The Latin-speaking Romans obviously had to drop articles. Thrax counted eight parts: adverbs, articles, conjunctions, nouns, participles, prepositions, pronouns and verbs. Even in our own tradition, the roster keeps shifting. For example, Latin, Russian and Japanese all lack articles. One problem with such reverence is that different languages are set up differently. The anonymous author of the 1733 book "The English Accidence" called the parts of speech "the foundation upon which the beautiful fabrick of the language stands." John Stuart Mill felt they represented universal categories of human thought. Eventually, grand claims were made for it. For a long time, the idea was pretty much universally accepted. The notion of dividing words into discrete parts of speech is generally credited to the ancient Greek grammarian Dionysius Thrax.
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