mattkeefe.com

Over the weekend, I read a couple of interesting articles about language – a piece from The Economist about the world’s hardest language, and David Mitchell on why pedantry is important. These I found interesting firstly because I’m a complete saddo, and secondly because I’ve recently been teaching myself to read and write the Arabic script, learning a little Arabic along the way, and also attempting to improve my Russian.

Something apparent in the first article is the relative difficulty in determining what exactly makes a language ‘hard’ or otherwise. All languages appear difficult to those who do not speak them, and may appear harder or easier to learn depending on their similarity or otherwise to the individual’s own language. Some languages which may present a relative difficulty in learning – because of an extensive set of grammatical rules, for instance – may thereafter be amongst the easiest to use and acquire skill in because of the language’s consistency in following those rules. Is that a hard language, or an easy one?

Take English. On the one hand, English has some very well-known inconsistencies – mostly in spelling and pronunciation – but on the other it has some very simple features indeed. English has very few irregular verbs (that is, the different forms of most verbs can be reliably predicted from a consistent pattern – scare, scares, scared; play, plays, played; pass, passes, passed), plurals are similarly easily to make, possession can be indicated by a simple apostrophe (usually followed by an es), and there is virtually no system of case. Does that make it easy or hard? Made easy by its lack of rules, or difficult by its apparent inconsistency? I’m not sure it’s one thing or the other.

I’m currently trying to learn Russian grammar, of which until recently my knowledge was basically nil. Russian has six cases, three tenses and three genders (and, just to prove the point, two aspects, three moods, two voices and four participle forms). Six cases is not unusual, nor are the rules that pertain to them particularly complex, but learning them is very difficult for me because case is not something I am used to considering when using language. Indeed, until relative recently – and until going out of my way to read up on it – I had almost no idea what case actually meant (or what aspect, or voice, or mood meant either).

My ignorance of grammar goes much further than that. I don’t naturally recognise – or even always know – which is the subject of a sentence and which is the object. If I’m brutally honest, even my understanding of what’s a verb, a noun, or an adjective is not as developed or as instinctive as it should be. I know what a verb is, what an adjective is, what a noun is, and of course I can identify them in a sentence, and if given a word I can tell you whether it’s a noun, a verb, or an adjective (or whether it can be used as more than one of them), but doing so is a conscious effort on my part. I don’t find it especially hard, I don’t find it especially difficult, but they aren’t instinctive terms of reference buried deep within my brain that I can use without thinking. I don’t recognise these kinds of properties or categories with the same immediate, unthinking speed I might spot a spelling mistake, or be able to identify which tense was being used, for example.

This might sound surprising coming from someone who has made his living from the English language since being 18 years old. This isn’t intended as a confession of guilt – this isn’t me throwing my hands up and saying, “I’m a fraud!” – I still think my English is very good. What I’m describing is a basis for comparison. The knowledge that I do have – of grammar, of word classes, of spelling and all the rest of it – limited or otherwise, is in large part the result of what I learned at school. What I’ve described will be true of many people: if your first language is English, the chances are you know virtually nothing of grammar.

That’s what makes learning the Russian case system so difficult. Not only am I having to learn words and suffixes in a language which I speak at only a very basic level (though admittedly I can read the alphabet well; a huge advantage in its own right, and another facet of the relative ‘difficulty’ or otherwise of any given language) but I’m having to learn the very concept of case and what it means. Now does that make Russian a hard language, or just one with a substantial difference to English in its grammar?

This, I think, is where the importance of pedantry comes in. Often the rules that we do have, few as they are, are representative of grammatical rules or other linguistic properties that occur in other languages as well. Take the example of case. English is not entirely bereft of case; almost, but not quite. We indicate possession by use of an apostrophe followed by an es. When it comes to pronouns, however, we use wholly different words – my instead of I, her instead of she, etc. This is an example of genitive case. Have you ever heard of genitive case? Did you learn about it at school? I certainly didn’t.

Perhaps the most famous example of schoolroom pedantry is the old chestnut about using John and I instead of John and me. As it happens, this is also one of the most frequently misunderstood rules of grammar, and one which is most frequently taught incorrectly. John and I went to the circus is correct, while John and me went to the circus is not. However, very often this is taught as a blanket rule of always …and I, never …and me.

