Re: History of French

From: Ruud Harmsen (realemailseesite01_at_rudhar.com)
Date: 09/14/04 

Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 23:44:10 +0200

14 Sep 2004 14:40:02 -0500: hrubin@odds.stat.purdue.edu (Herman
Rubin): in sci.lang:

>Relatively few of the undergraduates at our universities
>have a reasonable understanding of English grammar.

Oho, that's that other meaning of 'grammar' again.
You mean 'grammar' =
"the study of the classes of words, their inflections, and their
functions and relations in the sentence b : a study of what is to be
preferred and what avoided in inflection and syntax"

I mean:
"the characteristic system of inflections and syntax of a language b :
a system of rules that defines the grammatical structure of a
language"

(both from Merriam-Webster at http://www.m-w.com/ )

I claim that all of these students have full command in sense 2. You
are right that their command in sense 1 may leave a lot to be desired.
Two completely different things.
Sense 2 is automatic, trained, unconscious, implicit, practical,
applied.
Sense 1 is done on purpose, willfully, non-automatic, conscious,
academic, theoretical, observational.

Two very very different approaches.
Cf. heart-beats: everybody has full mastery, or you won't live for
long.
But only doctors and heart-surge (something, sorry, my mastery of the
English langauge forsakes me) have that other types of mastery, a very
small minority. 

-- 
Ruud Harmsen - http://rudhar.com

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