"Rules" in English

[PeterW]

Wayne,

In the Competition thread you correctly wrote:

English borrows a lot of words from other languages--particularly "American" English. It seems like it would be a difficult language to learn as there don't seem to be as many rules as there are in many other languages.

That's why English is such a fascinating language. There are relatively few "rules" compared with some other more rigid languages. Take word order in a sentence, for example.

Gray's poem Elegy in a Country Churchyard starts:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lee.
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way.
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

My English tutor pointed out that, grammatically, the fourth line could be as written by Gray, or it could be:

Weary, the ploughman plods his homeward way.
or The ploughman plods his weary homeward way.
or The weary ploughman plods his homeward way.
or Homeward the weary ploughman plods his way.
or The ploughman, weary, plods his homeward way.

Or possibly one of several other word orders, each one bringing a slightly different atmosphere.

I agree this must make it a difficult language to learn. But it is just one of the beauties of the English language. Its flexiblity allows us, if we take the trouble, to choose the word order that best expresses to the reader or listener what we feel and the way we feel it.

My tutor also reminded us that people make a language and are constantly changing it. Grammarians are academics, often steeped in Latin and ancient Greek, who catalogue it and try to put it into neat little boxes of "rules".

PeterW

[daveh]

Peter,

As always an interesting look into English usage. I don't know if there were different versions, but my remembered version has the first line as "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day."

Multi-language instruction sheets are interesting for comparing different languages. The English version is fairly consistently the shortest other than character languages such as Japanese.

Dave.

[PeterW]

You're quite correct, Dave, it should be parting day.

Sorry for the slip-up, thanks for pointing it out.

PeterW

[SidW]

When learning a foreign language, the rules are a measure of the difference between your own language and the language you're learning.

Looked at from a different angle, all languages are equally difficult because they're learnt by children of 18 months without books or tutors.
The 18 month old brain works it all out on its own and sets the limit for what a language can look like. That goes for Chinese too.