In actual fact, She is coming to the circus with John and me is correct, while She is coming to the circus with John and I is not. It’s not the presence of John in the sentence that changes ‘I’ to ‘me’, it’s the change from subject to object for the speaker – that is, the change of case. ‘I’ is in the nominative case, used when the speaker is the subject of the sentence. The presence of John in the sentence is an irrelevance; you would say I went to the circus, hence you would also say John and I went to the circus. What you would not say is that She is coming to the circus with I, so why would you say She is coming to circus with John and I? You wouldn’t, you shouldn’t – it’s incorrect and based upon a misunderstanding of grammar. The word ‘me’ is the accusative case form of ‘I’, hence used when the speaker is the object of the sentence (in that sentence, She – whoever she might be – is the object of the sentence, thus the word ‘she’ is in the nominative case).

Again, did anyone going to an English comprehensive in the last thirty years learn any of this? Any mention of the subject and the object, the nominative and accusative cases? I certainly didn’t. All I got were variously correct or incorrect versions of the ‘…and I’ not ‘…and me’ rule. About as close as I got to a definitive version of it was one particular teacher’s advice to remove all other named people from the sentence and see if it still made sense, so, John and me went to the circus is wrong, because it would leave me went to the circus, which is clearly wrong, hence the correct version must be John and I went to the circus. That’s a perfectly good rule of thumb, but it still doesn’t tell me why I shouldn’t be saying me went to the circus in the first place – as convoluted as it might seem, only an explanation of case, subject and object really explains that.

Now, case might be all but extinct in English, and the distinctions made in the above example – nominative case, accusative case – may be relevant almost nowhere else in the English language, but the identification of the subject and the object certainly is. Apart from that, knowledge of the case system, and specifically the proper names for the different cases, is hugely useful in learning other languages, where such things may be more important. There are many other instances of English’s own grammar, or certain English words, evidencing linguistic properties not otherwise found in the language – take gender, for instance: blond and blonde can be learned by rote as two different spellings, one for a man, one for a woman, or a few extra moments could be taken to point out, as trivia if nothing else, that the difference is akin to the principle of gender used in many other languages. It’s a certain kind of pedantry that preserves these handful of insights into the way language – not just English, but all languages – work, and it makes that kind of pedantry important.

In fact, it’s not just pedantry – at least, not just in the sense of being rigidly correct. Sometimes it’s worth pointing out the obvious – pointing out the way our own language works, and why, even if we can get by using it quite happily without knowing. I’ll give another example: Russian demands consonant mutation. That is, in certain circumstances, certain consonants change – ‘mutate’ to other consonants – to prevent tricky combinations of letters creating words that are inordinately difficult to pronounce owing to unsympathetic sounds following one another. For instance, З (the Russian ‘z’) changes to Ж (a softer ‘zh’, like the ‘g’ in ‘rouge’) at the end of certain words when a suffix is to be added. Confusing? It was for me. The very idea of having to change letters within a word, and not just add them on to the end, baffled me. Until, of course, I realised that we do it in English.

Consider the words divide and division. ‘dividion’ would be hard to pronounce, and over time – given that we’ve all got roughly the same mouth parts to work with, Jamie Oliver excepted – the pronunciation of such a word will inevitably mutate to ‘division’, which the spelling reflects. In English, not all consonant mutations are reflected by a change in spelling. Consider the words fuse and fusion. In fuse, the es is pronounced like ‘z’; in fusion, the es is pronounced like ‘zh’ – the exact same mutation as occurs in Russian, it’s just that Russian has a rule that the actual spelling is changed to better reflect the changed pronunciation.

Consonant mutation baffled me because I’d never heard of it, and yet it occurs in English. True, I’d still have had to remember which consonants substitute for which others, but the principle of its occurrence, the reason why it happens, and, most importantly, the times when it might occur, became immediately clear to me when I became aware that the same thing occurs in English. Pointing out the features of our own language – however familiar and taken for granted they may be in some cases, or however pedantic it may appear to do so in others – can provide us with a terminology and help in understanding the things we’ll need to know when learning another language.

