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Re: Subject / Object / ?

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Monday, September 13, 2004, 12:35
En réponse à Andreas Johansson :


>* This is not a rhetorical question. I am genuinely curious as to why you >apparently see a need for primary schools to teach kids how to analyze >sentences in their native language.
Because that's the only way to make them able to reliably and consistently build and understand complex sentences in their own language. I remember reading the results of a survey that proved that illiteracy was caused in part by a lack of teaching the basic analytic tools necessary to analyse sentences in one's native tongue. It was in dead tree form, so I don't have a link to it (nor do I have it here). Note that I'm referring to illiteracy here (the inability to understand texts of medium to high complexity), not analphabetism, which has other causes. If your goal is just to allow all children to write SMS messages on their mobiles, then you're right that this is unnecessary. I personally think literacy should be a little higher than that.
>** Granted, both make a nom-obl distinction in pronoun, but it's practically >identical in the two languages, and so represents no problem.
I was lucky to know how all those concepts when I started learning English. The structure of the English sentence is different enough from the structure of the French sentence that being able to fall back on a structured system of analysis helped me learning much faster. Even with languages I learned later, it helped: for instance, I am better at writing Dutch than my friend, who is a native Dutchman. I make more spelling mistakes than him and my vocabulary is limited (and I constantly confuse genders), but my sentences are usually better built than his, and when it comes to grammatical rules I'm much better at expressing them than he is, and thus much better at *using* them. But learning foreign languages isn't the main reason for learning simple grammatical concepts, as all those things I've been describing apply to your native language as well, especially in a literate civilisation like ours. Christophe Grandsire. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

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Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>