LL-L: "Grammar" LOWLANDS-L, 16.JAN.2001 (01) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: Stefan Israel [stefansfeder at yahoo.com]
Subject: "Grammar"

Edwin Alexander opined:

> I find it hard to believe that
> anyone who was a serious "grammarian" in the 16th century
> would have
> proposed such a theory, since it is so obviously illogical.

Oh Edwin, grammarians generally have no clue about language at
all.  Linguistics hasn't really existed as a science since the
1800's or really the early 1900's.  When I read what amateur
"experts" write about "proper" language even today, it makes me
cring-- people confuse what is socially inappropriate (in a
given social context!) with linguistic difficiency, or try to
derive old dialects from young standardized norms etc.

Examples for English include the rule against double negatives,
as in Latin-- even tho French, which they admire, requires
double negatives!  You may all have run into such arbitrary
rules that ignore what speakers are doing and doing well.

(I -am- happy with the openness on this list, let me add!  It's
the self-smug amateur expert who are immune to factuality that
upset me.)

Stefan

----------

From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk]
Subject: "Grammar"

> Stefan Israel [stefansfeder at yahoo.com]
> Subject: "Grammar"
>
> Vocative -usage- is found in every language in the world, but a
> vocative case is a case that has a distinct form from other
> cases, and just as you say, it is the distinctive form that is
> being lost, o Sandy! ;^)

Yeah, but I brought this up originally because I was puzzled
why Margaret's Russian professors had singled out the vocative
as a case that's "going away" from ur-EI languages. Surely if
they just meant that the distinctive form is being lost, they
could have said the same about the accusative, dative and
locative (eg in English, Romance and Celtic languages). If
they meant that it was practically lost from all such
languages, well, this isn't true of Czech, for example.

To consider whether or not it makes sense to talk about a
Latin/Russian (or even better, Czech)-style case system in
English, for example, we might argue that pronouns still
distinguish the nominative from other forms. Only, it
doesn't work because "nominative" forms are only used in
simple (as opposed to compound) nouns (except with people
who use certain "educated" affectations such as "My
husband and I...").

At school, we weren't taught English grammar in terms of
nominative, accusative &c at all. Rather, a simple sentence
was in the first instance to be split into the subject and
predicate, eg:

Me and my business partner | had to write them a letter.

To speak of nominative forms would have just confused us
since there is nothing in evidence that could be called a
nominative form (though in older teachings of just a few
years previously we might have been fobbed off with a
brass-necked insistence that "My business partner and I"
was the correct form!). Then the predicate was to be split
into the verb (or verb phrase) and the indirect object,
object and so on:

Me and my business partner || had to write | them | a letter.

I think it's important to note that the "case" system
doesn't even fit Latin very well - different forms can
have lots of different functions (is there overlap, too?).

I'd say that while tabulations of named word forms should be
a component of a good grammar book, the case system shouldn't
be treated as reflecting the grammatical structure of a
language - it's simply a way of classifying and tabulating
different morphological forms for students to memorise or
use prescriptively. In a language like English the
tabulation scheme is small and is useless for nouns and
possibly not even very helpful for pronouns when one tries
to incorporate "Latin" terminology.

Sandy

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