From: Warrl kyree Tale'sedrin (warrl@mail.blarg.net)
Date: Tue Mar 24 1998 - 18:30:25 MST
> From: phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu (Damien R. Sullivan)
> On Mar 24, 4:29pm, "Kathryn Aegis" wrote:
> > Kick Graybull:
>
> > textbooks were making up facts. Up until partway through 16c English
> > relied upon Germanic grammatical structures until a few
> > cultural heavyweights on the British islands decided that enlightened
> > and civilized humans spoke Latin, and therefore set up new
> > grammatical rules for English that relied upon Latin grammatical
>
> I don't think heavyweights can change grammar like that. More importantly,
> English grammar doesn't resemble Latin very much. German probably resembles
> Latin more. What I've read is that our grammar resembles that of the
> Scandinavian languages more than anything else, a result of living with the
> Danes for a few centuries; apparently the Scandinavian tongues split off from
> Germanic in grammar, although I don't know whether English adoped Scand.
> grammar or whether the current system is a bastard of Old English and Old
> Danish.
>
> English has often been _taught_ based on the Latin model, which may be where
> the 'heavyweights' come in, and which probably gave grammar a bad name in
> English, precisely because it didn't apply.
For example, the rule "don't end a sentence with a preposition".
And Churchill's classic reply: "That is a rule up with which I will
not put."
>
US$500 fee for receipt of unsolicited commercial email. USC 47.5.II.227
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:48:47 MST