wasn't the rules of grammar started by pompous artistocrats, just like their rules of etiquette?
wasn't the rules of grammar started by pompous artistocrats, just like their rules of etiquette?
"He was nauseous with regret when he saw her face again, and when, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Neal; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad."
---Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll
and wasn't it those "books" that started all the "thou shalt..."?? ugh.
"He was nauseous with regret when he saw her face again, and when, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Neal; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad."
---Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll
I would not dismiss school grammar, either, and that was the point that I attempted to make earlier on in this thread (but seem to have failed in doing so, for which I apologiseOriginally Posted by blp
). School grammar has its place, especially so in formal writing, which you may, depending on what you are a copy editor of, be very familiar with. "Formal writing" is, after all, nothing but another sub-culture that uses language in a specific way. But considering how dependent our culture is on such writing nowadays, it is an important variant of your mother tongue to master.
What I and all linguists I know would refrain from, however, is judging pure language or one's ability to think based solely on school grammar and regardless of what the context of the language use actually is. Like both you and I have mentioned, the meaning and grammaticality of something like "I didn't see nobody" is dependant on the context (or "sub-culture") in which it is used. In for example formal academic writing, it would indeed either be ungrammatical or have the meaning "I saw somebody". In certain other contexts, it would have a meaning equivalent to "I saw nobody". (And for Heidegger, of course, it would be a very important philosophical dilemma, which I think he got himself into just because he tried to approach language as he would logic.)
School grammar type of grammar certainly becomes very useful also when learning another language, especially after the so-called "critical period" when children seem to be able to acquire a language far more easily than do adults. It may not describe a language correctly, but it does help one to make use of the limited time that one usually has to acquire a language in a second language learning setting. While there are differing views in language pedagogy (which I do on the side in addition to my more theoretical interests) as for how much grammar actually should be taught in a foreign language learning situation, I personally think that teaching school grammar has its place there as well.
So, I wouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water. I would just not equate language with language use and/or thought.
It depends on what you mean by "rules of grammar". We all as native speakers of one language or another have acquired rules of grammar all by ourselves, without any pompous aristocrats needing to make house-calls when we were young.
Descriptive grammar (i.e. describing how languages seem to work), meanwhile, has a tradition that goes back millennia. The earliest surviving accounts we have of language description come from Indian Vedic texts.
Prescriptive grammar (i.e. someone telling you how you should use your mother tongue) on the other hand probably goes back to as far as does language. There, it in a sense indeed has often been the aristocrats (with various degrees of pompousness, I would imagine) that have influenced language change. Due to various social and economic reasons, emulating the speech of the members of society who have political and social influence has been beneficial, and therefore something to aspire to. They have also been the people who are in a position to publish and run things, and therefore obviously have had more linguistic influence than does, say, a potato farmer who lives in the middle of nowhere.
In the past half a century, however, this has been changing somewhat. We do not seek to emulate the kings or the prime ministers anymore, but much of the influence to language change comes from the media, and especially so music and films. Even the Queen of England doesn't these days really speak the "Queen's English" any more, as even her language has adapted under the media's influence.
i tend to think rules of grammar-Think are inseparable from the stifling writing that entertains it; like the ridiculous five paragraph essay form that's grounded in inductive analysis, leaving the writer the mere task of assembling the pieces, not painting a landscape with words, imagination. such is reserved for "creative writing" courses, another snotty endeavor for the formalistic story-teller.
"He was nauseous with regret when he saw her face again, and when, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Neal; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad."
---Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll
Grammar, speech and dialect all are important markers that differ depending on the context in which speech is used. A strict, rigid formalistic usage of language is appropriate under certain contexts (the five paragraph essay, while useless and scripted, is not really grammar) and slummy slang is appropriate during others. Registers of speech vary significantly based on what sociological context you use them in. I would certainly agree that in regular speech 'stuffy' grammar doesn't really have a place if one is to commuinicate freely, but in a more formalistic context it is important in oder to have your ideas communicated effectively.