English was once taught to a rigid grammatical standard, often backed up by comparisons to Greek or Latin, which themselves possess much more extensive and much more rigid grammatical systems; I don’t think that’s helpful. There’s no point marking kids down or telling them they’re wrong when they’re using the English of common, accepted, modern usage. I’m not suggesting we hold people – least of all kids struggling to learn the language anyway – to a ridiculous grammatical standard that isn’t really borne out by usage anyway. What I’m suggesting is that it’s at least worthwhile pointing out that grammar does exist, and giving kids – where the opportunity exists to do so – the kind of terminology that can help to identify and describe the properties of language, and help to recall its meaning later on. Many of the difficult concepts encountered when learning other languages actually exist in English – they’re just difficult because we’re not familiar with the strange terms like ‘genitive case’ which are used to describe them, even if we’ve already learned instances in which they occur.

I’m not sold on the idea that teaching Latin as some kind of ‘template language’ really helps, but I certainly do think making kids aware of grammatical concepts (which is often the intent behind teaching Latin) is a good idea. I wish I had been introduced to such concepts, even if only as trivia mentioned in passing, and wasn’t struggling now as an adult to get my head around them. Maybe we need to think primarily in terms of teaching language, and not just the English language; take it as an opportunity to point out some of the properties that English and other languages have, even using what are relative oddities or seldom used aspects of English to give some idea of the kinds of things that might be encountered in other languages (teaching snippets of actual other languages alongside these wouldn’t be a bad idea either).

I don’t know why this doesn’t happen. I don’t know if the prevailing opinion is that it’s too complicated or too dull, or if it’s thought likely to take up too much precious teaching time. Maybe it’s a mixture of all three, maybe the reasons vary. I think they’re mistaken, though – that kind of additional informational and tangential learning seems to me like the kind of thing good teaching works precisely because of, not in spite of.

When I was at school, we used to endlessly frustrate the teachers by talking amongst ourselves in what we called Latin. It wasn’t Latin. It was English rearranged according to the rules of our game. From memory, that involved moving the first syllable to the end of the word, and then adding –et (pronounced ‘ay’ as in ‘day’). We’d often do this in slightly unconventional manner, breaking the first syllable at a vowel to leave words beginning with a consonant, though I don’t know if this was part of the rules, or just something that occurred through usage, or our ineptness at defining syllables anyway. The result would be a phrase like “Iet amet kingtaet kwardsbaet,” meaning “I am talking backwards.” (I’ve omitted the letters which fall silent as a result of breaking the syllables the way we did.)

We loved this game because it meant we could trade obscenities and vile rumours about the teachers with virtual impunity. The thing is, looking back, I think it’s also the perfect opportunity to teach kids a thing or two about language by deconstructing it without having to bore the arses of them with actual Latin. I’m pretty sure most kids in most schools played some variation of that game – why not let them do it over the course of a few lessons, but introduce certain rules that can be used later for more obviously educational purposes. Instead of adding –et to the end of each word, why not tell them to add –et to verbs, but –us to nouns and –ia to adjectives (or whatever endings seem appropriate, it doesn’t really matter). The kids can trade whatever obscenities they want for an hour or two but at the end of it I’m pretty sure they’d be left with a better understanding of the differences between certain kinds of words than they might have gained otherwise.

That isn’t quite the same thing as pedantry, admittedly. I do think it’s important for the same reason, though – sometimes it’s worth pointing out the obvious, the overlooked and the pedantic because as irrelevant as it may seem in one context (even in the context of the whole English language) such knowledge may very well be key to understanding something else, in some other context.

A language is only as hard as it is unfamiliar. In the case of most languages, the words will always be new but the concepts needn’t be. I find now that there are innumerable concepts with which I struggle badly only to find, by many turns and doublings, that I’m already aware of them, that I’ve encountered them before and that I do vaguely understand them, but that I have to learn them all over again just to attach a name to them, just to learn how to do the same thing in another language, because the fact that I was doing anything at all – that there was anything there to notice or to understand – passed me by so completely the first time. There’s a lot that isn’t taught, isn’t mentioned even though it’s there, because it seems needless. I for one am finding now that it’s not. And that’s why my English is rubbish and my Russian is worse.