High Grammar as a Second Language

I'm studying now for my grammar exam - the exam no Journalism student at the University of Missouri is allowed to go into sequence without passing. I'm not too worried - I've taken the practice exam twice and scored about 90% each time, and I've brushed up on the things that do confuse me a bit.

I have a good ear for grammar in general, and it's almost amusing to me that I don't score 100%. After all, English is my native language, I'm a better than average writer, and I study languages. But some of the examples on the test are just silly - horribly written with or without the corrections, just constructions that no native speaker would try to push through. (For example, "The thief was he."

Actually, I'm curious as to how learning foreign languages, and general linguistics, impacts my English grammar. I think it does more good than harm, ultimately, but I also think that, contrary to what any Latin teacher will tell you, it goes both ways. Learning languages teaches me the fancy words and distinctions that many of my classmates are struggling with, for example. My scores on case-identification and voice-identification sections are flawless. On the other hand, learning different languages strips away the sense of objectivity that grammarians try to cloak their subject in.

Take, for example, these two examples: The Dread Double Negative and The Dread Passive Voice. For many grammatical no-no's, Grammarians admit that "it's just the way English works", but for these two they provide more logic than usual. The say that Double Negatives simply make no sense - If you haven't got no cheese, you must have SOME cheese, right? And passive voice makes sentences wordy, weak, and dull. Sounds pretty convincing to me, except that these logical conclusions aren't cross-linguistically applicable.

In many languages, such as Spanish, double negatives are totally acceptable, sometimes even recommended.
Ex. - "No tengo ni idea - I don't have no idea."

In Latin, using passive voice was considered more refined and sophisticated than using active.
Ex. - "Liber Caesari a regina donor - The book was given to Caesar by the Queen."

While some might shift uncomfortably at the first example and scramble to think of a non-racist and non-ethnocentric way to suggest that hispanohablantes might just be a bit ignorant, most people hold Latin up as THE most perfect, most logical literary language, so it's preference for the passive voice doesn't do much to support their claim for the intrinsic superiority of the active.

But what does all this mean for students of languages and linguistics, such as myself? It could go either way, I suppose. We might get so confused by all the possibilities, struggle to remember which rules belong to which language, even be driven into apathy by the subjectivity of it all. But generally, I find, increasing our useful knowledge only gives us an edge.

As for myself, I find the who-whom debate to be silly. People never, or at least very rarely, use whom when speaking. It's dying, if not dead, and there's little use in weeping over it. It'll hardly be the first or the last tragedy of an ever evolving language. I use who 99.9% of the time when speaking, and my knowledge of linguistics and foreign languages has only strengthened my resolve to do so, since I realize that using whom would be useless and a bit confusing at best, and arrogant at worst.

But today I have to take a grammar test, and they're going to test me on who-whom, and they're handing out the grades, those nassstttyyy grammarians, so I'll play their game tonight. And I'll play it well, too, because I know the answers, having taught myself Grammatical English as one of my many secondary languages.

Update: I got 99% on the test. I'm pretty sure the one I got wrong was about politics - whether the word politics is singular or plural. :P

Intermediate Thinking Language? Maybe Not...

I was talking to Lucia recently about how I think, or don't think, in Foreign Languages. I remember that Barry Farber (I am 98% sure it was him. XD) wrote about having an 'intermediate thinking language' - which was essentially English words and such, organized in the grammar of the language he was speaking, and then, as he spoke, the words came. I was speculating that my own system was somewhat like this, if mostly subconscious. I have this theory that this 'intermediate thinking language' idea might fall somewhere in between trying to translate English thoughts as one goes and thinking in the target language in efficacy. I know that I could improve as far as thinking fully in my languages other than English! (Perhaps because, although it is impossible to know exactly how other people think, I have a few reasons to suspect that my own thought process is more language (English XD) bound and clear than many other people's - if I think in a way that leaves a thought 'sentence' incomplete, for example, it's a bit jarring.) It seems strange, that I'm not certain what language I'm thinking in a lot of the time, but I think it does change based on which language I'm speaking, with whom, at what level, anyways, a wide range of factors.

Well, I was thinking about this again today, as I was making corrections to my last German essay. On one sentence, my teacher wrote, "Sehr schön formuliert" - kind of like, "Very nicely formed". I assume she means sentence structure and grammar? So anyway, I paid more attention than normal to the sentence, and I was actually impressed. Not with myself, I swear to God above, I tell the blog when I am impressed with myself! No, I was impressed by the human brain, it's ability to come up with all these various ways of organizing thought, and of mastering different ways, and to be able to switch between them. In short, to learn languages. Although obviously German and English are laughably similar to each other in structure, compared to most languages in the world, I will still use this line as an example of how different even closely related languages can be.

"Wenn man dass glaubt, dann soll man das auch über Amerikaner denken, weil wir nicht von dieser Schwäche befreit sind."

Translated literally, this would be something like:

"If one that believes, then should one also that about Americans think, because we not from this weakness free are."

Translated... erm... more properly, it is:

"If one believes that, then he should also believe it of Americans, because we are not free from this weakness."


It's something, isn't it? Anyway, it made me revisit my little 'intermediate language theory', because I knew with absolute certainty that I hadn't at all thought about the literal translation of that line before, it would have just confused me - I know that at least in that moment, I was composing with the German sentence structure viberating in my mind. And that's something amazing!