Alex Page wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 02:17:24AM -0700, Paul Makepeace wrote:
>
> > Me too, ('74 vintage) but I got learnt grammar. I think mostly by my
> > mother if truth be told. The rest I picked up from Latin :-/
>
> AOL. A strongly grammatical language like Latin really makes
> you think about your grammar in English. I did Latin to
> A-level, and remembering which form of qui to use in a given
> situation really helps you work out that whole who / whom issue.
In my case, German helps there, with wer/wessen/wem/wen distinctions. German
speakers also tend not to make mistakes of the "give it to either Paul or I"
type, probably because case is still pretty visible in German. (That being
said, my wife does tend to mix up accusative [often -n] and dative [often
-m] endings, so not every native speaker has an innate grasp of grammar.)
> Similarly, I'm pretty good at using the subjunctive properly
> and stuff like that. German helped a lot too...
I can imagine. Greek would also help you, at least with the
nominative/accusative distinction (dative died hundreds of years ago and was
replaced by preposition + accusative, or sometimes by genitive). I remember
my German grammar helped me when learning Greek, since of the four surviving
cases, three also existed in German, and vocative is pretty simple to use
:). The English speakers in my class had a harder time of it, and when I was
in Greece, I met one American who told me he got a text on English grammar
because he said he felt he needed to understand his own grammar before he
could understand another language's.
> When I was at prep school, my English teacher had lots of
> little signs over the classroom walls saying things like
> "It's not all right to say 'alright'", to drum little things
> like that in.
I hope it had s/say/write/ , since I don't hear any difference when someone
*says* "all right" or "alright".
A German example is "gar nicht wird gar nicht zusammengeschrieben" (new
spelling, I believe, would use "zusammen geschrieben").
Cheers,
Philip
--
Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
All opinions are my own, not my employer's.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
