Copied from The Sunday Times: b y Harry Ritchie Published: 27 October 2013 Eats, shoots and leave it out — grammar ain’t what you think. Traditional grammar guides are full of tosh. We are all language experts, even if we don’t know our articles from our objects. I have just published a book about English grammar. It came out on October 10 — publishing’s “Super Thursday” — along with an estimated 1,499 other books, including a slew of television tie-ins and celebrity memoirs and the new Bridget Jones. Super Thursday. A book about grammar. Hmm. I had sometimes given in to secret fantasies about the book doing well, or at least OKish — but now I was braced for the worst. Then something really weird happened. On Wednesday morning my latest glum check told me that the book was hovering around the 21,653 mark in Amazon’s rankings. By five o’clock that afternoon, it stood at No 22. English for the Natives was No 10 in hardback non-fiction, outdone only by Alex Ferguson, Guinness World Records 2014 and various TV chefs. It was several places above Robert Harris’s excellent new thriller, 15 above Stephen King’s latest and a good 10 places above One Direction. Bloody hell — my little book about English grammar was two places above the Great British Bake Off tie-in book, the day after the TV final. There was only one explanation: I had been on the radio that morning. Granted, it was Radio 4, not Radio Northeast Suffolk, and it was Midweek — but even so, it was radio, not telly, I had been on for only 10 minutes at the very end of the broadcast and, believe me, it was no bravura performance. All the highlights I’d prepared, all my best material — they all remained unsaid. I managed to mention the basic points of the book — to teach the real rules of English grammar as they are taught to foreign learners of our language, to show that we are all linguistic geniuses — but no more. And the examples had to be brief and relatively bland — the difference between our present tenses, our sequencing of adjectives (we never talk about a “black little dress”) and a fleeting mention of verbs that take gerunds and infinitives, which we wield expertly but which have foreign-language students slumped in despair. Clearly, the briefest revelation of the actual regulations of English grammar — not the nonsense peddled by the traditional guides — had had the same kind of impact on many listeners as it had on me when I first learnt real English grammar to teach it to foreign students when I was a Tefl (teaching English as a foreign language) slacker. Unless, of course, you have been one too, or have a linguistics degree, I bet you have no idea about any of our grammatical rules, even about their existence. It is not your fault. It’s linguistics that is to blame, not you. Linguists have been outlining these rules for going on 90 years. These are the same rules taught to the billion or so people currently trying to learn English as a foreign language. However, nobody has thought to explain any of them to us native speakers. It’s not just our grammar that linguistics hasn’t bothered to teach us. It’s everything else about the subject too. A few academic linguists have written books for the general public. But no linguistics expert has sat us down and told us about either the basics of the subject or many of its astonishing highlights. Preposterously, we still quail at the mention of words such as “gerund” and “preposition”. Ludicrously, we are still prey to the stuff peddled to us in traditional “grammar” guides — all that is available to us native speakers — which is invariably tosh, and pernicious tosh at that. We don’t even know what grammar is — we think it means ultra-correct, literary etiquette and the proper meaning of words such as “disinterested” and “hopefully”. Not so — grammar is the way a language organises words in a sentence, and changes those words to signal different functions or meanings. And, without realising it, we are all brilliant at it — “Discover the grammar you don’t know you know,” pleads my subtitle. When someone gets it wrong, we spot it straight away. Applying indefinite articles to uncountable nouns was one of the mistakes made by Ali G, the character created by the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, when he conducted his interview about science with Professor Heinz Wolff. After being told by the professor that elementary particles were the smallest things in the universe, Ali G responded: “Is it smaller than a sand? Is it smaller than a salt?” Linguistics’ fundamental principles — accepted in every university linguistics department in the world — come across as way-out-there, political-correctness-gone-mad absurdities. One of these principles is linguistic equality — we are all experts at our own language and dialects are every bit as valid as standard English. Somehow even linguistics’ most amazing, wow-kapow insights and discoveries also remain unknown to the general public. The miracle of children’s acquisition of language. The astonishing achievements of Kanzi, the bonobo that has acquired advanced language skills. The disappearance of dialects in this century. The reason Homer called the Mediterranean “wine-dark” — because this was the 8th century BC and “blue” did not exist yet. The discovery, in the 19th century, that almost all the languages spoken from Iceland to the Himalayas are descended from the tongue of one tribe based near Volgograd around 3,300BC. The fact that this ancient language has been pretty well reconstructed, so we know their Bronze Age words for horse (“ekwos”), for example, or sky (“dyeu”) or father (“pihter”), and that they worshipped a chief god, the Sky Father (“Dyeu-pihter”), a punchline that had me gurgling with excitement. We even know their two words for different sorts of farting. Maybe my dials are smashed because I’m a sad language nerd, but I cannot for the life of me explain why linguistics hasn’t come up with a Professor Brian Cox or even one BBC2 documentary to tell us about any of this. I have tried but I’m writing as a layman; one who found an entire subject ripe for exploitation and could include all this apparently brand new, sometimes 150-year-old, knowledge in my book. Not that I got the chance to mention any of this to Libby Purves. But, as it turned out, I didn’t need to. Just one whiff of proper linguistics and a couple of examples of real English grammar: that was all it took to lift me 21,631 places up Amazon’s ladder in a few hours. I always knew there was a need for a real English grammar. Now it seems there is a fairly desperate hunger for one too. Which is why, if for one afternoon only, after my 10 minutes on Radio 4, gerunds and infinitives were outselling One Direction and Bake Off. For their long and continuing silence about their wonderful, fascinating subject, I owe everyone in every linguistics department everywhere a huge thank you. And Libby Purves.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 03:36:55 +0000
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