←
→
eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
Add MemoryShare This Entry

QotD

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 05:25am on 2006-03-05 under ,

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2005-11-21:

"English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin--a language with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans. Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football. It is a patent absurdity. But once this insane notion became established grammarians found themselves having to draw up ever more complicated and circular arguments to accommodate the inconsistencies." -- Bill Bryson, in The Mother Tongue, English & How It Got That Way, 1990.
(submitted to the mailing list by Lynn Kisilenko)

←
→
There are 8 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] anniemal.livejournal.com at 02:11pm on 2006-03-05
Well, Yeah. But that doesn't mean wen have to tolerate bad grammar in the sense of mismatched modifiers and gross abuse of syntax in general. Or do we?
[link] [reply]
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] dptwisted.livejournal.com at 03:50pm on 2006-03-05
The other thing to consider is that English is a Germanic language. Once I took a German class in college, I saw where a lot of the grammatical errors come from. Splitting infinitives is grammatically correct, as is ending a sentence with a preposition. I forget what others I ran across, but those were the biggies.
[link] [reply]
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] pedropadrao.livejournal.com at 05:14pm on 2006-03-05
Although my wife, the editor, would disagree with me, I can't really bring myself to call a feature of a Germanic language an *error* because some nobs with Latin on the brain figured that they could make a Germanic language play by Latinate rules. Right now, the problem's a matter of a square peg being battered into a round hole for hundreds of years, & no wonder if you find that there are splinters & cracks in both the peg & the pegged.
[link] [parent] [reply]
zenlizard: Because the current occupation is fascist. (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] zenlizard at 05:56pm on 2006-03-05
>English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin


No, no, no, no, no, no, no! No way, no how. English is *not* and has never been grammatically a Latin language. English is by history and grammatically, a German language. The reson the language is so fucked up these days is the twisted attempts by elitist prigs to make it conform to Latin rules of grammar-these have been mentioned by the previous replies to this post.

A lot, I think still even these days, a majority of English voacbulary is based on Latin; but vocabulary is not grammar.
[link] [reply]
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] anniemal.livejournal.com at 06:36pm on 2006-03-05
And neither one of us has a gender ID. You are still you, and I still I. And nothing comes between us. Language, much as I love it, too, goes by the boards, ultimately.

Not really . I was just fencing that.
[link] [parent] [reply]
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] realinterrobang.livejournal.com at 06:52pm on 2006-03-05
Yes, its rules and its grammar are based on Latin...

...thanks to the 18th and 19th Century Prescriptivists, that is.

I still say don't split the damned infinitives; it sounds horrible, and my linguistics prof in undergrad, the Oxonian grammarian, determined that it is in fact permissible to end a sentence with a preposition, so long as that preposition is part of a phrasal verb (like "put up with," which is a phrasal verb because it has a different meaning from either "put" or "put up"). See? There, now everyone's happy.

The cat and the miscegenation are out of the bag; I doubt it would be possible to re-Germanicise the language now (especially after heavy Latinate interference and several hundred years of French infusion courtesy of the Battle of Hastings).
[link] [parent] [reply]
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] dianec42.livejournal.com at 09:16pm on 2006-03-05
Bah, just goes to confirm my impression of Bryson being full of half-truths and poor logic. (I tried to read his A Short History of Nearly Everything and darn near tossed it across the room.)
[link] [reply]
 

(no subject)

posted by [identity profile] doubleplus.livejournal.com at 05:19pm on 2006-03-07
Not to mention that other rules of "the way proper people have always spoken English" were laid down by grammar-textbook writers in the 1940s and 50s...
[link] [reply]

Links

January

SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
1
1
 2
1
 3
1
 4
1
 5
1
 6
1
 7
1
8
1
 9
1
 10
1
 11
1
 12
1
 13
1
 14
1
15
1
 16
1
 17
1
 18
1
 19
1
 20
1
 21
1
22
1
 23
1
 24
 
 25
 
 26
 
 27
 
 28
 
29
 
 30
 
 31