{"id":642,"date":"2016-10-16T11:01:38","date_gmt":"2016-10-16T18:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/teachingwriting\/?p=642"},"modified":"2016-10-18T23:31:51","modified_gmt":"2016-10-19T06:31:51","slug":"cflat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/teachingwriting\/2016\/10\/16\/cflat\/","title":{"rendered":"To Boldly Split Infinitives"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a great lover of the English language, I have often found myself in the position of having to defend my mother tongue from the torrents of abuse levied at it by my distraught ELL students. \u00a0To them I praise English\u2019s lexical flexibility, I hail its inherent euphony, and I adulate its allowance for descriptive precision. \u00a0But, for all of my efforts, I still find that my students complain <\/span>ad nauseum<\/span><\/i> that English is \u201ctoo confusing!\u201d \u00a0Despite my great love affair with English, I have to admit that there are some truly bizarre rules that make English a minefield to navigate, even for those with a rock solid grasp of grammar. \u00a0In researching this topic I discovered that many of these \u201crules\u201d that snooty grammarians lord over their linguistic lessers are actually the products of nonsensical grammatical impositions by a group known as Latinists, and we have all been paying the price since.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Latinists attempted to \u201cstandardize\u201d and presumably to \u201cimprove\u201d English by applying Latin grammatical rules to it, despite the fact that English is emphatically Germanic; a bizarre episode in the chaotic history of English. \u00a0Robert Lowth<\/span>\u2013<\/span>Anglican Bishop and terrible grammarian<\/span>\u2013wrote<\/span> the first widely read English grammar book, in which he strictly prohibited dangling prepositions. \u00a0He claimed that, as preposition comes from the Latin word <\/span>praepositio<\/span><\/i>, meaning \u201cto put before\u201d, and the fact that prepositions cannot end a sentence in Latin, it is therefore ungrammatical to do so in English. \u00a0There is, however, a problem with this assertion: ENGLISH IS A GERMANIC LANGUAGE!!!!!!!!!! \u00a0So, while Lowth was imposing his nonsense \u201cgrammar\u201d, great English writers continued to end their sentences with prepositions, as they have been doing since the 10th century. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The same misguided Latinizations gave rise to this head scratcher of rule: don\u2019t split your infinitives. \u00a0This one can be attributed to another pompous, ecclesiastical Englishman by the name of Henry Alford. \u00a0According to his grammar treatise <\/span>A Plea for the Queen\u2019s English<\/span><\/span>, Alford mistakenly wrote that \u201cto\u201d was an essential part of an infinitive verb, when, actually, it is a prepositional marker and is often grammatically unnecessary (though normally included). In Latin an infinitive is one word and, therefore, cannot be split. Thus, the foolish Alford maintained that adverbs in between \u201cto\u201d and its infinitive was Latin-wrong and therefore must be English-wrong. \u00a0Well, Alford wrong. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So the next time someone tries to nit-pick your grammar, you can tell them to quickly go and look their grammar rules up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a great lover of the English language, I have often found myself in the position of having to defend my mother tongue from the torrents of abuse levied at it by my distraught ELL students. \u00a0To them I praise … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43771,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/teachingwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/teachingwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/teachingwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/teachingwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43771"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/teachingwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/teachingwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":689,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/teachingwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions\/689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/teachingwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/teachingwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/teachingwriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}