though it is an entertainment, it is one that deserves respect.
One of the charms of a book like this lies in the steady, amusing way it teaches its main lesson: English is hard. Most English speakers, it seems to me, are under the impression that their language is very easy to learn. We don't have those arbitrary genders of French, nor are our verbs so unreasonably inflected. We are spared the declensions of Latin and German. I still have on my bookshelf an old schoolbook from my boyhood days in France on the art of conjugation. English schoolchildren have no such need. We have a straightforward, logical word order. (None of that German nonsense either about sticking the verb at the end of the sentence.) Vanity of vanities! Yogada makes it painfully clear that English depends on understanding ten thousand subtleties about all those little words we never think about until somebody sticks an essay on the parts of speech in our face.
the difference between using a and the and omitting the article altogether ... are so manifold and complicated that most grammar books take a pass on going into them and take the easy way out. That is, they say something to the effect that by the age of four, native English speakers know in their bones the difference between "I drank Coke," "I drank the Coke," and "I drank a Coke" ... But someone trying to learn English as a second language, they go on to say, will never really master the intracies, and so it's a waste of everyone's time to go into them. (p. 77)
A well-educated young man whose mother tongue was kichagga, a language native to Mount Kilimanjaro, once asked me to explain the difference between in time and on time. I told him, but as I had no mnemonic to offer for retaining the distinction, I suspect that in no time at all he forgot the distinction I had explained.
The chapter on verbs is positively terrifying as it goes through the many ways that "helping" verbs can be used to transform a simple verb like to see into some kind of complicated tangle that has got to be seen if it is to be believed.
Happily, Yagoda is a wit so the moments of horror are brief while the chuckles are frequent. He's a plagiarist too, of the Tom Lehrer variety, giving credit to the sources as he cracks wise with jests from Saturday Night Live and Seinfeld. He has found the only joke ever based on the word an: a snobbish couple in an SNL skit examines the young man their daughter has brought home and says Oh, an Puerto Rican.
Behind all the chuckles lies a wealth of useful thinking about how to write better. The chapters are packed with insights into how to think about these words to keep your writing clear, interesting, and energetic. There was a moment in every chapter when I would experience a painful recognition. I'm guilty that too much, I would confess in my heart. And then would come the recommended cure, which, I hope, I can swallow. I especially liked the tip, attributed to Adam Gopnik on replacing buts with—not howevers—ands. It does the same work without sounding so quarrelsome. I believe in free speech, says the anti-pornography politician, butand I believe in decency too. See what he means? The change in words has the magical effect of respecting the first part instead of denigrating it.
Thanks, AdamBen.
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