In these days, old man, no one thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people, the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and I have mine.-Harry Lime, The Third Man novella by Graham Greene
I would add to Vili's post that while many languages could be said to be structured by stuffy aristocrats their efforts (especially appearant in the Academie Francaise) are usually not very significant in impacting the actual spoken language. The rules they perscribe are often strange, arcane and unnatural, based not on linguistic development but linguistic reationism as often as not, and as a result their rules do not gain common currency and are used only by a certain few people (such as bureaucrats) and only in very formalistic writing (such as government pamphlets and papers). As such, it is often said that Frnech is a language with so many rules that almost no one ever learns them all, but that is mostly pomposity on the side of the Acadamie and three quarters of those rules are totally superfluous to actual communication.
In these days, old man, no one thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people, the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and I have mine.-Harry Lime, The Third Man novella by Graham Greene
the voices of robert frost and raymond carver, for example, whose use of language is clear and concise, conveys even the most abstract ideas, cutting across contextual fields. so i'm not sure whether there is necessarily a need for the formalistic, let alone a strict, rigid brand other than to embellish one's sense of refinement (i.e. snobbery). every society has a form of it---and people especially use religion to exert it---because while religion is a belief system, it's also a language system, which is why a hierarchy of power developed for each: to interpret, exhort, synthesize and simplify for mass consumption. no surprise the clergy imposed their divine kings notion on interpretation and thereby denied the masses the book. thankfully luther drove that nail in the door, or didn't he?
Last edited by jon1jt; 01-08-2007 at 11:06 AM.
"He was nauseous with regret when he saw her face again, and when, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Neal; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad."
---Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll
Vili said:
And for Heidegger, of course, it would be a very important philosophical dilemma, which I think he got himself into just because he tried to approach language as he would logic.)
I'm not sure where you get this idea from. Heidegger was probably one of the most poetic of the ontologists. he's the one that said, "Language is the house of being," but that didn't mean logical argument. Being and Time and From Enowning are works of poetry as much as they are conceptual assertions. they're not to be construed as "systems" for even heidegger himself made that clear.
"He was nauseous with regret when he saw her face again, and when, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Neal; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad."
---Jack Kerouac, On The Road: The Original Scroll
"no surprise the clergy imposed their divine kings notion on interpretation and thereby denied the masses the book. thankfully luther drove that nail in the door, or didn't he? "
Off topic in this thread, but, no.
I presume that you are using "Luther" loosely, to stand for the Reformation in general. Certainly, in England, the monarch who argued most strongly for the divine right of kings was James I (or James VI of Scotland) who was a Calvinist.
If there was one person in England who did most to ensure that kings of England remained subject to the law, rather than acting as if they were divine, then that was probably Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century, four hundred years before Luther.
I could be wrong, but I do not think you'll find much support for your proposition in the histories of any of the countries of northern or western Europe, except, possibly, Spain.
Voices mysterious far and near,
Sound of the wind and sound of the sea,
Are calling and whispering in my ear,
Whifflingpin! Why stayest thou here?
you mean "weren't" the rules...
"...there is only one plot. Things are not as they seem"
Jim Thompson
Crime Noir author
"...Thy Name
Shall be the copious matter of my song"
Paradise Lost
John Milton
jon1...hmmm....we have spent quite a bit of time here in lit land. I have to say that you present a bit of a paradox...but that is good...we all do.
You seem to be both "let it go with the wind" and also rather conservative in certain respects.
After reading many of your posts I have to admit that your lack of correct spelling and grammar gets in the way. In the way of what, someone asks? In the way of hearing you. Hearing? I thought this was about writing? Yes but as we all know there is more to writing then just the words on the screen. There is all sorts of static, implication, rhetorical jousts, connotations...
In your case, I want to take your opinions and thinking seriously. I sense that you want them to be taken seriously. Not everybody here does to the same degree. Some are here to just kick it and share some tea. But when the gentleman stands and makes a statement concerning culutre, music, art, politics, philosophy, morality...like it or not the audience will pay close attention to everything about the fellow. Now in person-person life there is body language, facial expression...here we have none of that and so the language, diction, grammar means even more.
I do want to add that I may very well fit into the same box as the one I am delicately building here for tuo. Takes one to know one.
"...there is only one plot. Things are not as they seem"
Jim Thompson
Crime Noir author
"...Thy Name
Shall be the copious matter of my song"
Paradise Lost
John Milton
I refer all contributors to this thread to Strunk and White's classice grammar primer, 'The Elements of Style' - especially you, jon1jt, from whom, frankly, I expect better.
