gerunds

[Yokoyama, Olga]

Latin grammars had both participles and gerunds and called them that
since 2 a.d. Most European grammatical terms were inherited from Latin
grammars and Slavonic grammatical tradition was no exception. English
lost the distinction in -ing forms (it also lost case and most of its
inflexion in general, as you may want to point out to your student) and
the two concepts blurred, resulting in the abandonment of the term
"gerund" in English. It is English that departed from the Latin
tradition and "stand[s] apart from seemingly all other linguists and
hundreds of years of tradition in using the term 'gerund'". Your
student's assumption is evidently that "all other linguists" is
co-referential with "linguists working in the English grammatical
tradition" and "hundreds of years of tradition" is synonymous with
"hundreds of years of English grammatical tradition". 

*************************************
Please excuse non-sequiturs occasionally arising from my voice
recognition system.
**************************************************************
Olga T. Yokoyama
Professor
Department of Applied Linguistics and TESL University of California, Los
Angeles

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