Re: History of French

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 09/14/04 

Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:46:54 GMT

Herman Rubin wrote:

> >Two senses of "grammar" are getting intermigled here:
> >1) What any native knows and applies automatically
> >2) Studying that grammar in hindsight, and teaching the results of
> >such studies.
>
> As to "any native" knowing and applying it automatically,
> my encounters with native Americans who are college students
> indicate that neither is the case.

Herman's been posting here for years but appears to be ineducable -- and
also unwilling to pick up any elementary linguistics text.

> Grammar is the structure of a language. Vocabulary and
> usage fit into the structure, and a good presentation of
> this makes learning much easier.
>
> There is a book by Gould, _Russian for the Mathematician_.
> He claims that if one learns the grammar, the alphabet,
> the connectives, and 40 Russian roots, one could read
> mathematical Russian.

That's perfectly true. Howard I. Aronson taught "Russian for Linguists"
at the University of Chicago, which in one ten-week quarter gave us all
we needed to read linguistics articles in Russian. Pronunciation,
particularly stress placement, and verbal aspect were ignored.
(Aspectual pairs, if they came up, were simply treated as separate
lexical items.)

> Even back when English grammar was taught in grammar
> school, learning the grammar of a foreign language
> pointed out parts of English grammar which the school
> classes did not cover.

And there was no need for "covering" them, since all English-speakers
speak their language perfectly, and grammatical features of other
languages are either irrelevant to English or inaccessible to
consciousness save in remarkable cases like Haj Ross or Jim McCawley. 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net

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