As the title suggests, they see good grammatical practice as intrinsic to good style. This is largey a matter of entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem - Ockham's razor (Entitles should not be multiplied beyond necessity). Like a good joiner who uses only as many nails as are strictly necessary, and only in the places where they'll be most effective, a writer with good access to the toolbox of grammar doesn't waste words. I've seen the unintelligible tangles people get themselves into without this understanding and it's not pretty: overlong, unbeautiful conjunctions such as 'In the first instance', constant confusions of subject and object, misleading repetitions of the same point in different language, verbless sentences and on and on. These people are not freed for poetic flights by their basic lack of facility with language, they're absolutely restricted, to the point of barely being able to communicate a coherent thought, let alone being able to sound human in the process. Far from making them sound more 'formal', vili, basic knowledge of grammar would pull the rod out of a lot of these people's verbal arses. Far from being elitist, as you seem to imply, jon, grammar seems to me to be a basic skillset to which everyone in a free society deserves access. The modish idea, in England at least, that teaching grammar is somehow unfair to children, has left a lot of people unfairly disadvantaged.
Conversely, I've been amazed at the effect of diligent tidying and pruning on weak prose. Not only does it confer and sometimes force a clarity that was previously lacking, it can deliver the much hoped for beauty that no amount of florid sentence decoration achieves. I'm not much up on Carver's biography, but the idea that a writer of his economy wasn't concerned with issues like this seems highly unlikely. I do know he used to sit with his writing teacher making minute decisions about his word usage.
Grammar is a system, but it's a remarkably ergonomic and unrestrictive one. A bit like Democracy, it provides a set of guidelines that are nevertheless internally accommodating to debate about its own structure and a multiplicity of individual voices. It is not like etiquette, which I completely agree is an arbitrary system of conventions, used largely for intimidation and social exclusion. Where etiquette wants to tell you to say 'How d'you do?' rather than 'Hi there!', grammar is only concerned with making sense - and offers multiple ways of doing so. You can argue for its arbitrariness by pointing to the different systems at work in different languages, but this is to ignore the ways in which individual rules form part of an interlocking whole: where one might use a complex set of declensions and cases to distinguish subjects and objects, another might rely more on word order, even when the basic communicative intent may be very similar. For all the differences, it's hard to imagine a language devoid of certain of the elements we tend to take for granted - verbs for instance.
To those who still insist that grammar's a way of formalising language and restricting self-expression: look, for ****'s sake, who have you been reading? There's barely a decent writer alive or dead who doesn't use good grammar, and even the ones who break the rules usually do so with clear strategic intent. It's a testament to grammar's flexibility that two writers as different as Bukowski and Charlotte Bronte both use it and yet read so differently. And really, I could have picked almost any two other famous writers to make the same point. I could have said it differently too: '...to such differing stylistic ends.' Among other possibilities (to use a verbless sentence of my own). Anyway, we're all using the stuff constantly every day, on this forum and beyond. If you want to reject it out of hand, go ahead, but what are you going to be left with? It would be like putting a kid in a car without any instruction and saying, 'Don't worry, just do what comes natural.'
I will admit that Joan Didion, frequently cited as a great prose stylist, said recently, 'I never learned the rules of grammar.' But then, I think she sort of did - through extensive reading - because her usage is as good as her erudition is manifest. She's one of the few writers I've ever seen observe the subtle (and, in fact, debatable) difference between 'which' and 'that'.
I am not so sure if this is applicable across history. While historical linguistics is not really my field, I think that the shift from Old English to Middle English, and then to (Early) Modern English was largely the result of the Normans taking over administration in England. These days the situation may be different.
I must admit that I am not very well read in Heidegger, and may be too influenced by Carnap's reading of him, so probably I should not be making any strong comments about Heidegger. But doesn't Heidegger in "What is Metaphysics?" take "nothing" to be an entity in itself (rather than the negation of one), and then start wondering what it means to say that "Nothing is outside of the door" (or something along those lines)?
I have nothing (no pun intended) against Heidegger, but I just thought this to be somewhat strange. That said, I may be totally mistaken, as my knowledge of the subject matter is rather limited, and it has been ages since I read the little Heidegger that I have read.
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