Grammar for Real People, Part 1: Magic and Science

Halfway through the winter semester, and I'm already seeing leaps and bounds in my understanding of the English language, thanks to university-level editing courses. Seeing the problems everyone has (and I had, for a long time) with grammar and punctuation and the like, I figured I would make a series of blog posts to finally make these concepts clear for the average Pony Joe Blow fanfic writer/editor/reader.

So let's try it, shall we?

Part 1: You Are Here!
Part 2: Sentences, Phrases, and Clauses
Part 3: Phrase Functions and Parse
Part 4-1: Modifier Confusion
Part 4-2: Specifier Logic
Part 4-3: Heavy Complements
Part 4-4: Positive/Negative Unity (The Truth Behind “Double-Negatives")
Part 4-5: Scripts and Sleepy Phrases (The Truth Behind “Passive Voice”)
Part 4-6: Script Details (Coming Soon)

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Magic and Science

So English. Everyone's heard the urban legend that it's the hardest language to learn, because of all the fiddly little rules and the innumerable exceptions to those rules.

Well, the biggest reason for that perception is just how old-fashioned the rules are.

Did you know that the grammar you learned in school is as outdated as alchemy, astrology, bloodletting, or the belief that the world is flat? For English, at least, language is the only intellectual study that wasn't improved in some way during the Renaissance. In fact, it was made worse.

You've heard of these rules. "Never split an infinitive," "Don't end sentences with prepositions," "Educated people never begin sentences with 'and' or 'but,'" "Always avoid gender-neutral pronouns like 'it' or 'they/them' for individual people," and plenty more.

Basically, forget all of that. Throw out everything you've been taught about grammar and punctuation, because the people who made those rules knew as little about what they were doing as medieval physicians trying to cure pneumonia by draining a liter of the patient's blood.

All those rules do have roots in the way the language actually works, but really all of them are misunderstandings and even mistranslations.

For instance, the traditional definition of a sentence is "a noun and a verb." Have you ever really tried that? "Wood lay." "Anarchy wire." "Wire wire." Wire wire? It doesn't work. (Not to say that they can't work. If that were the case, no one would advocate it as a rule. But no one can say that it's anything close to universal.)

That doesn't describe a sentence. What it does do, though, is attempt to explain what a sentence really is, which I'll get to later. That's a pretty good way to sum up the whole traditional grammar system: it attempts to describe what's going on in the language, but it's too caught up in tradition, standards of speech and writing limitations centuries out of date, and its own entrenchment in the modern English-speaking world to be clear about anything.

You can google this stuff, and you'll find tons of "descriptivist" articles explaining why certain rules are stupid, and when exceptions should be allowed. On the other hand, there are still prescriptivists (those who believe the rules prescribe how language should work, rather than the other way around) out there who argue the other side: rules should be followed to the letter, and anything else is wrong because the rule says it is. You can probably tell which camp I fall into. It's the same one all modern linguists adhere to, by the way.

For an example, the origin of that definition of a sentence goes all the way back to Plato, in The Sophist. He used the words onoma and rhema to describe speech, which were poorly translated in the Renaissance as "noun" and "verb" respectively. Really, "pointing word" and "asserting word" would have been fairer translations which are both much broader in coverage and make more sense. There's a thing you're talking about, and there's something you're saying about it. Point and assert. None of this "person/place/thing and action word" nonsense.

Likewise, a lot of grammar traditions come from Latin and Greek grammar themselves, since that was what was all the rage when they were being put together. The split-infinitive taboo is one of these, since in Latin you literally can't split an infinitive from its parent verb because they aren't separate words. And since in the Renaissance Latin could do no wrong, anything other languages did differently was bad and the languages should feel bad. In English, in fact, verbs and infinitives are separate words, there's no reason at all not to put something between them. So the next time someone yells at you for saying "To boldly go where no one has gone before," you can tell them to stop beating a dead language.

I could go on and bust even more grammar myths, but I think you get the idea. Just because your English teacher told you something about the language you speak (or were learning to speak), doesn't mean it's gospel.

So now that your mind is free of any foolish misconceptions taught to you by the mean old lady with the wooden ruler, let's take a look at how language really works.

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TL;DR

Pretty much everything you've been taught in English class is super old-fashioned and often just plain stupid. Don't just debate whether or not a rule is worth following, chances are the rule was wrong to begin with, and we shouldn't still be teaching it at all.

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>>>>>>>>>>>>Next Part

Comments

[Bugsydor]

It's nice being a descriptivist. It's a lot less stressful, for one thing. I figure the important grammatical things when writing are that the reader understands what you're saying without great effort, and that it sounds good.

Thanks for writing this series.

[Bad Horse]

Nicely written!