Re: History of French

From: Herman Rubin (hrubin_at_odds.stat.purdue.edu)
Date: 09/16/04 

Date: 16 Sep 2004 16:13:18 -0500

In article <414758BE.1AD5@worldnet.att.net>,
Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>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.

Peter Daniels seems to think that a language is a set of
words. There are those who consider the grammar of much
greater importance. There is also the difference between
the spoken and the written language, which can at times
be substantial. What is seen after a few centuries can
vary from one to another.

>> 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.)

Gould certainly did not ignore pronunciation, as one of the
major "tools" was pronunciation to read the "universal" words.
Even other aspects of pronunciation were not ignored.

Verbal aspect was definitely considered of substantial
importance, and the point was to minimize the number of
lexical items, and to use structure instead. This is a
major feature of a grammar-first course.

>> 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.

My daughter, who should not be considered exactly a dolt,
as she has a PhD in chemistry, realized when in high school
that her English grammar was lacking. This seems to directly
go against your claim about the perfection of the speech of
English speakers. Most of them are unaware of even major
gaps in understanding the structure.

It has long been noticed by bright students that learning
other foreign languages points out what they did not realize
about English grammar. There is probably less of that now,
because of the move to almost ignoring grammar. 

-- 
This address is for information only.  I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
hrubin@stat.purdue.edu         Phone: (765)494-6054   FAX: (765)494-0558

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