Why nobody defends English grammar

Let's suppose someone writing a book on French grammar decides to classify 'chien' as a conjunction and not a noun. You can be sure there will protests from Paris to Port Moresby and from there to Quebec. The reason is obvious. French-speaking people do know their French grammar, at least, those who are reasonably educated.

But when Bas Aarts advised the British government to drop the teaching of the subjunctive in schools in Britain, nobody protested. Thankfully, the government didn't listen to him.  At that time I could not understand why the public was silent and I put down my thoughts on a different platform from this but if you are interested in why I say Bas Aarts is totally wrong about the subjunctive, you may read what I wrote about three years ago which I've uploaded here.

The reason for the total silence in the English-speaking world is nobody today understands English grammar or knows it enough to be able to raise any meaningful objection. If Bas Aarts had been around in the first half of the 20th century, countless people would have written scathing letters to the Times complaining about his attempted massacre of the English tongue. To understand why people don't know a thing about English grammar today, we must go back half a century to the then 'modern' idea of language learning. In the 1960s, the prevailing school of thought was that language should be purely communicational. The study of grammar was viewed as laborious and tedious and to some extent deleterious to a student's general well-being. This view was hugely popular and was accepted by every English language educator. It was believed that all you needed to do was to teach a child to speak and write reasonably correct English. A child didn't have to delve deep into grammar. This view was so popular that it affected the teaching of English in every country in the world including my country. Schools taught English without going into the fundamental workings of the language itself. Children were taught to construct correct sentences without being taught the basic parts of speech. But this philosophy didn't affect the teaching of other languages and we were all taught 语法 for Chinese and nahu for the Malay/Indonesian language. It only affected the teaching of English. There were some families that were resistant to change and the kids in these families were given extra language lessons outside of the school curriculum and kids were made to do the usual parsing exercises. By the way, most of the people I know today to do not even know what 'parsing' means. 

Recently, educators in Britain and elsewhere decided that it was a horrid mistake not to teach children grammar. We now have a whole generation of people who do not know English grammar. In this climate where almost every English-speaking person lives in a grammarless cavern (if I may borrow the barbed words of Robert Burchfield, the former Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary), British schools suddenly re-introduced grammar as a necessary part of primary school education and naturally, parents are up in arms. Some go so far as to get their children to boycott classes.

Now, you can see why they don't protest when books that tear apart traditional English grammar are published but everyone is up in arms when their kids are forced to study grammar. Nobody knows enough grammar to be able to tell if a book contains any teaching that is not in conformity with standard grammar. Unless we are very old or we have a different education, most of us would have gone to school long after the 1960s; we all belong to the grammarless generation.

Just three years ago, the Daily Mail reported that teachers in Britain had to be re-educated because most of them were totally ignorant of basic English grammar.  But what the Daily Mail reported on Britain is perfectly applicable to all other countries in the world where English is taught. This is what the Daily Mail says, 'More than half of undergraduates, many of whom will train as teachers, have such a poor grasp of grammar that they cannot recognise that "and" is a conjunction, identify "in" as a preposition, or describe "technical" as an adjective.'

You don't need the newspapers to tell you that. You just have to think of the people around you. If they speak only English, chances are they don't know a thing about grammar. That practically covers the entire English-speaking world. Those of us who are fortunate enough to have our early education tailored differently from the national curriculum must have countless experiences with people who know absolutely nothing about grammar. And the insidious thing about grammar ignorance is most people don't even know that they are ignorant of grammar. And another insidious thing about it is you cannot even talk about it. People are sure to be offended if you point out to them the obvious - that they don't know grammar.

I was once seated next to an Englishman in a concert hall and before the concert started, he went through the programme with his young daughter. He explained to her what a sextet was. And then he came to the word 'contentment'. Now, this father was thorough and conscientious in educating his daughter. He first told her it was a noun. So far, so good. He then reduced the word to "content" and gave his daughter a sentence with the word in it by way of illustration: 'I am content', he said. He asked his daughter what part of speech 'content' in the sentence was. When his daughter was silent, he proceeded to explain to her that an adverb was a word that described how something was. Since "content" described how he felt, it was an adverb!

In another instance of 'involuntary' eavesdropping, I was in a restaurant seated at a table next to that occupied by a man (unmistakably British from his accent) and his wife who I think was Japanese. They had a young child who said his plate of chips were 'my all chips'.  His father corrected him, 'All my chips' to which the child responded quite cleverly, 'I like ALL CHIPS. These are my all chips.' The father replied patiently, 'It's ALL MY chips'. 'Why?' asked the child. 'There's no why to it. It's just the way grammar is' was the father's answer. The child refused to accept what his father said and kept saying 'my all chips' annoyingly throughout the dinner.

In both instances, the fathers had no intention of misleading their own children. They really believed they knew grammar and they were teaching their children 'standard English grammar'. In declaring to his child that 'it's just the way grammar is', the father in the second instance was doing what most people who are ignorant of grammar love to do - make grammar out to be disorganised and capricious. But grammar isn't like that at all. There is a sound grammatical reason why we only say 'all my chips' and never 'my all chips' and to tell your child that that's just the way grammar is won't help your child in any meaningful way at all. For one thing, it will put the child off grammar. Nobody wants to read up on a subject that has no rules and you only say it one way because that's 'just the way it is'.

Two or three years ago, the UK schools minister Nick Gibb was asked by a BBC interviewer what part of speech 'after' was in the sentence 'She came home after I had eaten my dinner.' He said it was a preposition and of course the interviewer laughed at him quite cruelly. This was the same question taken from a test for 11-year-olds and the education minister got it wrong.

It was here that the wayward grammarian Bas Aarts stuck his foot in. He said the schools minister was right if you go by his own analysis of grammar which I must stress differs entirely from standard grammar. I only know of two such wayward grammarians in the world of English grammar. Everyone else classifies 'after' in that sentence as a subordinating conjunction and not a preposition. Schools in the UK and all over the world follow standard grammar and Nick Gibb would have been marked wrong if he had taken the test (his own test) for 11-year-olds.

Every English dictionary in the world including the definitive OED (in 20 volumes) follows the classification of standard grammar. I once wrote to Bas Aarts on this and he replied very briefly that you can't assume the standard analysis is right just because it's been around for a long time. But he didn't elaborate why he was right and the whole world wrong.

I have always simply dismissed the view of these two renegade linguists because honestly, who cares what they think when billions of linguists including all English dictionaries say they are wrong. But these two grammarians are extremely renowned and they have written authoritative books on grammar and surely we ought to know at least  what they are saying?

It was in this context that my son recently got me Bas Aarts'  Oxford Modern English Grammar and very cheekily told me that it was good to read something 'heretical' - the very same advice I have given my kids since they were very young.

Well, I have finally read the book and this is my verdict:

As you can see, Bas Aarts' book is rightly used as my footrest. The book in my hand is the most authoritative grammar of the English language and is commonly referred to as the Bible of English grammar - A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language written by four of the world's best linguists including Randolph Quirk. The CGEL is the standard followed by the entire world wherever English is taught in a school curriculum from Britain to Brunei and you will need to read it every now and then if you happen to be reading Bas Aarts' book - just to restore your sanity.

Do I recommend Bas Aarts' book? Certainly not. You should only read it if you are perfectly familiar with standard English grammar and you can tell whenever there is a deliberate departure from it. I can say more about Bas Aarts' book but this is not the right forum. This is my photo blog on my life as a naturist. But we naturists do have other interests apart from sitting around naked. It's just that I don't want to hijack this blog with non-naturist articles.