As children few of us know any grammatical terminology, yet we’re still able to speak grammatically. In school we might be taught the ‘grammar’ of our own language. Traditionally, in English-speaking countries at least, this has consisted mainly of parsing sentences – an exercise that involves labelling the parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc). Recently though, there’s been a trend to avoid teaching any kind of grammar at all, at least in the UK.<\/p>\n
Those taught to parse sentences seem keen to point out that many people ‘don’t know their grammar’ these days, with the implication that this is a bad thing. However, even people who don’t know, or are not sure of, the difference between nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. are able to cobble together grammatically correct sentences.<\/p>\n
The origin of parsing sentences goes back to ancient Greece: the Greeks developed a description or grammar of their language in order to teach it to non-Greeks. The most famous Greek grammarian, Dionysius Thrax, established the idea of parts of speech, which he based on the ideas of Aristotle. In his T\u00e9chn\u0113<\/em>, written in the 2nd century BC, he stated that Greek had eight parts of speech: noun, verb, participle, article, pronoun, preposition, adverb and conjunction. Adjectives were a sub-class of nouns. To ‘know one’s grammar’ was essentially a matter of being able to parse sentences and name the parts of speech. Syntax was usually ignored.<\/p>\n The Greek model was copied by the Romans and adapted to Latin, a language different to Greek in many ways. The Latin model was later used for many other languages, few of which were much like Latin or Greek.<\/p>\n Were you taught grammar at school? How was it taught, and do you remember much of it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As children few of us know any grammatical terminology, yet we’re still able to speak grammatically. In school we might be taught the ‘grammar’ of our own language. Traditionally, in English-speaking countries at least, this has consisted mainly of parsing sentences – an exercise that involves labelling the parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-language-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}