I
NTRODUCTION
:
A
VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF
E
NGLISH GRAMMAR
‘[It is] impossible at the present juncture to teach English grammar in the
schools for the simple reason that no one knows exactly what it is.’
G
OVERNMENT REPORT
, 1921
Anyone who has so much as run their eye over an Anglo-Saxon lament, a tale by
Chaucer or a play by Shakespeare will see that the English in which they are
written is very different from the way we write and speak today. Even a novel
written as little as fifty years ago may differ from
a modern one in style,
vocabulary and punctuation. The books of poor old Enid Blyton, most of which
were written in the 1940s and 1950s, have already had to be revised for modern
children because they were considered so out of touch – and not least because
she had a propensity for naming her characters Fanny, Dick and so on.
It is in the nature of a living language to evolve, as new inventions require
new words, foreign influences enliven the vocabulary and social changes give
people more or less leisure to write at length. The monks who copied out
medieval texts invented short
forms to save themselves time, which passed into
the language as ligatures in words such as, funnily enough,
mediæval , which we
now deem archaic. In our own time the great revolutions have occurred because
of emailing and texting, and who knows: a standard dictionary of 2028 may well
contain the word
gr8 .
We cannot stop English changing – and only the most ardent, dyed-in-the-
wool pedants waste their time trying – but we can do
our best to ensure that it
does not become compromised along the way, and to preserve its best features.
Since linguistic sloppiness often leads to ambiguity – which is one of the things
that grammar rules try to avoid – a few rules are surely a good thing. And
frankly, if you can’t bring yourself to agree with that, you might as well stop
reading now and go and get your money back before the book starts to look tatty.
*1
Rules were very much in the minds of the sticklers of the eighteenth century,
who, fearing for the health of the English language, decided to impose on it a
grammar system that would fix it good and proper. Unfortunately for us, these
scholars were specialists in Ancient Greek and Latin –
not German, the language
from which English is derived – so they imposed an awful lot of Latin rules that
didn’t fit too comfortably with English, thereby creating all manner of
unnecessary complications. Most English people couldn’t even speak Latin, let
alone master its grammar.
Ignoring this major flaw in the plan, in 1762, an Oxford professor called
Robert Lowth produced a prescriptive text titled
A Short Introduction to English
Grammar , a publication so influential that it dominated
grammar teaching into
the twentieth century (and indeed is much quoted in this book). No longer did
one dare to end a sentence with a preposition, to split an infinitive or to say
‘between you and I’.
Lowth’s rules aside, the majority of people would have had little knowledge
of English grammar until the end of the nineteenth century. Most of them
couldn’t read or write, never mind worry about un-splitting infinitives. It was not
until the late 1800s that schooling became compulsory and children were sent off
to learn how not to blot their copybook.
Swot’s Corner: The earliest grammar systems
we know of were in Iron Age
India, about the fifth century BC. The Greeks had a grammar system by 100 BC,
and the Romans created a Latin grammar system following the Greek example.
Some 272 grammars of English were published before the eighteenth century.
Grammar teaching was regarded as important until the early 1960s, when the
authorities decided that we did not need to be drilled in a language we could
already speak, and pretty much everyone decided that Latin was boring and
pointless. Thirty years later, however, businesses and universities began to
complain about the younger generation’s bad grammar and punctuation, with the
result that the subject was once again taken seriously and reappeared on school
syllabuses.
*2
But,
like maths, it remains a subject that many of us regard with
foreboding. Either you belong to the generation that ‘missed out’ on grammar
when its teaching was out of fashion; or, if you are older or younger than that,
you’ll have hazy recollections of rules that you perhaps only half understood in
the first place.
Swot’s Corner: When grammar became a required subject in many US schools
in the mid-nineteenth century, teachers complained that they knew no more
about it than their pupils.
This book aims to fill in some of the gaps that the education system may
have
left you with,
*3
but remember that English is a rich and fluid language and
that one person’s unbreakable rule is another person’s insufferable pedantry.
Knowing the rules – and breaking them because you feel like it, not because you
don’t know any better – will make you a more confident, creative and
entertaining writer and speaker.
If your reaction to that is along the lines of ‘Yeah, right’, consider this: when
you’re chatting among friends, it may not much matter how you express
yourself, but what about when you are applying for a job or compiling a report
or trying to write an introduction for a book like this?
†4
Language is as much a
part of how you present yourself – and how other people react to you – as the
way you dress. if we alwez rote howeva we pleazd itd b like turning up 2 an
interview in ript
jeanz n a scruffy t-shirt, y’know? And one wouldn’t dream of
doing that, would one?
