prescriptive grammar

[Paul Frank]

Everyone has an intuitive knowledge of the grammar of his native language. But to teach the language
you have to know its formal structure, and you have to be able to talk about it intelligently. Die
Zeit reports on a project run by Wilfried Kürschner, a linguistics professor at the University of
Vechta in Niedersachsen, which teaches Latin grammar to aspiring secondary school teachers. The idea
is that the teachers will learn to understand and teach the grammar of their own language by
comparing and contrasting it with that of Latin. The program is reportedly very popular among
teachers. Here’s the article:

http://www.zeit.de/2005/13/C-Latein-Deutsch

I don’t suppose most linguists, who are committed descriptivists, would approve of this approach.

Paul
________________________
Paul Frank
Chinese-English translator
paulfrank at post.harvard.edu
http://languagejottings.blogspot.com