What Is This For?
I be tired of Grammar.
Grammar is a appeal to authority, or an argumentum ad populum at best. It bothers me that it's so arbitrary. It reminds me of other rule-systems based on arbitrary whim that are even more abhorrent.
There are a bunch of rules and I learn about them so that I can formulate sentences based on those rules. Then I argue that I'm communicating better when I'm really only communicating marginally more efficiently. I'd argue that the efficiency only comes into play when communicating with other people that happen to agree with most of my grammar conventions.
With the extremely limited exposure I've had to other grammars, such as Russian or Korean, it seems silly to correct grammar (although now I can't help it when I notice it). Listening to the Hispanic community around Austin that learn English as a second language, I thought they were progressing horribly. After learning a bit of Spanish, I noticed that some of the slaughter I was hearing was just a using of the English term (perhaps not conjugated) in the correct Spanish grammar. I could still understand what was being said, it was just in a different grammar; a different set of arbitrary rules. Take Ebonics as another example. When I first heard about it, I railed against it, thinking it was stupid. I looked up a bunch of stuff about it though, and it's as different as Russian is to English, almost. It tends to be confusing to people because it's basically the English language wrapped around a foreign grammar.
I correct my friends that end sentences with prepositions. Why? If we can't get anything better than an argument based on pseudo-authoritative figures rooted in academia, then screw grammar. Take the entry title: perhaps alarms went off, decrying the preposition at the end. So? I need to be re-convinced that it's important.
comments
1
Alan
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
I cringed when I read the title in the rss feed.
2
molotov
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
But did you read what I wrote?
3
ava
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Grammar is not entirely a mash of arbitrary rules; all grammar is is a system to organize words so that people can understand what you're saying, instead of your words coming across as an empty jumble of meaninglessness. Certain parts of grammar, such as the division of words into categories of nouns, verbs, etc. based on what the word describes, are far from arbitrary and are shared by pretty much every language.
The part of grammar that varies from language to language is the order in which words are put. In some languages, such as Latin or Greek, word order usually doesn't matter. In other languages, such as English, word order is all-important, and in Spanish, word order is equally important, but they use a different order. Is it arbitrary? Yes and no. Obviously some sort of organization is required, or else we'd all be babbling and nobody would have any idea what anybody else was saying, but which type of organization is used doesn't really matter so long as everyone can understand what you're saying. efficiency > prettyness.
In English, we're pretty constrained by history as to what sort of grammar we can use and still be understandable. Things like split infinitives and no prepositions on the end of sentences come from 17th century attempts to apply Latin syntax to English, and are not part of native English syntax at all. If you split your infinitives, never use "whom" (or use it wrong), and end every sentence you speak with a preposition, no one will really care and everyone will be able to tell what you're saying. On the other hand, if you never use the present tense and put every last one of your adjectives at the tail end of your sentences, people will have a very hard time trying to figure out what in the hell you're saying.